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Book Review

‘The Dark Road’ by Ma Jian

Chinese writer Ma Jian’s novels are banned in his homeland for their scathing criticism of the country’s regime.FLORA DREW/Flora Drew

Since the Chinese edition of “Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories” appeared in 1987, Ma Jian’s books have received a blanket ban in his birth country. With the publication of his work since then, anyone with even a passing comprehension of the recent cultural landscape of China will not find it difficult to understand why. Though less ambitious in scope than his previous novel, his latest, “The Dark Road,” is every bit as fiery and gruesome in its depiction of one of the Chinese government’s most brutal edicts: the one-child policy.

In a poverty-stricken village in rural China, Kongzi, his wife, Meili, and daughter, Nannan, struggle to scratch out a living and avoid the Family Planning Commission, the organization of government agents tasked with enforcing the one-child policy. Meili has fallen pregnant again, and the family fears the wrath of the commission, which has the authority to institute abortions and require the insertion of IUDs into women who already have one child — in this environment, women’s “wombs and genitals are battle zones over which their husbands and the state fight for control.” After a particularly violent episode involving their fellow villagers, Kongzi, Meili, and Nannan take to the Yangtze River in a rickety boat, essentially becoming refugees in their own country, “blind vagrants,” yet another example of the “ ‘Three Nos:’ no documents, no homes, no income.”

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During their arduous journey, the family face a litany of hardships, including back-breaking physical labor, sickness, hunger, theft, constant exposure to toxic waste, and — in some graphically rendered scenes — kidnapping, rape, forced sterilizations, and infanticide.

“Not even the most evil emperor in China’s history would have contemplated developing the economy by massacring unborn children and severing family ties!” cries Kongzi in desperation. “But today’s tyrants murder millions of babies a year without batting an eyelid, and if a baby slips through their net, they cripple its parents with fines and confiscate their property.”

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The haunting presence of the merciless commission — some of their slogans include “Rather Ten New Graves Than One New Cot” and “Rather Rivers of Blood Than One More Unauthorized Child” — echoes throughout the novel, as the ebb and flow of tragedy and heartbreak is punctuated only fleetingly with moments of hope, in which the family achieves some small measure of financial security and happiness. Over the course of the narrative, however, we grow to understand that regardless of the small victories, sadness always lurks just around the corner. As Meili sees it, “Happiness is when you forget yourself.”

Ma Jian’s attempt at magical realism — in the form of occasional narration from Meili’s unborn “infant spirit” — contributes little to his already forceful story. However, the author is to be commended for his extensive fact-finding missions in rural China, during which he gathered information (“13 million abortions are performed in China each year, an average of 35,000 per day”) and testimonials to generate his sharp characterizations, all of which are starkly immediate and often too unspeakable to even consider. But that’s exactly as the author intended, and his potent pen serves as a harsh but necessary spotlight on one of the more insidious elements of China’s recent social, cultural, and economic revolutions.

As Kongzi says, “The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.” Sadly, for his family and thousands of others in China today, it couldn’t be a more apt description of their lives.

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Eric Liebetrau, managing editor and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews, can be reached at eliebetrau@kirkus.com.