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In “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”, it is the hunger for the banned foreign book titles in the 70’s China that drives the plot forward.  Similarly, in “Once on a Moonless Night”, it is the hunger for the ”˜mutilated relic’ – a missing Buddhist sutra – that sets the story on fire.  In fact, the fire is so great that it breathes life to factual and fictitious characters, civilizations, and traditions; from ancient China to modern Beijing, from France to Africa and Southeast Asia.  So much details and emotions are poured into the historical figures and places, as well as traditional workmanships and crafting techniques, one has to marvel at the depth of research the author has performed.  Unlike “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”, this book requires patience to read.  The construct of the sentences appears to be more complex (unsure if it is because of the different translators involved).  The history behind the story is vast.  Although I am from a Chinese background and that most of the translated terms, history, and tradition I am familiar with, there are still lots of details I am not . Fortunately, most of the so-called diversions from the main plot are relevant to how the story develops.  That kept me engaged even some of the materials require a higher amount of concentration to grind through.

The story begins with a piece of silk scroll Puyi has torn into pieces by his teeth – hence the ”˜mutilated relic’ – and threw out of a Japanese warplane during his final days as the Last Emperor.  That silk scroll turns out to contain a Buddhist sutra written in a dead ancient language that Emperor Huizong from the Song dynasty tried to decipher and could not, that Puyi tried to decipher and could not.  The tale then spins all the way to a vanished civilization called Tumchooq (it is also a language Buddha preached in, the name of one of the main characters, and more), through the Forbidden City, the Manchuria race, different languages and geographic locations, narrated by multiple characters.  It is remarkable to see how the sutra travels through time and space, linking historical and fictitious characters, vanished and present time civilizations as the search continues for the missing sutra.  And when the final piece of puzzle is solved, after numerous twists in plot (too many to mention), the answer seems so humorously simple.  Yet thinking of all the effort and sacrifice people made in order to find the truth, it is mind blowing.

It is quite impossible to quote a particular paragraph to illustrate Dai Sijie’s writing style, because the entire book is treated with the same poetic touch.  If I may, the following excerpt touches my heart the most.  The narrator, a French girl who studied in China, is in search of her lover – a half French half Chinese – who is in turn searching for the missing sutra.  It is this sense of melancholy that touches my heart.

The sun was only just up, the meticulously swept path with not a single fallen leaf on it glittered beneath my bare feet, and each of my footsteps, I was aware, was an act of meditation.  With its sand and its occasional stones positioned here and there, as if among the extinguished, collected, cooled ashes of our passions, without the least spark of an ember to reignite them, that little path was like the life of whoever walked along it.  Perhaps its maker wanted it to remind us that our footprints, like the happy days of our lives, disappear with the first gust of wind, without leaving any trace at all.

It comes with a pleasant surprise that one of the characters in this book – Ma – is indeed the narrator of “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”.  And Ma plays an important – albeit minor – role in this book.  I suspect that a Buddhist may get more from this book than I do.  But I am happy that my horizon has been expanded and am certainly looking forward to read his second book if I manage to get hold of it in our library.

“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.