Serve the People!

by Yan Lianke, Julia Lovell (Translator)

Overview

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. When Liu Lian establishes a rule for her orderly that he is to attend to her needs whenever the household’s wooden Serve the People! sign is removed from its usual place, the orderly vows to obey. What follows is a remarkable love story and a profound and deliciously comic satire on Mao’s famous slogan and the political and sexual taboos of his regime. 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. Originally banned in China, and the first work from Yan Lianke 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)

Editorial Reviews

"Yan Lianke's "Serve the People!" is a scathing sendup of life in 1960s China during the chaos of the country's Cultural Revolution. Serialized in the Chinese literary magazine Hua Cheng in 2005 and then banned by the Central Propaganda Bureau, Lianke's novel takes aim at one and all, from impotent leaders and their scandalous wives to amoral People's Liberation Army soldiers scheming their way up the ranks, peasant farmers plagued by drought, and even the great Mao himself. Lianke spares no one . . . "Serve the People!" is a wonderfully biting satire, brimming with absurdity, humor and wit . . .the novel is exuberantly drawn in several shades of revolutionary (or should that be Revlon?) red." —LA Times

“This passionate satire of clandestine, intimate privilege in an ostensibly classless, egalitarian society is exceedingly carefully written, so that it is at once funny, sad, and bitterly ironic on nearly every page. Oh, and sensual, too.” —Ray Olson, Booklist (starred review)

“Yan’s work certainly contains its share of double entendres and may even be perceived as comedic at times, but on a deeper level, it offers a sociopolitical commentary on a way of life generally unfamiliar to Westerners.” —Library Journal

“Yan’s satire brilliantly exposes the emptiness of Maoist ideals and the fraudulent ends for which they were used, but also relates a sorrowful tale of compromised relationships and modest hopes left unfulfilled.” —Publishers Weekly

“Steamy and subversive . . . Lianke [is] one of China’s greatest living authors and fiercest satirists.” —Jonathan Watts, The Guardian

“Yan Lianke’s slim novel drips with the kind of satire that can only come from deep within the machinery of Chinese communism. Eschewing broad comedy, Yan barbs the text with enough social criticism to receive a priceless blurb from the Central Propaganda Bureau.” —Craig Taylor, Financial Times

“Not just sexy, but also tender . . . Lianke peppers the book with useful passages on the art of writing itself, and makes his readers aware of semantic manipulation and the power of words, their ability to brainwash and erase thoughts.” —Waterstone’s Books Quarterly (UK)

“An exhilarating comedy of misunderstandings . . . Yan Lianke is one of the most popular and controversial writers of his generation.” —La Repubblica (Italy)

“It is Ionesco in full. And the last pages of the book, melancholy and mysterious, make it possible to measure the variety of the talent of the novelist.” —Le Figaro (Paris)

From the Publisher

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

English-language readers now have the opportunity to read award-winning Chinese author Yan's Wei Renmnin Fuwu, originally published in China in 2005 and subsequently banned. Yan records the story of Wu Dawang, a farmer turned Sergeant of the Catering Squad and General Orderly for the People's Liberation Army's Division Commander and his wife. The creed "To Serve the People" takes on new meaning for Wu Dawang when he learns that the Division Commander's much younger wife, Liu Lian, expects him upstairs whenever the household's "Serve the People" sign is moved from its usual location. Initial sightings of the stray sign begin innocently enough, but soon Liu Lian's expectations recall those of Potiphar's wife. Wu Dawang, however, is certainly no Joseph, becoming enwrapped in a torrid affair. Yan's work certainly contains its share of double entendres and may even be perceived as comedic at times, but on a deeper level, it offers a sociopolitical commentary on a way of life generally unfamiliar to Westerners. For larger public and academic library collections.
—Shirley N. Quan

Library Journal

Satirical novel of love during the Cultural Revolution. "Serve the people," a slogan taken from a speech Mao Zedong gave in 1944, plays a paradoxical role in the life of Wu Dawang, an orderly assigned to garden and cook for the Party's Division Commander in 1967. It's emblazoned on a sign that decorates the Division Commander's dinner table, defining the path to advancement in the People's Liberation Army and in the Party. But then the Division Commander's wife, Liu Lian, tells Wu Dawang that whenever the sign has been moved from its usual place, he is to stop performing his usual duties and attend to her very specific, very personal needs upstairs. Wu Dawang knows that Liu Lian has the power to destroy his hopes for advancement, and he has also been told-again and again-that to serve the Division Commander and his family is to serve the people. Nor is he unaware that Liu Lian is gorgeous, glamorous and passionate in ways that his peasant wife is not. So naturally, Wu Dawang decides to serve the people by serving Liu Lian. Their affair comes to a terrible end, but before it does the lovers indulge in an orgy that allows them to express long-suppressed physical and emotional needs, including the need to exorcise the exigencies of class in a society where inequality does not officially exist. Lianke's protagonists bring their debauchery to a climax in a contest to determine which is the greater counterrevolutionary: They rampage through the Division Commander's house destroying all the Mao-emblazoned furnishings, crockery, cookware and decorative bric-a-brac they can find. There's no reason to believe, however, that love can triumph over the Party. The Chinese Central Propaganda Bureaubanned the book in China because it "slanders Mao Zedong . . . and is overflowing with sex": You couldn't ask for a better blurb than that. Agent: Laura Susjin/The Susjin Agency

Kirkus Reviews