Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
This novel takes place in 1971 during China’s Cultural Revolution in a poor village on a high mountain known as Phoenix of the Sky. Two teenaged boys, Luo, and the unnamed narrator, have been sent here for re-education for the crime of their parent’s modest success. They are to be stripped of their intellectual ways with hard country work including carrying baskets of human waste up the mountain and working in the coal mine. The boys meet a beautiful, yet simple (in their opinion) mountain girl, referred to as only the Little Seamstress. With some western novels, including Ursule Mirouët by Honoré de Balzac, stolen from another re-educated boy in a nearby village, they set about transforming the Little Seamstress. However, the result of their education is not what they expected.
This is a short easy to read book that is packed full of history and culture of that time. The writing is light hearted and comic, despite the hardships described. The novel is semi-autobiographical. The author spent several years in the mountains being re-educated. It’s an interesting glimpse into a period of China’s history that been kept hush-hush to the outside world. Being relatively short for a novel, book club members said it was like reading a selection plucked from the middle of a much longer novel. The novel is open ended and leaves you wondering what happened to everyone in the end!
Our book club meets next on June 18 at 7:00pm to discuss Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline. This is our last meeting before the summer hiatus.
