Serve the People!

Banned in China, Serve the People! is the sexy, satirical sensation chronicling a love affair between the wife of a powerful Communist army commander and her household’s servant–a remarkable, profound, and deliciously comic satire on Mao’s famous slogan and the political and sexual taboos of his regime

Today Yan Lianke’s best-known work, Serve the People! found a wide underground audience in 2005 via excerpts and in chat rooms on the internet, before it was ultimately banned by Chinese authorities.

Set in 1967, at the peak of the Mao cult, Serve the People! is a beautifully told, wickedly daring story about the forbidden love affair between Liu Lian, the young, pretty wife of a powerful Division Commander in Communist China, and her household’s lowly servant, Wu Dawang. Left to idle at home while her husband furthers the revolution, Liu Lian establishes a rule for her orderly: whenever the household’s wooden Serve the People! sign is removed from its usual place on the dinner table and placed elsewhere, Wu Dawang is to stop what he is doing and attend to her needs upstairs. The orderly, an exemplary soldier, vows to obey.

As life is breathed into the illicit sexual affair, Yan Lianke brilliantly captures how the Model Soldier Wu Dawang becomes an eager collaborator with the restless and demanding Liu Lian, their actions inspired by primitive passions that they are only just discovering. The two-month sexual affair culminates in three days of ravenous lovemaking, the peak of which is an evening in which the lovers compete to see who can prove themselves the most counterrevolutionary by destroying the compound’s most sacred Communist icons.

Yan tramples on the sacrosanct taboos of the army, sexuality, and political etiquette in this funny, subversive critique of official corruption and the hypocrisy of leadership. His first work to be translated into English, Serve the People! brings us the debut of one of the most important authors writing from inside China today.