Long March

The Long March is invoked as a revolutionary historical reference against which the novel measures both official rhetoric and private experience. In one scene, Liu Lian appears in her army uniform after five years away from military life, and the narrator likens her fatigued appearance to someone who has just completed Mao’s Long March. The comparison brings an epic national memory into an ordinary household, exposing the distance between the language of revolutionary endurance and the circumstances of the people expected to embody it.

Historical Reference in a Domestic Scene

The reference occurs when Wu Dawang arrives at the residence before reveille, intending to prepare Liu Lian’s preferred breakfast of lotus seed rice soup. Instead, he finds her seated in the yard in the army uniform that has remained folded away for five years. He has never seen her wear it before. Its scarlet collar insignia and her tired appearance make the uniform’s return striking, but the narrator’s comparison to the Long March also turns her fatigue into a recognizable revolutionary image.

That image is deliberately disproportionate to the scene: Liu Lian has not crossed a battlefield or undertaken a military campaign. The Long March supplies a grand public standard for hardship, while the immediate circumstances are personal and domestic. The contrast helps show how revolutionary history and its symbolic vocabulary persist inside private life, where even a uniform can connect present experience to the military past.

Revolutionary Service and Personal Advancement

The novel sets this allusion within Wu Dawang’s own career in the army. He is a decorated, ambitious soldier whose success at a competition in political theory and practical logistics wins him appointment as the Division Commander’s orderly and cook. His advancement depends on demonstrating command of Maoist quotations and performing the practical work expected of a model soldier. The historical memory represented by the Long March therefore sits alongside an institutional culture in which revolutionary ideals are recited, assessed, and converted into recognition and opportunity.

Wu’s earlier marriage pledge likewise ties his military prospects to private obligations. He promises Zhao Ezi that he will earn commendations, join the Party, and become an official on a timetable, so that he can move her to a city. When these goals do not come quickly, anxiety about letters from his wife and father-in-law intensifies. His transfer into the Catering Squad eventually improves his prospects: within a year and a half he becomes a full Sergeant and joins the Party, although promotion to officialdom remains out of reach. In this trajectory, service is both a public ideal and a route toward personal advancement.

Historical Memory and Institutional Irony

The later fate of Wu’s division further complicates the rhetoric of revolutionary service. At a seminar in Beijing, the Division Commander volunteers the unit for a pilot army-streamlining scheme; the practical result is that the division will be disbanded. Promotions are cancelled, while Wu receives an exception: the Commander arranges a city job and a move for his family. The Long March’s heroic scale thus contrasts with the bureaucratic decisions that redirect Wu’s life and dissolve the institution in which he has built his identity.

At Wu’s farewell, the unit publicly recasts his career as an exemplary record of service. He receives a special early discharge, a factory job, the Third Order of Merit, and the distinction of Exemplary Servant of the People. The ceremony praises his study of Mao’s works and his success in putting theory into practice, even though the arrangements for his departure have been made above his head and the division itself is being dismantled. Against that official performance, the Long March allusion functions as part of a wider tension in the novel: revolutionary history offers a language of sacrifice and endurance, while the lives shown here are shaped by domestic dependence, ambition, and institutional change.

Significance

The Long March is not narrated as a separate episode; it enters through comparison and historical reference. That brief invocation makes a private moment legible in the language of national memory, then lets the mismatch remain visible. The result is neither a simple dismissal of revolutionary history nor a straightforward heroic parallel: the reference highlights how inherited symbols can dignify ordinary hardship even as the novel scrutinizes the institutions and ambitions conducted in their name.