An enchanting literary debut-already an international best-seller.
At the height of Mao's infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are
among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for
"re-education." The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of
being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village
where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to
cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths.
Their meager distractions include a violin-as well as, before long,
the beautiful daughter of the local tailor.
But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics
in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most
surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden
treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost
forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive
retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever
transformed.
From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest
passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and
unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the
wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of
storytelling.
1. What does Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress reveal about the nature and purpose of China's
Cultural Revolution and the suffering it caused? In what ways does
the novel offer a more intimate portrait of what life was like
under Chairman Mao than a strictly historical account could?
2. Why have the narrator's and Luo's parents been named "enemies
of the people"? What were their crimes? How does this
classification affect the fate of the two boys? Why did China want
to reeducate people like the narrator and Luo?
3. Early in the novel, the narrator says, "The only thing Luo
was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be
sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has
moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern
societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done
away with the old storytellers-more's the pity" [p. 18]. Is he
right about the marginal status of the storyteller in the modern
world? In what ways is this novel an argument for the importance of
storytelling?
4. When the narrator first reads Ursule Mirouet, even though
he's heard "nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism,
Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life," he is transformed
by Balzac's story of "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action.
. . . In spite of my complete ignorance of that distant land called
France . . . Ursule's story rang as true as if it had been about my
neighbours" [p. 57]. What is it that enables him to identify so
strongly with characters and situations he has never experienced?
What does his experience suggest about the power of literature? In
what ways does Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress exert a similar power on its readers?
5. Luo is sent to the mountains to be reeducated, an experience
he bitterly resents, and yet he himself wishes to reeducate the
Seamstress. When he steals Four-Eyes' suitcase full of novels, he
says, "With these books I shall transform the Little Seamstress.
She'll never be a simple mountain girl again" [p. 100]. What is the
ironic result of his success in making the Little Seamstress more
sophisticated? What does the novel suggest about attempting
to change others according to one's own beliefs or desires?
6. In what ways does China under Chairman Mao, as represented in
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, resemble
Afghanistan under the Taliban, or other cultures that strive to
keep the modern world from undermining traditional or religious
values?
7. Why does Four Eyes object to the authentic mountain songs Luo
and the narrator bring back from the old miller? How does he alter
them to make them politically correct? What ironies are involved in
the effort to make peasant culture conform to communist ideals?
8. When the narrator sees the books in Four Eyes' suitcase, he
remarks, "Brushing them with the tips of my fingers made me feel as
if my pale hands were in touch with human lives" [p. 99]. And when
Luo later burns the novels, it is the characters, rather than the
books, that seem to go up in flames. Why does he regard these books
as being so alive?
9. When the tailor and the Little Seamstress come to stay at the
house on stilts, the narrator observes how agitated and impatient
women become when considering clothes: "It would evidently take
more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a
woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as
the world, as old as the desire for children" [p. 122]. Do you
agree with this statement? Are such desires inspired by cultural
pressures or inherent in human nature? What does this passage
suggest about a political system's ability to shape and control a
people's basic wishes?
10. When Luo suffers a bout of malaria, the narrator is called
upon to tell a story: "I embarked on the strangest performance of
my life. In that remote village tucked into a cleft in the mountain
where my friend had fallen into a sort of stupor, I sat in the
flickering light of an oil lamp and related the North Korean film
for the benefit of a pretty girl and four ancient sorceresses" [p.
39]. Why are the rural Chinese so fascinated by film, or the
stories they tell? What does this scene suggest about the
convergence-and compatibility or incompatibility-of ancient and
modern ways of life?
11. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is
a harshly realistic novel, in which the two main characters are
forced to work in a coal mine and to carry buckets of excrement up
and down a mountain, but it also has a fairy-tale quality. What
makes the book read like a fable? How has Dai Sijie managed to
merge these two narrative traditions?
12. How can Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress be read as a coming-of-age novel? Do the events
in the story change the narrator and Luo? Have they lost their
innocence by the end of the book?
13. What is the irony of Luo and the narrator discovering
western literature only when they are sent away to have decadent
western ideas reeducated out of them?
14. Throughout the novel, the repression of Western literature,
and by extension Western cultural values, is presented as a
terrible deprivation. And yet, at the end, when the Little
Seamstress sets off for the city, she tells Luo that "she had
learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure
beyond price" [p. 184]. How does this ending complicate the novel's
apparent endorsement of cosmopolitan Western culture and literature
over rural Chinese culture? How is the Little Seamstress planning
to use her beauty?