Serve the People!
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The erotic masterpiece banned in China.
A model student in his regiment, Wu Dawang can recite tracts of Mao's writings and prepare ten courses of food in record time. He wants nothing more than to earn promotion and serve the people, working as hard as he can in the commander's home. But the latter's bored wife, Liu Lian, has other ideas of how Wu Dawang can serve the people-in her bedroom.
Forgetting the battles of the People's Liberation Army, mistress and servant engage in an extended erotic adventure. The more they defile the symbols of Mao's cultural revolution, the better their sex. Together they smash statues of Mao, tear up The Little Red Book and urinate on his epigrams.
The passions of a peasant soldier and his mistress subvert sexual, political and revolutionary taboos.
Serve the People! is at once a deliciously comic satire, and a masterpiece of profound pathos by one of China's greatest living writers.
'Deconstructs Maoism with the Orwellian gusto of Animal Farm…Highly readable and historically astute.' Sunday Canberra Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This spare, enigmatic novella of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution tells the story of the brief love affair between Wu Dawang, general orderly for a local division commander, and Liu Lian, the commander's bored wife. An ambitious model soldier of peasant origin, eager to move his family to the city, Wu Dawang is repeatedly instructed by his superiors that to serve the Division Commander and his family is to Serve the People. While the commander is away in Beijing for a two-month conference, Liu Lian initiates the affair with Wu Dawang through her subversive take on that Maoist slogan: whenever a sign saying Serve the People is moved from its accustomed place in the household, Wu Dawang is to attend to her needs immediately. Their delirious sexual liaison culminates in an orgiastic desecration of the images and words of Chairman Mao. Yan's satire brilliantly exposes the emptiness of Maoist ideals and the fraudulent ends for which they were used, but also relates a sorrowful tale of compromised relationships and modest hopes left unfulfilled. It was banned in China in 2005 for slander and for overflowing depictions of sex.
