Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie

Stumbling around the internet for an appropriate pic to accompany my meanderings on this slim novel, I found this. Good lord, I hope that wasn't actually intended as his publicity photo! Seriously, I totally cracked up when I found this. (Oh, that's Balzac by the way)

Ok, seriously now. To your left you see the man whose words would inspire two youths undergoing their "re-education" during the infamous Chinese Cultural Revolution to embark on a secret love of literature and ideas that were being denied them by Chairman Mao. The narrator patiently explains for we less-than-informed that in 1968 Mao closed all of the universities and sent the "young intellectuals" to the countryside to be educated by the peasants. Let's hear it for communism! The idea was to teach the youth what really mattered, "basics of industry and agriculture." If that wasn't bad enough for these two boys, their parents had been classified as enemies of the people mostly because they were doctors of some prominence. This fact gave them a 3 in 1000 chance of ever being released to return home.

Things, however, started looking up when two things happened. First, they met the little Chinese seamstress who became the object of their affection. And second, they run across another boy they know working in another village who has a mysterious leather suitcase under his bed that weighs too much for it's size. What could account for the heft of that suitcase? Well, since his mother is a famous poet, the boys deduce that it must be books . . . which are strictly forbidden. The rest of the story winds around how these two events alter the boys lives.

I won't put this book in the great category, but it was good . . . partly because of its brevity. Here's why it is good. I liked that it framed the Chinese Cultural Revolution for me in a specific anecdotal way by showing it through the eyes of two boys who went from an almost normal life to an isolated life of back-breaking work in the mountains amongst strangers. It also, in a very simple unadorned way, showed the power of story telling and the written word. We DO extend our experience through books. They give us a window into places, people, and times that we would otherwise not be capable of knowing. So, in a sense Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was my window into the Cultural Revolution just as Balzac's works himself were windows into French Realism to the two boys. It told the story of something other. If you take this for what it is, a simple well told story with a moral, you should enjoy it.