Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

The clandestine readings inspire in the boys and in the beautiful seamstress a longing for a fuller, richer life. The novels teach Luo and the narrator about emotion, love, idealism, individualism, and spontaneous action-values discouraged by the repressive communist system that has given rise to the Cultural Revolution.

Much as the friendship with the young woman awakens new feelings of passion within the young admirers, so too does their avid reading awaken a new sense of political oppression. Stealing their friend’s luggage, Luo and the narrator undergo a “Balzacian reeducation” by devouring novel after novel by Honoré Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Herman Melville, and other canonical European and American authors. One day Luo and the narrator visit an old friend nicknamed Four Eyes, the son of a famous poet, and become convinced that Four Eyes has several volumes of forbidden literature hidden in a fancy suitcase. The pair also befriend the young woman whom the author refers to as the Little Seamstress, daughter of the local tailor, gradually falling in love with her charming beauty. Forced to work in coal mines, the two best friends entertain themselves by showing off Western novelties to their peasant hosts, including an alarm clock and a violin, and by dramatically retelling the plots of movies to crowds of villagers. The parabolic novel begins in 1971, as 18-year-old Luo, the son of a famous dentist who once treated Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, and the 17- year-old nameless narrator, the son of two doctors, are sent to the remote mountain region known as Phoenix of the Sky to be reeducated among former opium growers. The result is a slender, poetic novel about both the universal trials of adolescence and the more specific turmoil experienced by the so-called Lost Generation, the young men and women forcibly taken by the Mao government from their schools and families and sent to work as laborers in small rural villages across China. Dai describes the first flush of adolescent love felt by his two protagonists-love for a local young woman and love for a hidden cache of Western literary classics-against the backdrop of political and social upheaval.

The novel by Chinese author Dai Sijie (1954– ) fictionalizes the lives of two urban youths sent to the Chinese countryside for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Analysis of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstressīalzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was an instant sensation upon its publication in French.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie