Featured Reading Guide
Dai Sijie
In 1971 Mao’s campaign against the intellectuals is at its height. Our narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of being the sons of doctors, have been sent to a remote mountain village to be ‘reeducated’. The kind of education that takes place among the peasants of Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous, foggy paths, but the two seventeen-year-olds have a violin and their sense of humour to keep them going. Further distraction is provided by the attractive daughter of the local tailor, possessor of a particularly fine pair…
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
FacebookAbout Dai Sijie
Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was himself ‘re-educated’ between 1971 and 1974, and left China in 1984 for France, where he has lived and worked ever since. This, his first novel, was an overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000, became an immediate bestseller and won five prizes. Rights to the novel have been sold in twenty-five countries and it is soon to be made into a film.
topAbout the Book
In 1971 Mao’s campaign against the intellectuals is at its height. Our narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of being the sons of doctors, have been sent to a remote mountain village to be ‘reeducated’. The kind of education that takes place among the peasants of Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement up and down precipitous, foggy paths, but the two seventeen-year-olds have a violin and their sense of humour to keep them going. Further distraction is provided by the attractive daughter of the local tailor, possessor of a particularly fine pair of feet. Their true re-education starts, however, when they discover a comrade’s hidden stash of classics of great nineteenth-century Western literature – Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy and others, in Chinese translation. They need all their ingenuity to get their hands on the forbidden books, but when they do their lives are turned upside down. And not only their lives: after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, the Little Seamstress will never be the same again. Without betraying the truth of what happened, Dai Sijie transforms the bleak events of China’s Cultural Revolution into an enchanting and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit and the magical power of great storytelling.
topDai Sijie interview/review
“It’s nothing but a love story… There was a real love story,” Dai said of the autobiographical aspects of the story, “but not as romantic. The stealing books part is true and the experience of reading stories to farmers is also true.”
From the 1960s to 1970s, during Dai’s teenage days, “all the books were banned, even science books. … So at that time almost everybody stole books and hid them,” he said.
“I wanted to show how much impact culture could have on an isolated mountain village, and especially for [the seamstress]. It was a revelation of freedom, of self-consciousness. The little seamstress had seen more in Balzac … learned that men could flirt with women, that it is natural. … This is what she had never learned during her days of being indoctrinated … that life could be filled with many nice things,” he said.
For Dai, this lack of freedom and individualism is the essence of his generation.
As to how a young woman could suddenly be changed through foreign literature — the part of the story most criticized by Chinese authorities and the main reason the story was not released in China — Dai has an apolitical answer. “The influence of literature is universal. [The story] was not only an ode to the literature we had read, but also simply to show that in a difficult situation, we, at that young age, had a yearning to learn, to see new things and nice things.”
Taken from the Taipei Times, 20th May, 2002 (taipeitimes.com)
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Is the novel intended for a Western or a Chinese audience? What evidence is there to suggest it might be aimed specifically at one, rather than the other?
- What do you think the author feels about the consequences of banning books and about his own experiences of ‘re-education’?
- Why does Luo punch the narrator for crying at the Dentist’s public humiliation?
- Is the Little Seamstress a convincing character? What do you think of Luo’s intention to ‘civilise’ her?
- The scene in which the Seamstress dives for Luo’s keys is told from three different characters’ points of view. Why does Sijie interrupt the narrator to do this?
- In which ways do the forbidden books influence the different characters’ actions?
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has gained universal appeal despite it being a French-Chinese book in translation. Discuss the power of literature and story-telling to change lives in reference to the success of the book and the story itself.
Other Books by Dai Sijie
Mr Muo’s Travelling Couch
Dai Sijie’s bestselling and much loved first novel, Balzac and the Little …
Once on a Moonless Night
A young French woman in Peking in the late 1970s interprets between Chinese …
Suggested Further Reading
- Selected Short Stories ~ Honore de Balzac
- Wild Swans ~ Jung Chang
- Colours of the Mountain ~Da Chen
- Red Dust ~ Ma Jian
- The Good Women of China ~ XinRan
- Vermilion Gate ~ Aiping Mu
- The Girl Who Played Go ~ Shan Sa