Wu Dawang and Zhao Ezi’s marriage

Wu Dawang and Zhao Ezi’s marriage is founded on a promise of advancement rather than mutual intimacy. Zhao Ezi’s father, Accountant Zhao, sees Wu Dawang’s prospects as inseparable from what he can offer his daughter; Wu’s pledge to win commendations, join the Party, become an official, and establish the couple in the city turns their marriage into a continuing test of ambition. As Wu’s career rises, the bargain shapes their domestic life, but it does not produce emotional closeness. His eventual city assignment fulfills part of the promise while leaving the marriage’s deeper distance intact.

Courtship, Bargain, and Marriage

Accountant Zhao’s initial interest in Wu Dawang follows an interview in which he notices Wu’s neat handwriting. Later, after the harvest and planting seasons, the team leader brings Wu to meet him in Zhao Village. Wu wears a new blue jacket and black twill trousers, both borrowed, but the outfit resembles a military uniform closely enough to reinforce the impression that he could become a promising husband. At Accountant Zhao’s spacious, three-room tiled house, the older man tells him he will arrange for him to join the army before the year is out.

The marriage is explicitly conditioned on Wu’s prospects. Accountant Zhao explains that he has no Party membership or commendations and no apparent route to promotion, and questions what sort of life he can provide for Zhao Ezi. Wu answers by pleading to call the older man Father and making his future achievements the price of that acceptance. In a written pledge, he promises to earn commendations within a year, join the Party within two, become an official within three, and move Zhao Ezi to a city home where she can eat steamed rolls every day. He further binds himself to serve her for life if she allows him to return to Wujiagou after he fails. The written promise turns an aspiration into an obligation with a precise timetable and a personal penalty.

Wu and Zhao Ezi marry almost as soon as the ink dries. Two weeks later, Wu’s mother dies with a smile, but the new marriage does not free him from the terms he has accepted. The account presents the pledge as a decisive change in his agency: from this point, his future and marital happiness are measured against promises made to his wife’s family. The marriage begins not with a shared account of affection, but with a plan for upward mobility and the fear of failing it.

The Pledge Governs Wu’s Military Career

Back in the army, Wu works hard but does not earn a commendation; the following year, he struggles without gaining Party membership. Letters from Zhao Ezi or her father asking how he is progressing intensify his anxiety. Each year that his name fails to appear on the lists of new Party members and commendations deepens his despair, and he contemplates suicide. His career is not simply personal ambition: it has become the means by which he must prove the worth of his marriage and provide the future he promised.

A vacancy as Sergeant of the Catering Squad offers a new route forward. Eight soldiers compete for the post, which is demanding but known to lead to quick advancement. The Political Instructor ultimately sees Wu’s willingness to serve as an argument in his favor. Wu is transferred as Deputy Sergeant, responsible for the company’s food and water. Within the next year and a half, he becomes a full Sergeant, joins the Party, and receives commendations with the Political Instructor’s help. These gains bring several clauses of his pledge within reach, but his remaining ambition—to become an official—stays out of reach as promotion opportunities repeatedly pass him by.

The chronology gives the marriage an institutional framework: a private promise is made answerable to army ranks, membership, awards, and assignments. Wu’s career develops through formal posts and opportunities, but also through influential support from the Political Instructor. His progress is therefore neither a simple reward for effort nor a private matter between spouses. Each advancement carries the promise of a better household, and Zhao Ezi’s response reinforces that connection.

Intimacy and Emotional Distance

The marriage’s emotional difficulty is present from its beginning. Wu remembers that their wedding night follows a conventional ceremony, but that early attempt at closeness does not lead to the warmth he expects. His later recollection describes their married life as claustrophobically joyless: his advances toward Zhao Ezi do not create real intimacy, and he cannot fully explain how the relationship became so distant. The novel contrasts the formal progression into marriage with the failure of that progression to produce emotional understanding.

