Zhao Ezi’s father repudiates Wu Dawang’s pledge

Zhao Ezi’s father repudiates Wu Dawang’s pledge by returning the written marriage bargain that had once promised a route to family advancement. His visit makes the failure of Wu’s years-long plan material: the oath lands on the ground between the two men just as Wu’s marriage has lost its remaining intimacy and his military future is being reshaped by the Division’s impending disbandment.

The pledge and its condition

Before marrying Zhao Ezi, Wu wrote a prenuptial promise that he would earn commendations within a year, join the Party within two, and become an official within three. If he failed to attain that advancement and move Zhao to a city home where she could eat steamed rolls every day, he swore not to return to Wujiagou unless she allowed him to serve her as she chose. The promise translated marriage into a timetable of military achievement and a hoped-for move to the city. It also made Wu’s prospects a matter of public obligation to his wife and her family, not simply personal ambition.

The timetable proved harder to meet than the pledge’s confident terms suggested. Wu worked without winning a commendation, then struggled without being admitted to the Party. Letters from his wife and father-in-law asking how he was progressing intensified his panic; each year that his name failed to appear on the relevant lists, he contemplated suicide. His eventual transfer to the Catering Squad changed the course of his career: he became a sergeant, joined the Party, and received commendations, but the official’s four-pocket jacket remained out of reach. The pledge’s final condition therefore continued to govern a marriage whose promised city life depended on an advancement Wu could not secure.

The marriage breaks down

After Wu returned to the village, Zhao Ezi nudged him awake at night and asked whether the absence of new commendations for six months explained why he would not touch her. She offered intimacy on the condition that he keep working hard after returning to the army. Wu understood the offer as repeating the bargain’s original logic: physical closeness remained tied to his capacity to improve her material situation. Rather than bringing the couple together, the offer confirmed for him that intimacy, like the work of a hoe or pickax, had been made an instrument of advancement.

Wu refused both intimacy and reassurance. Sitting up in bed, he told Zhao Ezi that he had sworn not to come near her if he failed to become an official, though he admitted he had not expected the failure to last so long. He used the oath as a reason for withdrawing, then left the bed and stood outside before walking up a hill beyond the village. His thoughts turned toward Liu Lian, and he remained away until dawn, when Zhao called him back. He told her that he missed the barracks and found home less enjoyable than army life; the explanation expressed his distance without directly naming its deeper cause.

The father returns the document

The day after Zhao Ezi’s father came to urge Wu to return to the army, he arrived at Wu’s home and refused the water his daughter offered or the stool his son-in-law presented. He delivered his judgment standing up: “I made the biggest mistake of my life when I let my daughter marry you.” The refusal to sit or accept hospitality made the visit a confrontation rather than a reconciliation. The father’s reproach framed Wu’s failure as a mistake in the family’s judgment of him, not merely a delay in fulfilling his own ambitions.

He took the neatly folded prenuptial agreement from an envelope, opened it, struck at Wu’s signature, and flung the document at him before leaving to finish the commune canteen’s end-of-month accounts. The paper fell onto the sandy ground, its pale color matching Wu’s face. The returned pledge gives physical form to the collapse of the promise: its carefully written clauses remain, but no longer function as assurance of a future the family can count on. The father’s departure to resume his accounts also places this rupture within ordinary communal obligations, rather than allowing it to become a negotiated settlement.

Return to the army and changed prospects

The next day Wu strapped together his luggage and went back to the barracks, traveling for two days and one night by train, bus, and tractor. He approached the Division with excited anxiety, longing to be back in military life after his estrangement from home. His return immediately placed the failed marriage pledge within a different, much larger upheaval: the Political Instructor told him that the Division Commander had volunteered the Division for a pilot scheme to streamline and restructure the army, which meant that the Division would be disbanded.

The restructuring suspended promotions, apparently closing off the officialdom promised in Wu’s pledge. Yet the Division Commander had instructed that an exception be made for Wu: a city job would be arranged in his native province, and his family would be moved there with suitable work found for Zhao Ezi. Within a week, Wu and his family had work and housing in the nearest city. The apparent solution arrived not through the promotion ladder on which the pledge depended, but through the Commander’s personal intervention at a moment when the Division and its personnel arrangements were being dismantled.

That benefit was inseparable from the affair with Liu Lian. The Head of Management later told Wu that he had come out better than anyone else “Thanks to Liu Lian,” leaving him to consider the remark and its ambiguous smile. Wu had already begun to suspect that the affair had been staged as part of a larger scheme, although he was reluctant to exchange his memories of it for a hardheaded account of how it related to the Division’s dismantling. In this light, the father’s rejection of the pledge marks a turning point rather than a clean resolution: Wu returns to the army, his family’s move to the city is arranged by another route, and the original promise is overtaken by a system whose changing fortunes determine who advances and who must leave.