Balzac And The Seamstress
Balzac and the Seamstress
"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie is one of those special books, moving and delicately twisted and full of insights about life under communism. It gives us a glimpse into a frighteningly oppressive world where learning and reading are political crimes punishable by death. The book is a fictionalized account of the author's own experience of surviving Chinese communism and in particular Mao's Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao's grand experiment to reshape the very core of the consciousness of the Chinese people. Between 1966 and 1976, thousands of forbidden books were burned and millions of people were sent to remote villages to be re-educated. The re-education aimed to rid them of "intellectualism."
In early 1971 the 17-year old narrator of the book and his best …show more content…
Forbidden books! If caught in possession of even one of these books, they stand to loose their lives. They seduce the Little Chinese Seamstress by narrating to her the stories in these books. Their re-education takes an entirely different turn from its intent. Instead of being rid of their "intellectual bourgeois thinking," the two boys and the Little Chinese Seamstress give in to the world of Western thought and ideas, emotions and relationships. It is these books that alter their lives forever
The Little Chinese Seamstress experiences the most change in this novel. When first meeting the boy's the seamstress was coy and lacked city intellect. As the two boy's worked with the seamstress they taught her how to read and told her story's from different lands. The seamstress increasing attraction to city way's was apparent as she started changing thru ought the novel. Her loss of innocents was most noticeable as she fell in love with Luo and eventually made love with him, a crime because she neither was nether old enough nor married to Luo
"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie is one of those special books, moving and delicately twisted and full of insights about life under communism. It gives us a glimpse into a frighteningly oppressive world where learning and reading are political crimes punishable by death. The book is a fictionalized account of the author's own experience of surviving Chinese communism and in particular Mao's Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao's grand experiment to reshape the very core of the consciousness of the Chinese people. Between 1966 and 1976, thousands of forbidden books were burned and millions of people were sent to remote villages to be re-educated. The re-education aimed to rid them of "intellectualism."
In early 1971 the 17-year old narrator of the book and his best …show more content…
Forbidden books! If caught in possession of even one of these books, they stand to loose their lives. They seduce the Little Chinese Seamstress by narrating to her the stories in these books. Their re-education takes an entirely different turn from its intent. Instead of being rid of their "intellectual bourgeois thinking," the two boys and the Little Chinese Seamstress give in to the world of Western thought and ideas, emotions and relationships. It is these books that alter their lives forever
The Little Chinese Seamstress experiences the most change in this novel. When first meeting the boy's the seamstress was coy and lacked city intellect. As the two boy's worked with the seamstress they taught her how to read and told her story's from different lands. The seamstress increasing attraction to city way's was apparent as she started changing thru ought the novel. Her loss of innocents was most noticeable as she fell in love with Luo and eventually made love with him, a crime because she neither was nether old enough nor married to Luo