Wu Dawang and Liu Lian’s drunken encounter

Wu Dawang and Liu Lian’s drunken encounter transforms an illicit attraction into an unmistakable intimacy, while exposing the unequal marriages and ambitions that surround it. Over food and Mao-tai, Liu recounts how she came to marry the Division Commander; Wu admits that the thought of her choosing the Commander makes him want to throttle her. By the time they wake, the political sign that has repeatedly framed their secret meetings lies across them, turning a public slogan into an ironic witness to private desire.

From shared cooking to a private toast

The episode begins with the two of them cooking together. Liu prepares cucumber with scrambled egg and green pepper with diced pork; Wu makes stewed chicken and stir-fried aubergines. Each champions their own dishes, and Liu argues that her southern upbringing gives her the advantage over a rough northerner. Wu counters with his second place in an army cookery competition and the Division Commander’s confidence in his skill. Their contest remains playful: Liu concedes him a narrow victory in the main course but claims the advantage with her dried-shrimp and white-gourd soup, which Wu acknowledges is better than anything he could make.

At the table, their legs and feet touch beneath the surface, and the meal becomes a game of taking turns to feed one another. Liu then suggests Mao-tai, saying that they have something to celebrate: Wu has made her life worthwhile. The bottle gives the evening a new charge. When Liu brings it and two cups, Wu agrees to drink only if she will tell him how she came to marry the Division Commander. The toast thus becomes an exchange: drinking opens a conversation that his position as the Commander’s orderly and her position as the Commander’s wife would ordinarily keep closed.

Liu’s account of her marriage

Liu says she comes from Yangzhou, which she praises above Hangzhou and Suzhou, including for the beauty of its women. She recalls that the Division Commander noticed her immediately during an inspection of the hospital. Her smile as she remembers being singled out carries pride, but tears fall into her cup as she speaks, complicating the story of her marriage from its first telling.

She explains that she had been a committed Party member and knew more quotations by Mao Zedong than anyone else in the Division Hospital. She once recited a hundred quotations, including their punctuation, for the Commander; she believes this performance helped attract his attention. Promotion came before marriage, and she says she had been willing to marry him. What she had not known was that he was impotent, or that his first wife had divorced him for that reason. When she considered asking for a divorce herself, she says, the Commander knelt before her. His age, military rank, service against the Japanese from the age of fourteen, four wounds by 1945, and two remaining bullets from the Civil War all weighed on her judgment. So did his medals and his visible devotion to the Revolution. Liu presents her decision not as uncomplicated romantic fulfillment but as a response to the history and sacrifice embodied by a man who pleaded with her to stay.

Jealousy, songs, and the change in their relationship

The conversation breaks through the roles that govern their daily contact. Liu reminds Wu that he is the Commander’s orderly and she the Commander’s wife. Wu, however, says that the thought of her wanting to marry the Commander makes him want to throttle her. His confession is direct evidence of jealousy: the woman whose private history he had known little about has become someone whose past and marital choice matter intensely to him.

Liu answers by daring him to go ahead and saying they might as well die together. She returns to Maoist recitation as a kind of challenge, offering a hundred quotations if he drinks and threatening to make him recite them if he does not. Wu asks instead for a song. Liu sings “The Morning Sun,” then “The Long March” and “Self-Reliance” as the cups continue. The familiar repertoire does not disappear; it is carried into their private drinking, where the tally of cups and songs eventually fades from memory. Revolutionary culture, which helped Liu attract the Commander and underpins Wu’s soldierly identity, becomes part of the couple’s shared scene even as their conduct departs from the discipline it proclaims.

The sign as witness and the scene’s aftermath

When they wake, dusk is falling over the compound. The kitchen is left in disorder, with cups and dishes on the table, clothes on the chairs, chopsticks scattered across the floor, and an empty bottle among the remains of the evening. Wu and Liu lie together, and the “Serve the People!” sign rests across them like a price tag. Its placement condenses the novel’s central irony: a principle Wu has treated as an order to serve his superiors now appears over an intimacy that cannot be reconciled with the official roles they occupy.

The narrator refuses to give the affair a simple origin story. It asks whether life had always been a game or had only recently become one, and whether passion produces love or love produces passion. The comparison to a river whose source need not know what waters it feeds leaves causation unsettled: the relationship seems to emerge from nothing and, the narration suggests, may return to nothing. The encounter therefore marks a turning point in their closeness without promising permanence or a conventional romantic resolution.

Private desire under military authority

The episode’s intimacy remains inseparable from the institutional arrangement that makes it dangerous. Liu is the Division Commander’s wife; Wu is his ambitious orderly, whose exceptional record and promotion hopes depend on military favor. Later, when the Political Instructor reports Liu’s complaint and threatens to replace Wu, Wu hides what happened rather than disclose her advances. The Instructor gives him one more day in the Commander’s house to put matters right, placing the decision back in Wu’s hands. That response makes the encounter’s secrecy consequential: their private relation can affect Wu’s post, reputation, and prospects even before it is discovered.

The larger military structure later supplies an abrupt counterforce to those personal stakes. The Commander volunteers the Division for a streamlining pilot, and the Division is to be disbanded; promotions are cancelled, though the Commander arranges city work and housing for Wu and his family as an exception. Wu is told not to return to the Commander’s house amid instability in the household and the Commander’s temper. He feels relief that the affair remains undiscovered, while a Captain orders him to say nothing about what he has heard or seen. The drunken encounter is thus both a moment of emotional disclosure and part of a concealed relationship whose future is eventually constrained by institutional change, secrecy, and separation.