“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” by Dai Sijie is a fascinating tale about the power of literature. Two boys from urban China are sent to the mountains for “re-education” at the height of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Soon after arriving at their hut on stilts in the countryside, they discover that they are never meant to return to their lives in the city. Their lives are banal and backbreaking. The narrator of the novel and his friend, Luo, must learn to come to terms with the constricting nature of their homeland, with literature being the only thing that sets them free.
The narrator, the son of doctors, is banished from normal life because of his bourgeois background. The parents of Luo are even more guilty, with Luo’s father having been the one to publicly admit that he implanted a new set of teeth in none other than the Great Helmsman of the communist revolution himself. In sum, a deep hatred of education, of bourgeois intellectualism, is what centers the novel.
In many ways, it is autobiographical. Sijie himself was sent to Sichuan Province and underwent an experience that formed the basis of the story. But more importantly, his story communicates the necessity of freedom in its most bare form. After discovering that a fellow worker and son of bourgeois culture, “Four Eyes,” is stashing Western novels in a suitcase, Luo and the nameless narrator never view the world or themselves the same. Sijie writes:
“Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.”
Reading Honoré de Balzac’s “Ursule Mirouë” offered this group of victims a source of existential wisdom. How to be a human through books, not ideology nor the Party’s supremacy, became the central goal. Stories from a faraway land touched the remote peaks of rural China and these two laborers and the daughter of a local tailor became immersed in a life-altering experience.
The latter, the seamstress, was most affected. After sharing their findings with her, the boys are amused to see how much the stories changed her. In a conversation together, they say:
“This fellow Balzac is a wizard…He touched the head of this mountain girl with an invisible finger, and she was transformed, carried away in a dream. It took a while for her to come down to earth…She said having Balzac’s words beside her skin made her feel good and more intelligent.”
At the novel’s end, the seamstress runs to the city. Luo, the seamstress’s secret lover, is shocked at how much the books have changed her. According to Luo, the seamstress “said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price.”
More than that, literature taught them the value of seeking new ideas and frontiers. Our narrator, for example, says that without Romain Rolland and his novel (“Jean-Christophe”), “he would have never understood the splendor of taking free and independent action as an individual.” He continues to say that “up until this stolen encounter with Romain Rolland’s hero, my poor educated and re-educated brains had been incapable of grasping the notion of one man standing up against the whole world.”
Sijie’s work calls out to us across time to be aware and active in shaping the world around us. For his characters, the mechanism to achieve this goal was through exposure to outside literature, but it serves as a reminder of the importance of free access to ideas as a whole. Sijie does a brilliant job of communicating deep messaging through sometimes vague and obscure metaphors, and reading this book will undoubtedly force one to think.
However, the one downside is that the book is very short, and the ending leaves one feeling that more could have been offered. A deeper understanding of the external factors in the characters’ lives would have been helpful to the layman reader who does not understand the true importance of the Cultural Revolution. Sijie is not simply communicating a story, but is also trying to make a political point. It sometimes becomes more of a story about three children than a book about the Chinese political climate and its impact on them. However, for the general reader who appreciates a good story, this book will not fail you.
Rating: 7/10
