Wujiagou

Wujiagou is the impoverished mountain village that frames Wu Dawang’s early life and return from military service. Its scarcity gives force to his promise to move his wife, Zhao Ezi, to the city, while its return to view after the Division’s dissolution makes the limits of that promise painfully concrete: the village remains home, but no longer feels like a life he can inhabit fully.

Setting and livelihood

Six years before the novel’s narrative present, Wu Dawang was a farmer in Wujiagou, a poor, remote, drought-stricken settlement in the mountains of western Henan. His father had died years earlier, leaving Wu Dawang and his widowed mother to make do in difficult circumstances. His mother kept him in school until he was sixteen, an unusually consequential investment in a place where everyday life was defined by agricultural labor and want.

The village’s roughly twenty households were scattered along a flank of the Balou Mountains, and its hundred or so inhabitants depended on collective and private farming. Families tried to supplement their food from the margins of shared fields or sandy riverbanks, planting such crops as beans, sesame, cabbages, and radishes. The harvest was uncertain: these small plots offered the hope of helping provide three daily meals, not a guarantee of abundance. The landscape and economy together establish the material pressure behind Wu Dawang’s desire to leave.

Work, education, and the route out

His schooling helped Wu Dawang become the accountant for Wujiagou’s production team, the village collective farming unit organized by the Communist government. That modest administrative role became a route beyond village life. When the production-team leader fell ill before a harvest meeting at the local commune, Wu Dawang served as deputy and volunteered to help the commune accountant copy the attendance list, which was used to distribute meeting expenses.

The encounter brought him into contact with Zhao Ezi’s father, and Wu Dawang’s prospects eventually became bound to a written marriage bargain. He promised that after marrying Zhao Ezi he would seek commendations within a year, join the Party within two, and become an official within three, so that he could move her to a city where she could eat steamed rolls every day. If he failed to achieve that future, he pledged not to show his face in Wujiagou again unless she allowed him to return. The promise turned departure into both an ambition and an obligation: the village was the place he hoped to escape, but also the measure by which his success would be judged.

Military advancement did not arrive as quickly as the pledge required. Wu Dawang failed to gain a commendation and then failed to enter the Party, while letters from his wife and father-in-law asking about his progress increased his anxiety. He eventually became deputy sergeant in the Catering Squad, a post that transformed his prospects: within the next year and a half he rose to full sergeant, joined the Party, and received commendations. Promotion to officialdom remained out of reach, but the village-bound future he had feared appeared to be receding.

Return and the altered home

After the Division’s restructuring and dissolution, Wu Dawang was granted extended home leave. The Political Instructor told him that the Division Commander had volunteered his unit for a pilot streamlining scheme that meant the Division would be disbanded. Although promotions were cancelled, arrangements were made for Wu Dawang’s family to move to a city in his native province, with work for Zhao Ezi as well. His military career had thus produced a possible city future, even as the institution that had carried it forward was disappearing.

For weeks after returning to Wujiagou, Wu Dawang made no move toward his wife. During the day he worked diligently at the agricultural tasks that were his responsibility: bringing in corn, binding sheaves, ploughing, sowing wheat, and hauling and spreading manure. Zhao Ezi remained, in his eyes, a simple and unaffected village woman, while his remembered life elsewhere held his attention. At night he stayed awake after his wife and son had gone to bed, sitting in the courtyard or on a nearby hillside and staring toward the direction of the barracks.

His nights and his village duties reveal two different kinds of attachment. Wu Dawang can perform the labor his household and community require, but the silence after the workday leaves room for his fixation on the life he has lost. The village is no longer only the place from which he once hoped to rise; it is also the setting in which his absence from his own marriage becomes visible to others.

The sign and village scrutiny

The “Serve the People!” sign brought the conflict between military life and village life into the household. After Wu Dawang’s son accidentally stepped on it, Wu Dawang struck the boy. The incident alarmed his wife and fellow villagers, and Zhao Ezi went to the production-team leader to describe how her husband’s conduct had changed since his return. The leader visited Wu Dawang and urged him to go back to the army if he had not been discharged, or to seek treatment there if he was ill; he also warned that the family could not afford local doctors or medicine.

The conversation took place in the courtyard of Wu Dawang’s thatched house. Wu Dawang had been preparing to build an energy-saving stove, using skills learned in the army, and had set the sign on a pile of yellow earth while gathering courtyard silt. As the team leader left, he kicked the sign. Its rotten wooden pieces scattered across the courtyard, and its words broke apart. The gesture destroys an object that had carried military language into Wu Dawang’s private life, but the scene also marks the village’s refusal to treat his altered conduct as a matter only for the household.

The next day, Zhao Ezi’s father came from the village commune. His anger was shaped by a lifetime of work without securing a move to the city for any of his children. He declined the water his daughter offered and refused the stool his son-in-law brought, delivering his judgment while standing. His presence underscores how Wu Dawang’s promise had joined the fortunes of a village family to a hoped-for escape from village conditions.

Significance

Wujiagou gives the novel’s personal ambitions their material scale. Poverty, uncertain crops, and limited routes to advancement explain why a city job and daily steamed rolls could become the substance of a marriage pledge. At the same time, Wu Dawang’s return shows that leaving a place does not simply erase its claims: his farming labor resumes, his family remains there, and his village neighbors intervene when his behavior troubles the household.

The village also forms the counterpoint to the military system whose promises and upheavals have shaped Wu Dawang’s adult life. His early educational opportunity leads from Wujiagou’s production team to army service and advancement; the later disbandment of the Division returns him to the village just as a city reassignment seems possible. Wujiagou therefore stands at both ends of his trajectory—not as a static backdrop, but as the ground against which ambition, obligation, institutional change, and the difficulty of returning are measured.