Zhao Ezi is portrayed as uncomfortable with sex and reluctant to express love or ask for physical pleasure. At the same time, she becomes more willing to accept intimacy when Wu reports a commendation or another step toward officialdom. Wu understands her compliance as a reward for his achievements and as encouragement to continue pursuing the next one. Their limited periods of living together make the imbalance especially stark: across several years of marriage, they have spent only two or three months together, yet the arrangement continues to influence their expectations of one another.

Later, while Wu is back in the village, Zhao Ezi offers intimacy after a six-month stretch in which he has won no new commendations, urging him to keep working hard when he returns. Wu sees the offer as continuing to bind sex to promotion and material advancement. Rather than reassuring him, it diminishes what affection he has left for her. He refuses to touch her, citing his oath that he would not come near her if he failed to become an official, though the account makes clear that this is also a pretext for withdrawing. He leaves the bed and spends the night outside the village, unable to resume ordinary marital relations.

The contrast is not merely between physical distance and proximity. Zhao Ezi’s conduct follows the marriage’s original bargain: advancement is supposed to secure material well-being, and intimacy becomes part of the exchange surrounding that goal. Wu’s response shows how the same bargain that once drove him toward her now offers him a reason to retreat. Their lives together remain organized by the pledge even as its promise of a satisfying marriage fails to materialize.

A City Future, Still Unresolved

The Division’s disbandment changes the practical terms of Wu and Zhao Ezi’s future. At a seminar in Beijing organized by the Central Military Commission, the Division Commander volunteers his unit for a pilot restructuring scheme, which means that the Division is to be disbanded. Promotions are suspended, and most companies are to be demobilized while others are transferred. Wu’s long-standing hope of becoming an official seems threatened once again, but the Division Commander orders an exception for him: a job is to be arranged in a city in his home province, with work for his family and an appropriate position for his wife.

Within a week of Wu’s return to the army, work and housing have been arranged for the family in the city nearest their village. While his comrades face uncertainty about their next steps, Wu only has to complete and sign the paperwork given to him by army bureaucrats. The outcome fulfills a central, practical part of the pledge: Zhao Ezi is to have a city home and employment. It does not, however, fulfill the promise in precisely the form Wu had imagined, since his official promotion remains unrealized and his discharge comes amid the Division’s dissolution.

The arrangement also rests on personal favor as well as procedure. The Division Commander’s wife has secured Wu’s extended home leave by reporting that he has serious family problems. The Commander’s instructions then provide the city placement for Wu and his family. When the Head of Management hands Wu an assignment form, he remarks that, thanks to Liu Lian, Wu has come out better than anyone else. The remark links Wu’s favorable outcome to the household connections surrounding the Division Commander, even as the assignment is processed through official paperwork.

A conversation with the Political Instructor reveals how closely Wu’s marriage resembles another military marriage organized around the prospect of a city future. The Instructor, facing demobilization, asks Wu to have Liu Lian appeal to the Division Commander so he can remain in the army until he has served fifteen years and his own wife can join him. He explains that his father-in-law allowed the marriage because he expected military service to bring his daughter a city job, and that he too had signed a guarantee. Wu is struck by the similarity. The parallel makes his pledge part of a wider pattern in which military service, marriage, and the hoped-for transfer of a wife to the city are bound together.

Significance of the Marriage

Wu Dawang and Zhao Ezi’s marriage turns social mobility into a domestic contract. The handwritten pledge gives Wu’s ambition a deadline and makes his relationship to his wife’s family depend on measurable military achievements. His rise to sergeant, Party membership, and commendations answers several demands, while the official rank he pursues remains elusive. When the Division is disbanded, a combination of bureaucratic arrangements and personal patronage supplies a city job and housing before that final ambition can be achieved.

The marriage’s outcome is therefore both practical and unresolved. Wu secures a city future for his family, but the narrative does not present that achievement as the recovery of intimacy between him and Zhao Ezi. Instead, it shows how the original bargain persists inside their private life: career progress becomes a condition of closeness, and its failure becomes a reason to withdraw. The move to the city answers the pledge’s material demand without undoing the emotional distance the pledge helped establish.