Wu Dawang and Liu Lian’s three-day confinement

Wu Dawang and Liu Lian’s three-day confinement is the most complete and deliberately bounded withdrawal of their affair from public life. Liu closes the compound gates, locks the doors, and conceals the house from the road; for seventy-two hours, the pair inhabit a private world organized around desire and bodily need. Yet the enclosure does not sustain the happiness they seek: by the third afternoon, their physical energies fail, and exhilaration gives way to fatigue.

The decision to shut the world out

Before the confinement begins, Liu voices a wish to spend the rest of their lives locked inside with Wu Dawang. Her words make the house more than a place for their affair: it becomes an imagined refuge from everyone and everything beyond it. She also assures him that he need not worry about when the Division Commander will return and promises to get Wu Dawang’s promotion fixed once he does. The longing for a life outside ordinary obligations thus coexists with the practical realities of the military hierarchy and the Commander’s anticipated return.

After Liu leaves the bedroom and goes outside, Wu Dawang watches from the window. She carries an iron lock to the compound entrance, checks in both directions for approaching soldiers, shuts the two iron gates, and padlocks them from the outside. The locked entrance is meant to create the appearance that nobody is home. Back inside, she locks both the front and back doors. These are deliberate measures, not merely a decision to remain indoors: Liu makes the house difficult to enter and the couple difficult to detect, while the outward sign of an empty home helps protect their seclusion.

A private domain

When Liu returns, she is naked again, and the pair meet across the bedroom doorway. She tells Wu Dawang that she has locked everything up. Their brief exchange about food makes the practical terms of the withdrawal concrete: there is only half a bag of rice in the cupboard, but they decide that it will be enough. Wu Dawang takes off his uniform and folds it carefully into Liu’s wardrobe, as if he expects not to wear it again. For the time being, he puts aside the visible sign of his military position along with the obligations that normally structure his life.

For three days and nights, Wu Dawang and Liu Lian remain inside, attending only to their most basic needs. The narration presents the compound as an autonomous domain, governed by its own rules and detached from the world beyond the steel fence. They come together when they want and rest when they are tired, sometimes sitting or lying with Wu Dawang’s head on Liu’s thigh. The scene’s intimacy is insistently physical: even rest is described through the contact of his bristly crew cut against her tender skin. Their private world is not built through a new social order so much as through repeated desire, exhaustion, and recovery.

Concealment and circumstance

The isolation is made possible not only by Liu’s locks but by the compound’s setting. The Division Commander’s house stands within the senior officers’ compound; across the road, the Division Social Club’s back wall faces it. With the barracks deserted, the club gate is permanently locked, and its instruments are silent. Its thick red-brick walls would muffle sound even if the gate were open and the drums were playing. The nearby environment therefore reinforces the lovers’ enclosure: the social and military spaces around the house are present, but inactive and separated from them.

Other circumstances further reduce the chance of discovery. The building site has fallen quiet and become overgrown, while sentries patrol on the far side of its red-brick wall, away from the house. The patrols would not hear the inhabitants of Compound Number One unless they were screaming. The house is overlooked only from the west, by the Political Commissar’s home; at this time, the Commissar is away on camp and field training, and his wife has travelled to the provincial capital with her orderly. The narrative frames the opportunity as if Heaven itself had arranged it, but the apparent providence consists of specific absences, distances, locked gates, and walls.

Desire reaches its limit

For the first two and a half days, the lovers remain absorbed in their most basic desires. The episode then reverses direction: on the afternoon of the third day, primitive joy gives way to primitive fatigue, at once physical and psychological. The confinement has offered them an interval in which ordinary life seems excluded, but it cannot prevent the body from imposing its own limit.

The change is dramatized through failed repetition. Even when they try the position that had previously brought them ecstatic success, it no longer works. They try other arrangements and variations in mood, but none restores the earlier intensity. Failure follows them as they lie exhausted on the bed, and Liu asks what is wrong. Her question marks a shift from their earlier shared certainty that they can simply continue to the bewilderment of a desire that no longer answers to their wishes.

The episode’s central irony lies in the contrast between the lovers’ imagined permanence and the confinement’s actual duration. Liu wishes they could spend the rest of their lives locked together; Wu Dawang folds away his uniform as if he will never need it again. Yet the carefully secured house can only suspend the outside world, not abolish time or bodily limits. The locks and gates make their retreat possible, while exhaustion ends the delirium from within. Their sealed domain briefly appears self-sufficient, but the third day reveals its dependence on the very bodies it was meant to liberate.