Frog

GUGU: (flings the manuscript into the air, pages flying everywhere) I don’t need to read it. One sniff tells me what kind of fart you’ve just laid. With what little knowledge you possess, do you really think you can figure out why Gugu is afraid of frogs?

Tadpole, Qin He, and Hao Dashou scramble across the stage fighting over pages.

GUGU: (caught up in nostalgic thoughts) On the morning you were born, Gugu was down by the river washing her hands, when she saw a tight mass of tadpoles in the water. It was a year of drought, and there were more tadpoles than the water could accommodate. That got me thinking that no more than one out of ten thousand of them would become frogs; the others would become part of the muddy riverbed. Just like a man’s sperm, except for them, only about one in ten million penetrates the egg to make a child. Gugu was reflecting that a mysterious connection exists between tadpoles and humans in the propagation of species. So when your mother asked me to give you a name, Tadpole was the first word out of my mouth. A good name, your mother said, a perfect name. Tadpole. Children with debased names are easy to raise. Tadpole, you could not ask for a better name.

Tadpole, Qin He, and Hao Dashou stand quietly, listening, each with sheets of paper in his hand.

TADPOLE: Thank you, Gugu!

GUGU: Sometime after that, People’s Daily introduced the ‘Tadpole contraceptive method’, urging ovulating women to swallow fourteen tadpoles in the privacy of their own rooms to forestall pregnancy. But not only did it not prevent pregnancy, the women who used the method gave birth to frogs.

HAO DASHOU: Stop there. Say any more and your illness will act up again.

GUGU: Act up? Not me. They’re the ones who were sick, those who ate frogs. They made women go down to the river and cut the heads off frogs, then skin them, like taking off a pair of pants. Their thighs were like a woman’s. That’s when my fear of frogs was born. Their thighs were just like a woman’s.

QIN HE: Those who ate frogs all paid a price for swallowing them, because they carried parasites that travelled up to the women’s brains and turned them into idiots. In the end, their facial expression was the spitting image of a frog.

TADPOLE: This is an important plot. Those who ate frogs all turned into frogs. And Gugu became the heroic protector of frogs.

GUGU: (painfully) No. The blood of frogs is on Gugu’s hands. Without being aware of it, Gugu was tricked into eating meatballs made of chopped frog. Like the story your great-uncle told of King Wen of Zhou, who was unaware that the meatballs he ate were made from the chopped flesh of his son. When King Wen fled from Chaoge, he lowered his head and retched several meatballs, and when they landed, they turned into rabbits, which sounded to him like ‘son’s bits’. When I came home that day, I had an upset stomach that rumbled with a strange guttural sound, nauseating and intolerable. So Gugu went down to the river, lowered her head, and retched a bunch of little green things, and when they landed in the river they turned into frogs.

The boy in the green stomacher crawls out of the cave, followed by an army of crippled frogs. Collecting debts! the boy cries out. Collecting debts! The frogs behind him produce an angry guttural chorus.

Gugu shrieks and passes out.

Hao Dashou catches her and pinches the groove beneath her nose, the philtrum.

Qin He drives off the boy and the procession of frogs.

Tadpole scoops up all the sheets of paper.

TADPOLE: (takes a red invitation out of his pocket) Gugu, I know exactly why you are afraid of frogs. I also know all the ways you’ve tried over the years to atone for what you view as your sins. Truth is, you’ve done nothing wrong. Those chopped-up frogs are illusions you created. Gugu, it was you who made the birth of my son possible. So I have laid out a grand banquet for you (turns to Hao and Qin) and the two of you.

Curtain

Act V

Night. Lamplight shining in from the side turns the stage a golden yellow.