{"product_id":"9781101605844","title":"The Dark Road: A Novel","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eFrom one of world literature’s most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China’s one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFar away from the Chinese economic miracle, from the bright lights of Beijing and Shanghai, is a vast rural hinterland, where life goes on much as it has for generations, with one extraordinary difference: “normal” parents are permitted by the state to have only a single child. \u003ci\u003eThe Dark Road \u003c\/i\u003eis the story of one such “normal” family—Meili, a young peasant woman; her husband, Kongzi, a village schoolteacher; and their daughter, Nannan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKongzi is, according to family myth, a direct lineal descendant of Confucius, and he is haunted by the imperative to carry on the family name by having a son. And so Meili becomes pregnant again without state permission, and when local family planning officials launch a new wave of crackdowns, the family makes the radical decision to leave its village and set out on a small, rickety houseboat down the Yangtze River. Theirs is a dark road, and tragedy awaits them, and horror, but also the fierce beauty born of courageous resistance to injustice and inhumanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Dark Road\u003c\/i\u003e is a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty. While Ma Jian wrote \u003ci\u003eThe Dark Road\u003c\/i\u003e, he traveled through the rural backwaters of southwestern China to see how the state enforced the one-child policy far from the outside world’s prying eyes. He met local women who had been seized from their homes and forced to undergo abortions or sterilization in the policy’s name; and on the Yangtze River, he lived among fugitive couples who had gone on the run so they could have more children, that most fundamental of human rights.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike all of Ma Jian’s novels, \u003ci\u003eThe Dark Road\u003c\/i\u003e is also a celebration of the life force, of the often comically stubborn resilience of man’s most basic instincts.","brand":"Penguin Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47077071454448,"sku":"9781101605844","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781101605844_p0.jpg?v=1763688461","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781101605844","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}