Wu Dawang and Zhao Ezi’s Loveless Marriage

Wu Dawang and Zhao Ezi’s Loveless Marriage is a union built around a promise of advancement rather than mutual love. The pledge Wu makes before their wedding turns the prospect of a home in the city, Party membership, commendations, and official rank into obligations binding both their future and their intimacy. As Wu struggles to fulfil those terms, the marriage becomes a recurring measure of how military opportunity and material security have displaced emotional closeness.

The Pledge and Its Conditions

Before the marriage, Zhao Ezi’s father questions what kind of life Wu can offer his daughter: Wu is not a Party member, has no commendations, and has little prospect of promotion. Wu answers by kneeling and promising to meet those expectations. He then writes that he will earn commendations within a year, join the Party within two, and become an official within three, so that he can move Zhao Ezi to a city home where she can eat steamed rolls every day. He also promises never to return to Wujiagou if he fails, and to serve her as she chooses if she allows him back.

The terms do not remain a private assurance to Zhao Ezi’s father. They become the framework through which Wu and Zhao Ezi understand the marriage’s future. Their wedding follows almost as soon as the ink dries; two weeks later Wu’s mother dies, and the narrator marks this as the point after which Wu is no longer master of his destiny or marital happiness. The pledge has joined his domestic life to a sequence of outcomes—recognition, Party membership, office, and relocation—that he cannot secure by desire alone.

A Marriage Without Emotional Intimacy

The absence at the centre of the marriage becomes clear on the wedding night. After the ceremony and the end of the wedding gathering, Wu reaches for Zhao Ezi, but she rebukes his advances by asking whether he is a good soldier and whether he should be ashamed of his conduct. Wu understands that the kind of love he has read about will be missing from their union. Sitting on the red-lacquered nuptial bed, he feels the marriage’s bleakness, made sharper by Zhao Ezi’s apparent failure to recognize what is absent.

The marriage’s emotional distance is not described as a lack of physical contact alone. Wu’s attempts at intimacy do not produce the warmth he expects, and the narration compares them to a melon plant bearing only shrivelled seeds. His regret is for an absent love that neither partner seems able to name in the same way. The resulting gap persists even as the couple’s lives become more closely tied to the pledge’s practical rewards.

Intimacy as a Career Incentive

During a home visit, Zhao Ezi asks Wu to kneel before her and swear again that he will work hard, obey his commanders, and do what is necessary to become an official so she can move to the city. Wu points out that he has already made this promise to her father, but she insists on hearing it again before agreeing to intimacy. The scene makes the marriage’s bargain explicit: access to closeness is connected to renewed assurances about Wu’s career and her hoped-for future.

Afterward, Wu is allowed to have his way with her, but Zhao Ezi regularly reminds him, just as he reaches orgasm, to work hard when he returns to the army. The reminder might have sounded affectionate in another setting; here it chills him. The narrator says that the limited semblance of affection between them becomes too fragile to carry emotional truth. Sexual intimacy begins, but the narrative presents love as ending at that same point: physical access does not repair the distance or transform their arrangement into mutual tenderness.

The pattern is reinforced when Wu returns to military life. He works without winning a commendation, then struggles without being admitted into the Party. Letters from Zhao Ezi or her father asking how he is progressing intensify his panic. He repeatedly fails to appear on the annual lists for Party membership and commendations, and at his most desperate even contemplates suicide. When the Catering Squad’s sergeant post becomes vacant, Wu competes for it because the role is known to offer rapid advancement despite its exhausting and unpleasant work.

His transfer to the Catering Squad changes his prospects. He becomes a full sergeant, joins the Party, and receives commendations and awards with help from the Political Instructor. Yet official rank—the final unfulfilled clause of the pledge—continues to elude him for reasons including medical testing, limited promotion quotas, and competition from other soldiers. His career improves substantially without completing the promise on which the marriage was founded.

The Contrast with Liu Lian

The affair between Wu Dawang and Liu Lian changes how he understands his marriage. The narration explicitly presents the contrast with Zhao Ezi’s emotionally cold relationship as what enables Wu to recognize the experience of love in the affair. For nearly two months, the lovers share a passionate relationship, while Wu and Zhao Ezi’s intimacy remains structured by promises and incentives. The two periods of living together are described as comparable in length—only two or three months in the few years of Wu and Zhao Ezi’s marriage—but as utterly different in character.

Zhao Ezi treats sex as a reward for good behaviour and as a regrettable but necessary release of instinct; Liu Lian experiences it as an equal exchange of pleasure. This distinction sharpens the marriage’s central imbalance. Zhao Ezi’s practical hopes are legible within the terms of Wu’s pledge, but those terms do not create the reciprocal emotional life that Wu finds with Liu Lian. The affair does not resolve the marriage; it makes the limits of its intimacy harder for Wu to ignore.

Return, Estrangement, and an Arranged Future

After Wu returns from the army, Zhao Ezi remains his wife, and she has made an effort to accommodate him sexually as part of their shared prospect of moving to the city. Since becoming a sergeant and Party member, he can tell her about a commendation or progress toward officialdom, and she will accept intimacy as a reward for achievements already secured and an incentive for those still to come. Yet Wu, preoccupied with memories of the barracks and Liu Lian, does not resume marital relations for weeks.

Zhao Ezi eventually asks whether his distance reflects the absence of new commendations. She offers herself if he will keep working hard after returning to the army. Wu recognizes the old arrangement in the offer: intimacy is still tied to promotion and material betterment, like another tool for turning the earth. His affection, such as it was, withers further. He refuses intimacy, invokes his oath not to approach her if he fails to become an official, and leaves the bed for the courtyard and then the hills beyond the village, where he stays until dawn. The oath that once promised a shared future now serves as a reason to withdraw.

The army’s restructuring then changes the practical future of the marriage without supplying emotional reconciliation. At a seminar in Beijing organized by the Central Military Commission, the Division Commander volunteers to test a scheme for streamlining and restructuring the army; in practical terms, the Division is to be disbanded. Promotions are cancelled, threatening Wu’s remaining hope of becoming an official. Because the Division Commander and his wife favour him, however, instructions are given to arrange a city job for Wu in his native province, move his family there, and find Zhao Ezi suitable work.

That arrangement appears to fulfil part of the original pledge by offering the household a move and Zhao Ezi employment, but it comes through military reorganization rather than the promotion Wu had promised to win. At the same time, the Division Commander’s wife has secured Wu an extended home leave, and military personnel instability means Wu is told not to return to his former post or visit the household unless necessary. The relationship’s practical circumstances are therefore redirected by decisions outside the marriage, while its emotional estrangement remains. The narrative leaves Wu and Zhao Ezi bound by the pledge and its material consequences, but without evidence that the promised city future has repaired the love missing from their union.