Customer Reviews

Serve the People!

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Serve the People is a great book. It is well written like a lot of Chinese literature. The words are smart, sparse and full of emotion. The story is one that is both political and a love story at the same time. Apparently, according to the book jacket, this book was banned in China because it made fun of Mao and was sexual. The writing reminds me of Ha Jin in that it gets to the point by using few words and not using a bunch of big words just to fill up the pages. Once I got into it I couldn't put it down because I wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters next. It kept me on the edge of my seat and didn't necessarily take the path I thought it would to get to the end. I recommend this book because the writing is so good. The writing makes you feel at home, it makes you feel comfortable, not like you need a masters degree to read it. Also, the story is a good love story and the politics of it all is subtle and nuanced. You do not feel as if you are being preached at.

While there's doubtless no worse governmental regime under which to live than totalitarianism, there is also no other easier (and more dangerous) to skewer with satire. Such is indeed the case with Yan Lianke's marvelously spot-on short novel, SERVE THE PEOPLE! Written in 2005 in a relatively more open China, this book certainly did little to endear author Yan to his country's party and leadership.

The book's title derives from one of the Chinese Communist Party's central tenets, "Wei renmin fuwu," a sentiment toward selfless service to the country expounded by Mao himself as the title of a speech he delivered in 1944, five years before his ascendancy to the role of Great Leader. "Serve the People" remains an everpresent admonition for China's current leadership, still inscribed in Mao's brushstrokes at the entrance to the Communist Party's leadership compound Zhongnanhai in Beijing. However, author Yan Lianke takes serving the people to a whole new and decidedly bawdy level in his exposition of Maoist China in 1967.

Wu Dawang is a typical Chinese country boy who joins the Army in order to secure enough promotions to make good on a pre-marital vow to move his wife and child to the big city someday. Finding himself trapped in a loveless marriage to which he strives to be faithful, Wu lives most of his days at the military base where he has risen to General Orderly (primarily cook and gardener) to the Division Commander. In that role, Wu lives with his company comrades but works every day at the Division Commander's standalone residence. Winner of multiple awards and commendations for politically correct service, Wu strives to live outwardly by the People's Liberation Army's three rules of thumb - don't say what you shouldn't say, don't ask what you shouldn't ask, and don't do what you shouldn't do. In reality, he follows the survival rules he's learned from army veterans, "To think hard but say little, to channel ingenuity into practical ends and to blunt intelligence into worthy dullness."

Young Wu's plans are turned upside down one day shortly after the Division Commander has left for a two-month conference in Beijing. A wooden sign lettered "Serve the People" in bright red characters has moved from its normal spot on the dining table to the kitchen counter. It takes Wu little time to discover the reason: the Division Commander's beautiful young wife, Liu Lian, has elected to use the sign as a signal that she "needs [Wu Dawang] upstairs for something." He timidly approaches her room only to discover her naked in her darkened bedroom, holding a copy of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong. Thus begins Wu's bawdy adventures in serving the people by serving the Division Commander by, in turn, servicing his wife (at her insistence).

The story elevates to hysterical bedroom farce in short order, with the two main characters becoming wholly consumed by their physical relationship in the Division Commander's absence. Yan takes repeated satirical swipes, both small and large, at Mao, the Communist Party, and the People's Liberation Army, culminating with an outrageously slapstick scene where Wu Dawang and Liu Lian smash and desecrate every Mao object in the household (a crime punishable by death at that time) in order to prove whose love for the other is stronger. The reasons behind this two-month orgy and how it plays itself out over the next fifteen years of Wu's life are left for the reader to discover, along with the fate of the "Serve the People" sign. Alternately sensual and hilarious, it's well worth the effort to read SERVE THE PEOPLE! to find out more.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

This book was published in 2005 and translated into English in 2007. Set in the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-73), it began as a sex comedy, chronicling the development of an affair between an aging general's young wife (Liu Lian) and the handsome male soldier who was her servant (Wu Dawong).

