The Dark Road in Around the World in 80 Books

Jun 05, 2013 Lori rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

The Dark Road by Ma Jian was the 14th book I've read this year. As some of you who are Facebook and/or Goodreads friends you know I keep track of my reading each year and include a short review or reflection. I read this book about three weeks ago and I am far enough removed from it to write the reflection. It will be lengthy.

This was, hands down, the most heart-wrenching and brutal book I have ever read in my life. And, I recommend it to everyone. In fact, it should be required reading for ever The Dark Road by Ma Jian was the 14th book I've read this year. As some of you who are Facebook and/or Goodreads friends you know I keep track of my reading each year and include a short review or reflection. I read this book about three weeks ago and I am far enough removed from it to write the reflection. It will be lengthy.

This was, hands down, the most heart-wrenching and brutal book I have ever read in my life. And, I recommend it to everyone. In fact, it should be required reading for every adult.

The book is a fictional account of how China's one child policy affects the rural Chinese and one family in particular. The author, Ma Jian, is a Chinese dissident who spent a year with these families who are on the run from the family planning authorities. So, while the story is fiction he based it on the true stories he both heard and witnessed. As an English teacher, I always talk to my students about how literature is window into the human experience. This story truly is an example of the human experience expressed through literature.

The father in the book, Kongzi, and the mother, Meili, have one child - a young daughter named Nannan. They live in a village in rural China during the mid 2000s. Kongzi is a proud 76th descendent of Confucius and feels it is his spiritual duty to produce a male heir. With the family planning police about to discover Meili's pregnancy, the family leaves the village and takes to rivers on a make shift boat. As is common practice in rural China, the family planning police invade villages to enforce the one child policy. Women are forced to get implanted with IUDs if they already have one child. If they happen to be pregnant with an additional, unapproved child they are given a forced abortion, regardless of how close to term the pregnancy is. If a family refuses, speaks out, or rebels in any way their homes are leveled with bulldozers and they are locked up for an undetermined about of time by corrupt government officials.

Taking to the rivers is a common practice in China to avoid the reaches of the authorities. Without telling too much of Kongzi and Meili's life on the rivers and attempts to scrape by, what I do want to discuss is how horrified I was at the brutality that is leveled against Chinese citizens by their own government. I consider myself an educated citizen of the world, and as much as I read about China, this was not something I could wrap my head around. Rural citizens, especially, have no civil rights. For example, if they don't have the correct paper work (which is impossible to get) they can be arrested for just entering a city. Women who have the bad luck of getting picked up in a city are arrested and often sold into prostitution without families ever knowing what happens to them. Girls too, are victims of kidnapping and forced child prostitution.

Baby trafficking is also commonly practiced in rural China. Where families barely get by on what they can make running a booth in a market, teaching school, or farming a small plot of land they are often faced with the dilemma of selling a baby girl, escaping the authorities since they can't pay the fine for another child, or killing the newborn. In fact, all three options are illustrated in the book many times. Often the best option for these families is to gains something from the birth of an additional child and sell the child to a baby trafficker who then sells the child to an orphanage.

I chose this book originally because of a review on NPR and because of my Chinese daughter. I want to be as armed as possible when, and if, she does start asking questions as to why her Chinese parents didn't want her. This story was so brutal that most of the time I was unable to connect what was happening in the book to what her parents' life in China might be like. In fact, one particularly awful part of the book takes place in Changsha, the province capital of Hunan and the place where we first became a family. I think, for me, it was hard to reconcile what might have been her parents' life with the story we were told about her abandonment, which was quite benign.

I am glad that I was unable to consciously connect what was going on the book to my own child's beginnings or what could have happened to her had she not been given the chance at a completely different life. But, the fact remains that I can't shake what families in China face on a daily basis. I am sure being a parent doesn't help and, on some level, being the parent of a Chinese daughter plays a part in my response to the story. I just cannot shake this book. Even after three weeks. You really should read it. It is a hard book to swallow but it will open your eyes to a world we can't really comprehend. ...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Sam marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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