re-education (Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
Date:	31/08/01 (465 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's enchanting.

Disadvantages: None,

In 1968, as part of the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao Tse-tung instigated a programme of 're-education'. Universities were closed, and the children of 'reactionaries' and 'young intellectuals' were
sent to work for the peasants in the countryside.

Dai Sijie was one of those youngsters sent for 're-education' between 1971 and 1974. He left China in 1984, and has lived
and worked (as a filmmaker) in France ever since.

Our narrator is the 17-year-old son of two doctors, and along
with his friend Luo, 18, who is the son of Chairman Mao's dentist,
he is sent to be re-educated by working for peasants in a remote mountain village. They stay in a house on stilts above a pig-sty.
Life was no picnic on the mountain known as "Phoenix of the Sky".

"What we dreaded most of all was having to carry buckets of shit
on our backs [...] The slurry would seep through the lid and trickle down our bodies until we were soaked."

They also have to work in a coal mine for two months.
However, this book isn't a chronicle of hardship,
it's an uplifting tale of the human spirit rising above adversity.
Seeing Luo's talent for story-telling, the boys are allowed to go
to the nearest town (100km away) once a month to watch a film, which they then re-enact to entertain the villagers.

Meanwhile, an old friend they call Four-Eyes has been sent to a nearby village. He is the unpleasant son of a writer and a poetess and while visiting him they meet the Little Seamstress of the title. She's the daughter of the local tailor, and Luo falls in love with her.

They also discover that a mysterious suitcase Four-Eyes keeps locked in his room contains a stash of banned Western literature from the 19th century:- Balzac; Hugo; Dumas; Flaubert; Tolstoy; Dostoevsky; Dickens and Brontë, to name a few. The boys go to great lengths to beg,
borrow and finally burgle the books...


If you never got round to reading Wild Swans because it was just too long (shame on you!) then you'll have to find a better excuse not to read this beautiful little book. In the end there isn't very much about the harsh politics of China under Mao, it's more of a romance. In fact it's the sort of book that makes your heart sing.

"If you read only one novel, choose this one: it's worth a hundred." was the advice from Le Figaro when this book was published in France last year, where it won five prize and became a bestseller.
It could well become one of the films of the year in 2002 or 2003.

The paperback edition isn't due until April 2002.

pp176, ISBN: 0-701-16982-6
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Summary: