Representing Fertility in Mo Yan’s Frog and Xue Xiaolu’s Finding Mr. Right

In this study I explore the changing representation of the pregnant body in two recent Chinese texts. Building on existing scholarship, I relate the fictional representation of maternity in Mo Yan’s novel "Frog" (2009) and Xue Xiaolu’s film "Finding Mr Right" (2013) to three consolidating discourses of reform, namely the Chinese family planning program, Chinese feminism, and Chinese globalization. By interrogating the highly symbolic depictions of pregnant women in these texts I meaningfully expand our understanding of the impact of these discourses through various scales and dimensionalities, including the generic, the social and the global. Approaching my topic in an interdisciplinary way, I disturb dualistic arguments that locate women in opposition to the political and reinstate everyday life as an arena of female agency as well as oppression. The introduction consists of a brief history of the implementation of the one-child policy in PRC and an analysis of the allegorical function of pregnancy and childbirth in Seventeen Year films. The main body of the thesis comprises close readings of two fictional texts that take pregnancy and gendered fertility politics as their theme. Written by the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, "Frog" (translated into English in 2015) tells the story of a female obstetrician charged with implementing the one-child policy. Told from the perspective of an unreliable male narrator, the novel deploys techniques of satire and the grotesque. The story arcs across a 60-year history of birth control and mandatory abortion to end in the era of corporate baby farms. The second text is the Hollywood-style comedy "Finding Mr. Right" (2013), which concerns the idle and vain mistress of a mainland tycoon who enters the US to secure American citizenship for the baby she is carrying. The film’s focus on Chinese birth tourism works in tandem with its representation of the mother-to-be as a transnational female consumer who has yet to learn the value of love or money. I consider how the film links transnational practices with neoliberal ideology via a sentimental story in which heterosexual romance is suppressed in favour of female independence and entrepreneurship. I suggest that the medium of comedy allows the film’s writer and director to approach the feminist issues of female sexual citizenship and Chinese fertility politics through the sanctioned lens of maternity, a theme central to Chinese cinema since the Seventeen Year films discussed in the introduction. By comparing "Frog" and "Finding Mr Right", I am able to address the complex history and legacy of China’s one-child policy at the moment of its repeal.