Similarities Between Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

Literature has served as a bearer of knowledge and understanding throughout the path of history. Beginning with the Egyptians, paper was created as a means to record and preserve ideas. Beliefs of different cultures have been conserved and can be found intertwined with texts. As seen in Dai Sijie’s Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress, illustrations formed through readings can be instilled into the minds of people, especially docile youths. Once given a taste, knowledge is highly sought after as means of empowerment, thus marking the birth of the race for intelligence. Throughout each section of the novel, the struggle for knowledge and learning leads the main characters to gain a sense of their true identity. As the quest for
The boys soon meet Four-eyes, a friend they boys met in a neighboring village, who is filled with knowledge as his name suggests since, “Four-eyes” means you can see twice as much and therefore intake double the amount of knowledge. The boys discover their first real experience of “re-education” when they suspect that “Four-eyes had a secrete suitcase”(45) filled with books. The “tinge of danger”(46) associated with the “expect[ed] books”(49) compels the boys further to seek out the forbidden objects. The lust for information forces the boys to be unusually kind to Four-eyes when he breaks his glasses, thus rewarding them in their first book filled with western literature. Immediately, the boys are hooked with the emotion evoked while reading Balzac’s book. At this point, their hunger for more knowledge and emotion is motivation for them to seek out “uplifting” (77) and “authentic” (76) song lyrics showing “a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly” (77) as the boys, similarly to Four-eyes, took on a nearly impossible task in the attempt to gain more literature, thus displaying the power of literature to change someone. The boys have ignored their “re-education” and the words of Four-eye’s mother that “ignorance is in fashion”(86) as they defied the social norms of society in pursuit of
The boy’s obsession with reading leads them to steal Four-eye’s books for a chance to educate not only themselves, but for those around them to find “neither [their] life nor the world [they] lived in would ever look the same”(111) displaying that the novels brought changes to everyone. The narrator found through re-telling the stories he had read that he “should have been a writer”(125) which he may have never discovered if he were still in the city. Lou could have avoided “the depths of despair”(141) if the books had not provoked thoughts of home causing Lou to need rescuing by the Seamstress portraying his hopefulness to be short lived. Even towns people were affected as “details [the tailor] picked up from the French story started to have a discreet influence on the clothes he was making for the villagers” (127) showing villagers were indirectly influenced in this quest for knowledge. Lastly, the Little Chinese Seamstress seemed to gain the most from the books as she understood “a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price”(184) therefore setting herself off on an adventure of her own in being true to herself. The literature sought after by the boys changed the lives of themselves and those around them forever as they now held a new sense of their