Sino-Japanese War
Serve the People!The Sino-Japanese War functions in the novel as both a historical measure of significance and a defining part of the Division Commander’s past. It belongs to the national history through which he understands his life, and to the account of revolutionary service Liu Lian invokes when explaining why she married him and could not bring herself to leave.
A Measure of a Life
The Division Commander has organized his existence around revolution and work. Since boyhood, he has used major events in the nation’s history—including the Sino-Japanese War, Land Reform, and the struggle for liberation—as a yardstick for judging the meaning of each day. Even beyond fifty, he continues to measure his life by that historical scale. In the present, this commitment is visible in his disciplined routine: daily drills before reveille and work that continues until late at night. The war is not presented as an isolated memory here; it is one point in the national chronology that gives his habits and sense of duty their meaning.
Liu Lian’s Account of His Service
The war returns in Liu Lian’s explanation of her marriage. She tells Wu Dawang that the Division Commander joined the Communists to fight the Japanese at fourteen and had been wounded four times by 1945. She places this early service within a longer history of sacrifice, adding that he was later wounded during the Civil War and still carried two bullets, one in his back and one in his knee. His medals and honours, together with this history, make him to her a man who had given everything to the Revolution.
Liu Lian’s account clarifies why the marriage continued despite her discovery that the Division Commander was impotent and her own consideration of divorce. When he knelt and wept before her, his rank and age did not erase the force of his service. The history she recounts supplies the emotional and moral context for her decision: she could not easily divorce a man whose life had been devoted to the revolutionary cause. The war thus shapes a private relationship not through a battle scene, but through the remembered weight of a life committed to it.
Historical Service and Present Institutions
The Division Commander’s wartime record also illuminates the authority attached to his position. His service is part of a cumulative record of commitment, sacrifice, and distinction that Liu Lian invokes when assessing him. Elsewhere in the novel, military decisions continue to determine personal futures: the Division Commander volunteers for an army restructuring pilot, and the Division is to be disbanded; although promotions are cancelled, he arranges a city job and housing for Wu Dawang and his family. The novel places this institutional power alongside the older history of revolutionary service, showing how the legacy of the war remains embedded in the military world long after the fighting described in Liu Lian’s account.
The contrast is consequential. The Division Commander’s history gives his life a durable public meaning, while Wu Dawang’s prospects depend on appointments, recommendations, and the changing organization of the army. In that way, the Sino-Japanese War anchors the novel’s private and institutional dramas in a political history whose remembered sacrifices continue to command respect and shape present choices.
