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The Dark Road

The Dark Road

Author(s): Ma Jian

Location(s): China

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): Turn of 21st Century

Location

Content

The Dark Road is an angrier, more openly confrontational novel than its predecessors (Red Dust and Beijing Coma). Set in the river towns and vast waste sites that line the banks of the Yangtze in Guangdong province, it tackles the grim issue of forced abortions and sterilisations with a prolonged and unflinching gaze.
The novel’s ill-fated heroine, Meili, is born into a simple peasant family and, typically of uneducated girls of her background, marries while still in her teens before giving birth to her one authorised child, a girl, Nannan. But her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, is a direct descendant of Confucius, whose nickname he shares, and he is desperate to produce a male heir to continue his family’s distinguished line. Meili falls pregnant again, with spectacularly bad timing: family planning officers are roaming the countryside implementing a new wave of measures with almost gleeful savagery. The young family is forced to flee the village, eventually joining scattered groups of vagrants along the banks of the Yangtze, drifting from one town to another as itinerant labourers while dodging family planning officers.

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Lead Review

“ characterization is superb. A devastating critique of China’s oppressive communist regime” (Mail on Sunday )

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