Far 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. The Dark Road is the story of one such “normal” family—Meili, a young peasant woman; her husband, Kongzi, a village schoolteacher; and their daughter, Nannan. Kongzi 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.

在中國經濟奇蹟的背後，在北京和上海璀璨的燈光照耀不到的地方，是遼闊的貧窮農村，人們世世代代在那兒生養不息，但那裏有個不尋常之處：「一般」父母親只准生育一個孩子。本書描述的是一個「一般」家庭的故事。美麗是名年輕的農婦，她的丈夫孔梓則是村裡的老師，而他們有個女兒名叫楠楠。根據家族傳說，孔梓是孔子的嫡系後代，而他為了要生下男孩以延續家族命脈的事情煩惱不已，因此美麗未經國家允許懷了第二胎。當地的家庭計畫官員對他們提出了制裁，於是這家人做了個重大的決定，他們要離開這個村子，他們在長江乘了艘破舊的船。眼前是條黑暗之路，悲劇和恐慌正等著他們，然而前方還有希望之光，那是勇敢對抗不公不義所萌發的美好未來。