Mao Zedong's Selected Works
Serve the People!The Selected Works of Mao Zedong is both a practical emblem of political education and a recurring object through which the novel makes revolutionary authority visible. First held up as a sign of dutiful study, it later becomes part of a private confrontation in which its physical destruction turns ideological defiance into action.
Appearance and Early Use
When Wu Dawang enters Liu Lian’s darkened bedroom, she is seated on the edge of the bed holding a volume of the work. He initially takes her apparent reading at face value; only in retrospect does he recognize that the room was too dark for her to read and that the book had been held for show. The object thus enters the story already caught between its public meaning as a source of doctrine and its possible use as a prop.
The volume also supplies Wu Dawang with a safe point on which to fix his attention. Faced with Liu Lian, he turns his gaze away from her and toward the book, invoking revolutionary reason against his own desire. When Liu tosses it aside and asks what he must remember while working in the Commander’s house, its authority is immediately tied to a rule of conduct rather than to reading alone.
Political Education and Public Performance
Wu’s relationship to Mao’s writings is established through his record as an accomplished soldier. At a Mass Theory and Practice of Frontline Logistics Competition, he recites 286 quotations and three classic essays by Mao, including “Serve the People,” and is praised as a Model Soldier. The Division Commander then selects him as his full-time orderly and cook. The book belongs to an institutional world in which command of political texts can be performed, assessed, and rewarded alongside practical skill.
That world is larger than the private household. In the barracks, soldiers conduct postprandial drills and educational activities under the revolutionary program, while senior officers inhabit a guarded residential compound. Wu takes the equation between serving senior officers and serving the People as self-evident. Later, the Political Instructor invokes the familiar political vocabulary of sacrifice and revolutionary duty while blaming Wu for failing to look after Liu Lian during the Commander’s absence. Maoist doctrine is thereby made to justify an intensely personal domestic obligation.
The novel returns to the work as an emblem of recognized political virtue at Wu’s farewell. In a ceremony arranged by his company, the Head of Management praises his diligent study of Mao’s collected writings and declares that Wu’s ability to put theory into practice has earned him the title Exemplary Servant of the People and a state-allocated city job. The ceremony’s claims of moral and political excellence sit beside the concealed circumstances that have led to Wu’s departure, making the book’s institutional prestige part of the story’s irony.
Destruction and Significance
The volume’s most decisive appearance comes when Liu removes its jacket, throws it down, and tears through its pages, finally crumpling and stamping on the title page bearing Mao’s portrait. Her act makes the text’s physical form impossible to separate from the authority it represents. Wu then carries the confrontation further by destroying a framed portrait of Mao and Lin Biao; Liu responds by bringing out a gold-plated bust of Mao and damaging it. The book is one object in a wider sequence of attacks on revolutionary images, but its pages and title portrait make the rejection especially direct.
Across these episodes, the volume shifts from a credential of political mastery, to a focus for Wu’s self-discipline, to a target of deliberate repudiation. Its repeated presence does not simply mark characters as believers or unbelievers: it shows doctrine being used to organize military service, justify household labor, support official recognition, and furnish the symbols through which private rebellion is enacted. The object’s progression from apparently studied to publicly rewarded and finally physically ruined gives material form to the novel’s contrast between revolutionary language and the interests and desires that language is made to serve.
