Maotai Wine

Moutai is the costly spirit Liu Lian produces during a shared meal with Wu Dawang, transforming a playful contest over cooking into a drinking game, a confession about her marriage to the Division Commander, and a drunken sexual encounter. Its role is less that of a celebratory accessory than a catalyst: with each cup, official rank and revolutionary performance give way to private grievance, attraction, and physical abandon, until the “Serve the People!” sign lies across the lovers’ bodies.

Introduction and Social Meaning

The bottle appears after Liu Lian and Wu Dawang have prepared four dishes together and teased each other over whose cooking is better. They sit opposite one another, their legs and feet touching beneath the table, and feed each other mouthfuls as the meal becomes a game. Liu Lian then asks whether Wu Dawang has tasted Moutai. He has seen senior officers drink it at the same table on the night he prepared a banquet of eight hot dishes and four cold ones to celebrate the country’s first successful nuclear explosion. The drink thus already belongs to a world of military ceremony and hierarchy before Liu Lian makes it part of their private evening.

She proposes that they drink because they, too, have something to celebrate: Wu Dawang’s having made her life worthwhile. When he asks her to tell him how she came to marry the Division Commander if he drinks, she agrees, provided he empties his cup first. Liu Lian retrieves a bottle and two cups from upstairs and fills them to the brim. The exchange makes Moutai a pledge as well as a drink: disclosure is made conditional on consumption, and the costly liquor gives their conversation the gravity of a toast even as it loosens the boundaries between them.

Drinking and Disclosure

After drinking, the two exchange biographical details. Liu Lian says she is from Yangzhou and boasts of the city’s women, contrasting it with the better-known cities of Hangzhou and Suzhou. Asked whether the Division Commander chose her, she confirms that he did, during an inspection tour of the hospital. Her radiant smile conveys pride at having been noticed, but tears fall into her cup as she speaks. She says she is happy she married him, making the declaration at once an affirmation and a sign of emotional strain.

The liquor carries the conversation from that proud public account toward the private history it conceals. Liu Lian recounts her devotion to the Party and her ability to recite Mao Zedong quotations: she once delivered a hundred quotations, including their punctuation, to the Division Commander, and believes this was when he took a particular interest in her. She describes promotion followed by marriage, insisting that she had been willing to marry him. Only later, she says, did she learn he was impotent and that his first wife had divorced him for that reason. Moutai has drawn out an account in which her political fluency, her marriage, and the authority of the man who selected her are inseparable.

Liu Lian also explains why she did not proceed with the divorce she had been about to request. The Division Commander knelt and cried before her; she recalls his service from the age of fourteen, his four wounds by 1945, and the two bullets still in his body, one in his back and one in his knee. His medals and revolutionary sacrifice made it impossible for her, in her telling, to leave him. The intimate disclosure therefore complicates her earlier claim of happiness: she speaks of both her own desires and the burden of a husband’s history, rank, and suffering.

From Toast to Drunken Encounter

As the drinking continues, Liu Lian offers to recite another hundred Mao Zedong quotations if Wu Dawang drinks, or to take a hundred quotations from him if he refuses. He would rather hear a song. She sings “The Morning Sun” after he empties a cup, then “The Long March” after another, and “Self-Reliance” after the next. The songs and cups accumulate until neither can keep count. Revolutionary language and drinking become parts of the same improvised performance: the songs remain recognizable public emblems, but they are now exchanged in a private game between the two drinkers.

When they wake, dusk has fallen over the compound. The kitchen records the night’s disorder in specific objects: cups, dishes, and an empty bottle scatter the table; clothes cover the chairs; chopsticks litter the floor, with one pair inexplicably behind the kitchen door. Wu Dawang and Liu Lian lie naked, their arms around each other, on the cement floor. The Moutai-fueled conversation has crossed into sexual intimacy, and the bottle’s role as an instrument of celebration and confession has culminated in a scene of abandoned restraint.

The Bottle Among the Novel’s Symbols

The encounter’s last image places the “Serve the People!” sign across the lovers’ bodies, like a price tag. That juxtaposition binds the bottle’s private effects to the public order already present in the room: the drink is associated first with the Division Commander’s banquet and senior officers, then with Liu Lian’s marriage story, and finally with the affair. The sign makes the lovers’ bodies appear momentarily caught beneath the very political slogan that structures the household and their roles within it.

The narrative does not reduce the affair to a simple cause-and-effect lesson about alcohol. Instead, Moutai marks the sequence by which a shared meal becomes a game, the game opens onto disclosure, and disclosure coexists with intoxication and desire. The reflection that follows questions whether life had always been a game or had only recently become one, and whether passion comes from love or love from passion. The spirit’s significance rests in that uncertainty: it makes a charged encounter possible without settling what the encounter means or where its feeling began.