Serve the People!

by Yan Lianke, Julia Lovell (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802170446
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/18/2008
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Franz Kafka Prize, and was elected as a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. He was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina étranger. He has also received two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.

Editorial Reviews

Serve the People!, smoothly translated by Julia Lovell, offers an initial sample of Yan Lianke's writing to an English-speaking audience. A bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases Mao Zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the Chairman's precepts too literally. To a Western sensibility, the broad strokes of Yan Lianke's humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. But then, part of the book's attraction is that it doesn't have a Western sensibility. It lets the reader see—or rather, intuit—what jokes Chinese officials don't consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century China, more than three decades after the death of Mao, a decade after the death of Deng Xiaoping and seven years since China entered the World Trade Organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.
—The New York Times

Liesl Schillinger