Why this book
The words Serve the People were Chairman Mao's, stitched onto every soldier's heart. Yan Lianke takes that sacred command and asks, with a straight face and a dangerous smile: serve whom, exactly, and how far?
The Story
Meet Wu Dawang, a poor peasant who joined the army to flee the hunger of his mountain village. He is the perfect soldier — obedient, tireless, and quietly desperate to rise. He cooks so skillfully and serves so humbly that his superiors soon single him out for something better.
Wu Dawang dreams of Party membership and a decent life for his young wife waiting back home. Therefore he obeys every order without question or complaint, convinced that flawless service is the only ladder that can ever lift a peasant boy up out of the mud he was born into.
His diligence is noticed and rewarded. Therefore Wu Dawang is chosen for a coveted, envied post: private orderly inside the home of a powerful Division Commander. There he will cook the meals, keep the rooms spotless, and tend the vegetable garden of the officer's quiet, well-appointed house on the base.
Day after day Wu Dawang serves that household like a machine of pure duty. He cooks, scrubs, and gardens from dawn to dark, never once meeting the wife's gaze. To him, Liu Lian is simply the Commander's wife — untouchable, above him, a person he must serve but never truly see.
But the Commander is old, stern, and forever away on distant duty. His wife is far younger than himself — Liu Lian — beautiful, spirited, and childless. She is left alone, day after day, in that big silent house, with nothing to fill the hours but waiting and her own restless thoughts.
On the dining table stands a small wooden sign carved with the words Serve the People — the Commander's stern reminder that his whole household exists only to serve the revolution and the Chairman. To an awed Wu Dawang, that little placard is a sacred, unquestionable command he would die to obey.
Liu Lian watches the earnest young orderly move through her lonely days — strong, shy, always lowering his eyes before her. Slowly her loneliness sharpens into open want. But a peasant soldier would never dare approach an officer's wife. Therefore, she understands, she must be the one to reach for him first.
So Liu Lian invents a secret code out of the sign itself. Whenever she lifts that wooden placard from the dining table and sets it somewhere else, it will carry one hidden meaning and one only: Wu Dawang must drop everything and come upstairs at once to serve her.
One quiet afternoon Wu Dawang notices the sign has vanished from the table. Dutiful and puzzled, he searches the house until he finds it moved to another room. Therefore, obeying exactly as trained, he climbs the stairs he has never been permitted to climb — and finds Liu Lian there, waiting.
Calmly, almost gently, Liu Lian explains what serving the people must mean in this house from now on: it means serving her — her loneliness, her body, her every desire. Wu Dawang stands frozen at the top of the stairs, the sacred slogan curdling into something forbidden he cannot even name.
To refuse an officer's wife could shatter his career and even cost him his life. But to obey betrays his marriage and the Party he worships above all things. Trapped between two unbearable terrors, Wu Dawang finally does the only thing a lifelong soldier has ever known how to do — he obeys.
What begins as pure dread slowly softens into hunger. Whenever the Commander travels, the sign quietly leaves the table and the two lovers fall together, reckless and utterly consumed. Therefore that small, shifted placard becomes the brightest and most terrifying signal in the whole of Wu Dawang's careful life.
The obedient boy awakens into a man. For the first time in his life Wu Dawang feels chosen, powerful, and truly alive — no longer a nameless servant but someone's entire world. Therefore the cold mud he crawled out of feels, for a few stolen weeks, impossibly far behind him.
Now their double life settles into a dangerous rhythm. In public, Wu Dawang is the humble orderly and Liu Lian the untouchable officer's wife; in private, whenever that sign moves, they are hungry equals. Therefore every ordinary meal at that table hides a secret only the two of them can read.
Liu Lian is transformed as well. In this shy, tender peasant she finds a warmth her cold and absent husband never once offered her. But their whole happiness rests on a stolen slogan — and so, to keep the fire from dying, the two of them begin to crave ever greater risk.
So Liu Lian dares him toward the truly unthinkable. She wants to test whether their fragile love can outweigh the one thing no citizen in the land may ever touch: the sacred image of Chairman Mao himself, worshipped like a god in every home, every school, every heart.
Trembling, then suddenly wild with freedom, they smash a plaster bust of Mao, tear down his portraits, and grind his shining badges beneath their feet. And the world does not end. Therefore, with every idol they shatter, their old fear dies a little and their desire for each other burns hotter.
But no stolen season can last forever. The Commander's return draws steadily nearer, and Liu Lian feels the walls beginning to close in. Therefore she must weigh a fleeting passion with a penniless orderly against the safety, the rank, and the comfort of the very marriage that gives her everything she has.
In the end, Liu Lian makes the colder and wiser choice. She ends the affair to shield them both, for discovery would surely mean disgrace, prison, or a bullet. Gently but firmly, she sends Wu Dawang away — back down the stairs and forever out of her hidden upstairs world.
Heartbroken but silent, Wu Dawang returns to the ordinary ranks. Yet the system faithfully rewards its faithful servants. Because he served without a single complaint and guarded every secret, he is handed the very prizes he once ached for — his promotion, and at long last, his cherished Party membership.
But the prizes feel strangely hollow in his hands. Wu Dawang goes back to his wife and his small ordinary life, a decorated model soldier once more — carrying forever in silence the memory of a woman, a shattered god, and the brief weeks when the slogan truly belonged to him.
What it means
For these two hidden lovers, every act of blasphemy is really an act of freedom. By breaking the very symbols that once ruled their every waking thought, they seize something the state had always forbidden them to own — a private self, and a love answerable to no one on earth but each other.
Here is Yan Lianke's quiet blade: the slogan built to erase the self became the secret doorway into it. When a regime demands total, absolute devotion, private desire itself becomes the final rebellion — and the holiest, most repeated words can hide the most stubbornly, unkillably human hearts.
🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.
