“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” tells a story of two young men – in 1971 when Mao’s Cultural Revolution was at its peak – being sent to one of the villages in the mountain called Phoenix of the Sky for re-education.  The irony is, during Cultural Revolution, there was not much education per se, except books authorized by the communists.  This book is originally written in French, by Dai Sijie who was born in China in 1954 and has experienced 3 years of re-education and he is now living and working in France, since 1984.  The political backdrop used in “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” hence appears as vivid, and authentic.  I confess that I was too quick to criticize on Sijie’s treatment on the topic of premarital sex as being too inconsequential, too recreational.  Almost too Western and too modern to my liking, given the fact that almost every word he wrote takes me back to China in the 70’s.  But I was wrong.  I am delighted to be wrong.

The two boys – the narrator and Luo – as part of the re-education program are required to perform hard labor such as carrying buckets of excrement up and down the mountain paths, working inside a coal mine, and working in a field with the buffalos supervised by the headman.  The story told from the narrator’s perspective (and at times shift to other characters) is in contrary not gloomy at all.  Outside the inevitable routine, this pair always manages to find interesting things to do.  Soon, they have met the highly sought after and hence wealthy tailor who travels from village to village.  And here is the author’s playful observation of how women love clothes.

Watching them during fittings, Luo and I were amazed to see how agitated they were, how impatient, how physical their desire for new clothes was.  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.

The tailor has a beautiful daughter, who is nicknamed as “Little Seamstress”.  For Luo and Little Seamstress, there is romance.  As for Little Seamstress and the narrator, there is friendship and love – I think – at a platonic level.  The turning point of the story is Balzac.  That is when the narrator, Luo, and Little Seamstress get hold of a stack of foreign literature.

Balzac is one of the French writers whose books were banned during the Cultural Revolution in China.  The impact of these books to the trio is enormous.  Those books slowly transform them into individuals who want to take free and independent actions, actions that lead them to desire, passion, and love.  In contrast to the uniformity of the Chinese re-education (which I suppose is the whole point of such exercise), “Balzacian” re-education takes on an unexpected turn for each of the three characters.  For the narrator, it is heroism, helping people beyond normal duty and means.  For Luo, it is his desire to transform Little Seamstress from an unsophisticated mountain girl into a literate who reads and internalizes Balzac.  For Little Seamstress, an awakening of what she is truly worth.

During my reading, I was so absorbed into the characters and the story not wanting this 172-page novel to end.  I was expecting a political heavy novel but it is not.  Instead, it is engaging, humorous, and there are enough twists to make the plot unexpected.