The book jacket and many book reviews emphasized the sex and romance ("red hot love story," "crackl[ing] with sexual tension"). But ultimately the novel seemed to be about how an authoritarian society distorted relations between people, the ways human nature found to overcome restrictions, the real meaning of self-sacrifice, and the massive gap in China between past and present values. Judging from the book's ending, the author didn't necessarily approve of all changes since liberalization.

Initially there was much humor in the way the affair developed. The author seemed to be poking fun at social characteristics of the old days like permanent mass mobilization in service of national goals, and the need at all times for dedication to something larger than merely oneself, as expressed in an endless stream of national slogans. He seemed also to mock people of the time who paid lip service to national ideals while keenly pursuing self-interest. The woman, for instance, tried to convince her unwilling servant -- a naïve, simple man from the countryside -- that in "serving" her he was ultimately serving the people. (This phrase, "Serve the people!" appeared throughout the book, with multiple levels of irony.) She also tried appealing to his own selfish motives.

The couple's yearning and frustration built up until they could be repressed no longer. For a short time, they locked themselves away and enjoyed bliss in privacy -- in a manner recalling the film Last Tango in Paris, except that in Communist China the greatest taboo and pleasure came from smashing busts of Chairman Mao. Ultimately, though, it proved impossible for them to move beyond the satisfaction of physical desire. For one of them, the stakes grew too high.

The ending of the book floored me. Here, the story flashed forward to the near-present. The Cultural Revolution was over, and people were in headlong pursuit of material wealth. The action at this point seemed to indicate how bereft of ideals so many had become. Then the book shifted to the faraway past, to a time near the start of China's Communist Revolution, with a speech indicating the fervent beliefs that had motivated the cadres of the day. Here in the last few pages, it seemed that the novel became something much deeper than a clever sex comedy, and much more than a satire of authoritarian behavior. Not that the author approved of the Cultural Revolution; but while contrasting an oppressive society with the progressive beliefs that had motivated its establishment, he seemed also to be contrasting the dreams of that time with the loss of ideals in the present.

Excerpts:
"Newly Reconstructing the Superstructure . . . Consolidating the Great Wall of Socialism."

"To think hard but say little, to channel ingenuity into practical ends and to blunt intelligence into worthy dullness--these were the survival strategies that Wu Dawang picked up from the veterans around him."

"'If a person won't Serve the People in practice,' he replied, 'how can he Serve the People in theory?'"

"A long-hidden resentment at the rigid hierarchy all around him was about to burst forth."

"Her breasts maintained an attitude of furious immobility, her nipples jutting forward like the pin noses of two indignant white rabbits, bearing solemn witness to the scene playing out before them."

"It was an emotional and biological event that broke down all the moral, social, cultural and political boundaries of their world."

"His was a face that admitted failure, its strength sapped by the social transformations that had bewildered and exhausted his generation."

"The secret sank without trace, like a piece of gold thrown into the sea."

There are shades of many things - the Biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Edith Wharton's "the Age of Innocence" and "1984," but this work is its own, and it is masterful. This is the portrait of a tyrannical, puritanical totalitarianism, but also of human beings striving to find happiness in an equally degrading and degraded world.

The design and moving opening to this short novel are enough to keep you reading, especially when the author draws his ideas of fiction into a few opening sequences, however the ending rushes by and is followed by an annoyoing melodramatic epilogue, though an intersting postscript.

I AM INTO READING ANYTHING ABOUT CHINA IN ANTICIPATION OF THE OLYMPICS AND ALL THE CIRCULATING HYPE. I LOVE FICTION THAT STAYS TRUE TO CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT, AND TO THIS END "SERVE THE PEOPLE!" DID NOT DISAPPOINT. A COUPLE OF OTHER RECENT CHINA NOVELS THAT I FOUND IMPRESSIVE ARE "MISS SHANGHI" AND "RABBIT IN THE MOON". IN ALL THREE OF THESE NOVELS, THE READER WILL BE ENRICHED IN MULTIPLE DOMAINS, CULTURAL,HISTORIC, GEOGRAPHICAL AND HUMANANISTIC. THIS IS THE YEAR TO INDULGE IN CHINA BACKGROUND.