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Serve the People!: A Novel
Yan Lianke
Grove Press, Black Cat
February 2008
On Sale: February 18, 2008
240 pages ISBN: 0802170447 EAN: 9780802170446 Paperback
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Fiction
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.
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