Set during the Cultural Revolution, at the peak of the cult of personality of Chairman Mao, the novel tells the story of an affair between the Liu Lian, the wife of a powerful military commander, and a young peasant soldier, Wu Dawang.
Liu Lian discovers that destroying her absent husband's sacred Mao icons - such as the Little Red Book and statues of the Chairman - turns her on.
[1] The title is a reference to a phrase originally coined by Mao in a 1944 article of the same name that commemorated the death of the red army soldier Zhang Side.
Due to the sex scenes and sensitive political content, the story attracted controversy in China when it was featured the literary magazine Huacheng in 2005.
The screenwriter and director Jang Cheol-soo adapted the story to set the erotic South Korean film, Serve the People, in a fictional socialist country with similarity to North Korea in the 1970s.