Wu Dawang’s marriage bargain with Zhao Ezi

Wu Dawang’s marriage bargain with Zhao Ezi turns marriage into a written timetable for social advancement: he pledges to earn commendations, join the Party, become an official, and move Zhao Ezi to the city. Made under pressure from his mother’s final wish and Zhao Ezi’s father’s expectations, the agreement binds private family life to military promotion. Its promises steer Wu Dawang for years, even as the army’s opportunities and later restructuring repeatedly alter what he can deliver.

The bargain takes shape

Wu Dawang’s prospects changed after Accountant Zhao noticed the regularity of his handwriting. Following the harvest and planting season, the team leader brought him to Zhao Village to meet the accountant. Wu Dawang wore a borrowed blue jacket and black twill trousers, clothes that gave him the appearance of a soldier and helped present him as a suitable match for Zhao’s only daughter, Zhao Ezi.

In his spacious, three-room tiled house, Accountant Zhao described a route out of village poverty. He would arrange for Wu Dawang to join the army before the year ended. Military service, he explained, could bring education and training, Party membership and commendations, and eventually promotion to officialdom. An official could obtain an urban registration permit for Zhao Ezi, allowing her to live with Wu Dawang in the city. The plan made marriage conditional on a chain of hoped-for institutional rewards, and tied the daughter’s future to the prospective son-in-law’s career.

That chain was disrupted after Wu Dawang had spent only a year in the army. His mother developed cirrhosis of the liver and summoned him home to her deathbed. She asked him to marry in the village before she died, so that she could know a daughter-in-law would tend her grave. The request gave Wu Dawang an immediate reason to seek marriage, but his military career had not yet produced the achievements on which Accountant Zhao had made his approval depend.

A promise put in writing

When Wu Dawang approached his prospective father-in-law, Accountant Zhao asked whether he had won commendations. Wu Dawang had not. Zhao considered the gap between his daughter’s hopes and Wu Dawang’s prospects: he was not a Party member, had no commendations, and had no clear path to promotion. His reluctance was framed not as personal hostility but as concern about what kind of life Wu Dawang could offer Zhao Ezi.

Wu Dawang answered by making his future performance the condition of the marriage. He asked Zhao to let him call him Father and promised to meet the demands: win commendations, join the Party, become an official, move Zhao Ezi to the city, find her a good job, and give her a good life. He offered to put the promise in writing. The resulting pledge set deadlines: commendations within one year, Party membership within two, and official status within three. If he failed and could not move Zhao Ezi to a city home where she could eat steamed rolls every day, he swore never to show his face in Wujiagou again, alive or dead. If she allowed him to return, he promised to serve her for the rest of his life without complaint.

The written pledge converted an anxious appeal into an explicit, lasting obligation. Its terms reached beyond career milestones to set conditions for residence, work, food, and even whether Wu Dawang could return to his home village. Almost as soon as the ink had dried, he married Zhao Ezi. Two weeks later his mother died with a smile, having seen her son marry. The marriage therefore answered her final request, but it also left Wu Dawang committed to a future measured by promises he did not control alone.

Military advancement and its limits

Back in the army, Wu Dawang worked hard, but effort brought no immediate commendation; the following year, he struggled to enter the Party and failed again. Letters from Zhao Ezi and Accountant Zhao asking about his progress intensified his anxiety. Each time his name was absent from the lists of new Party members and commendations, he feared that he was failing the written terms and at points contemplated suicide.

A vacant post as Sergeant of the Catering Squad offered a new route forward. The work was dirty and exhausting, but soldiers in the squad were known to advance quickly because so few wanted the duties. Eight ambitious soldiers competed for the position. Wu Dawang gained the Political Instructor’s attention through his readiness to serve, and was formally transferred as Deputy Sergeant, responsible for the company’s food and water.

The transfer changed the pace of his career. Within the next year and a half, before he was appointed to the Division Commander’s household, Wu Dawang became a full Sergeant and joined the Party. With the Political Instructor’s help, commendations and awards became common. These gains fulfilled important parts of the pledge, but the last major condition—promotion to officialdom—remained out of reach. His blood pressure tested too high, other companies received promotion quotas, another soldier secured a place ahead of him, and changing circumstances repeatedly interrupted his prospects. The four-pocket jacket associated with officials remained a visible sign of the status he had promised to attain but had not yet secured.

A family promise under changing institutions

The pledge’s consequences continued to shape how Wu Dawang understood later opportunities. When the Division Commander’s wife told him that all promotions were suspended but that she would arrange things for his family once they resumed, Wu Dawang had reason to hear the promise through the terms he had made to Zhao Ezi. She said she understood that he wanted his wife to join him and offered to help with the family’s future. The exchange connected his private obligation to a new source of personal influence within the army.

That prospect was overtaken by institutional change. At a seminar in Beijing organized by the Central Military Commission, the Division Commander volunteered his unit for a pilot scheme to streamline and restructure the army. The Division was to be disbanded. Promotions were cancelled, threatening Wu Dawang’s remaining hope of becoming an official, but the Division Commander instructed that an exception be made for him: a city job would be arranged in his native province, his family would be moved there, and suitable work would be found for his wife.

Within a week of Wu Dawang’s return to the barracks, he and his family had been assigned work and housing in the city nearest their village. While other soldiers faced uncertainty, he needed only to complete and sign a few forms. The resulting arrangement resembled the urban future set out in his pledge, but it came through the Commander’s intervention and the Division’s dissolution rather than through Wu Dawang’s promotion to officialdom. He could obtain a city placement for his family even as the career ladder on which his original bargain depended was being removed.

Reversal and reflection

As the Division emptied, the Head of Management handed Wu Dawang a job-assignment form and remarked that he had come through better than anyone else thanks to Liu Lian. The comment made his advantageous outcome seem entangled with personal favor as well as official procedure. It also sharpened the contrast between the written terms of his marriage bargain and the unforeseen relationships and institutional decisions that eventually secured a city future for his family.

A fellow Political Instructor later asked Wu Dawang to use his special relationship with Liu Lian to persuade the Division Commander to let him remain in the army. He, too, had made a marriage promise tied to urban employment: his father-in-law had agreed to the marriage because he expected military service to help his daughter obtain a city job. Wu Dawang was struck by the resemblance to his own situation. The parallel shows that his bargain was not an isolated arrangement but one example of a wider pressure on soldiers whose marriages and family obligations were bound to the uncertain rewards of military service.

The bargain begins with a concrete promise of advancement and ends in a more complicated fulfillment. Wu Dawang gains Party membership and commendations but not the official status he pledged to reach. His family nevertheless receives city work and housing through a special arrangement made amid the Division’s disbandment. The promise therefore remains both a driver of his choices and an imperfect account of how those choices turn out: the desired destination is reached through a route shaped by patronage, family dependence, and institutional upheaval.