43. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (Fiction) 184 pp.
World Lit Challenge: China
Two teenage boys from the city, their parents branded “enemies of the people”, are sent to a remote mountaintop village for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. The book is semi-autobiographical; Dai Sijie was himself sent to the countryside for re-education in 1971, remaining there for three years. He has an interestingly direct narrative voice, which isn’t all that unusual in a first-person narrative, but combined with the quality of his writing, it hooked me right away.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress paints a masterful portrait of the cruelty of Mao’s re-education program and the anti-intellectual ideals that fuelled it, but I found that it also gave me a better idea of where the PRC was coming from. The narrator and his friend are separated from their families, not knowing when, or even if, they will ever be reunited, but their lives in the village are scarcely harsher than those of the peasants who live there. Knowing the incredible poverty that the average Chinese person endured at the time, and the relatively luxurious lives led by intellectuals and “enemies of the people”, the PRC’s attitude becomes much less surprising.
This book reminds me of Reading Lolita in Tehran, in that they both explore the use of books as keys to new worlds when real life becomes unbearable. I suppose that’s what makes this book so popular; ultimately, every reader can identify with the need to escape through reading.
Books read: 43/100 (43%)
Pages read: 12,034/25,000 (48%)
Days passed: 133/365 (36%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Dai Sijie, World Lit Challenge
