4 ideas
The authorities keep demanding more explicit confessions, which officials read with evident relish. The persecution ends only when Chen writes that on the mountain, after Wang Er slapped her buttocks, she realized she loved him, a confession her interrogators find more shameful and unmanageable than any sexual detail.
When a label is imposed by collective gossip and no evidence could ever clear it, innocence is structurally unprovable, so the accused gains nothing by staying innocent. Wang Er's deadpan logic is to make the accusation true: the 'worn shoe' may as well commit the adultery she will be punished for anyway. This turns the charge from a humiliation imposed on her into a choice she has claimed.
The regime's demand for repeated, ever more detailed confessions of sexual 'crimes' serves less to punish than to supply the enforcers and the crowd with licensed erotic entertainment. Mere sex is endlessly consumable and so keeps the persecution going. A sincere statement of love and inner feeling breaks the ritual, because the apparatus has no category for private emotion that cannot be turned into spectacle.
Narrating persecution in a flat, literal, sexually frank voice denies the oppressor the tragic register that gives suffering its official meaning. Treating struggle sessions, castrated bulls and forced confessions with the same bemused detachment exposes the system's logic as ridiculous rather than terrifying. The narration frames life as a process of being slowly hammered, one that the hammered can still observe with irony.