Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel (Paperback)

Being almost ignorant of the Chinese cultural re-education system, this book was educational historically as well. I had known of it in theory, but not details such as the banning of all books other than those written by Mao, or the process behind re-education. I do want to learn more about this chapter in history, of which the world is still feeling the repercussions.

The book itself is gentle, with moving imagery and a quiet sense of humor. The characters in it do not rage against the political machine, but instead make do with what life has forced upon them. There is love, of course, because humans will love in the most desperate of circumstances. To highlight the playfulness of the book, my favorite scene is when the tailor, influenced by the hearing of Count of Monte Cristo, begins to dress the village in fanciful pirate clothes and nautical emblems.

Charming all the way through, and small enough to be a quick read.

One of the editorial reviews labels this a "moving, often wrenching novel"; that it is neither is what makes it so appealing. Dai Sijie's lovely novel is a departure from most the "scar literature" about the Cultural Revolution in so many refreshing ways. The genre is saturated by epic-length wallow fests, equal parts suffering, self-importance and appeal-to-Western-readers exotica. "Balzac" is simple, unpretentious, strait-forward and humorous. The tragic overtones of the time are mentioned passingly and straightforwardly, as through the eyes of a youth more concerned with his own affairs than of the nation convulsing around him. Yet its tragedy is so much more moving with such a sparing brush than those that linger morbidly to flesh out all the gory details.

The story is told through the eyes of a sent-down youth and his bosom buddy Luo. They are typical teenagers, at once cocky and nervous, at first thrown in over their heads in the small village they are assigned to, but soon figuring things out well enough to manipulate the system, and usually get away with it. Much humor is made through the village headman's infatuation with Luo's alarm clock, the first such thing to ever be seen in the town, and how they use the villages blind trust in its accuracy to steal extra hours of morning sleep.

The central characters are not paragons of virtue, and often downright unsympathetic, which makes the plot the more engaging and realistic. With teenage boy duplicity, they both vie to seduce the prettiest girl in the village, the seamstress of the title. Luo's talent for storytelling had won them the task of going to town to see movies and then come back and reenact them for the rest of the village, and first courts the seamstress with his movie tales.

After a friend of theirs, another sent-down youth and the child of writers, grudgingly loans them a Balzac book, Luo discovers that French romanticism gets him further with the girl than Korean Communist propaganda. After much plotting, they steal their friend's secret suitcase of banned Western novels, leading to the book's central conflict: Luo's forbidden affair with the seamstress, and the trio's forbidden love affair with literature.

In the average Cultural Revolution tale, these love affairs would end disastrously. Perhaps playfully alluding to the cliches of the genre, Dai foreshadows such a romantically tragic ending. What happens instead hilariously cements the book as a solidly realistic and cynical portrait of China and of human nature.

It's interesting to note the disparity between the emigrant Chinese writers who went to France and who went to Anglophone countries. While most of the latter, apart from a few notable exceptions, are horrendous writers, those who migrated to France, such as Gao Xingjian and Dai, have honed an elegant literary fusion. This harks back to the 1920s and '30s, when most of the best Chinese writers and artists studied in France. I don't know much about France, but it always does good things to the Chinese.

"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" is also a physical pleasure to read, with its flowing old typeface, small size and the elegant cover that lured me in despite my dislike of its genre.

In absolute terms, "Balzac" only deserves four stars, but compared to the other books in its genre, which get so many undeserved raves from naive readers who wouldn't know China from Cochinchina, it is definitely a gem.