The Dark Road - Softcover

Ma, Jian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143126407 ISBN 13: 9780143126409

Publisher: Berkley, 2011

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life. For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili's body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

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Review:

"The Dark Road follows the river-borne escape of fugitives from the one-child policy. An ill-matched couple's flight along anarchic backwaters leads them into a raw, brutal, brilliantly depicted boom-time underworld" -- Boyd Tonkin Independent "One of China's most prominent dissident voices addresses the bleak effects of the one-child policy in this striking novel, in which the brutality of social engineering is made graphically plain. Ma Jian's work is banned in China; this unflinching portrait of one woman's struggle against oppression makes it sadly easy to understand why" New Statesman

Book Description:

'These days, you have to pay the government nine thousand yuan to be born and two thousand yuan to die,’ says Father, taking off his glasses and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘The gates of hell aren’t somewhere far beneath us. They’re right here on earth.’

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