Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Summary

Re-education Rewinds Thought In Dai Sijie’s novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, re-education remains a prominent theme throughout the course of the story. Children from the city are sent to nearby villages to live life like the common people reverting back to the ways of early civilizations. Very rarely are these kids ever able to return home; if they are lucky and not enemies of the state, only then do they have a slight chance. This whole concept represents the sense of communism present in China at the time. Children are forced into performing civil labor away from their homes and families. The narrator, Luo and Four Eyes are all placed into this situation without personally having done anything wrong – this represents their innocence in the whole situation. Despite the three kids being without fault, the re-education still manages to change them from their previous ways of thought as was intended by Mao Zedong. In this rural part of China, the norm is comparatively backward and absurd
Luo, along with the narrator, always regretted the ban of books in his lifetime. “We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.” (51) The lack of something inevitably causes people to want it more which is what happened initially in the case of Luo. Luo used Four-Eyes’ borrowed books in order to develop a closer relationship with the Little Seamstress as he had full intentions to ‘civilize’ her. However the books became closer to the Little Seamstress than Luo himself; they got the better of him and eventually he ended up burning the books. Education changes people as it did the Little Seamstress and even after the Little Seamstress leaves, the idea of books and the power they hold remains. No longer did Luo value the power of books and literature as much as he initially