Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (China) - Potential Spoilers

There's been some interest in reading and discussing Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie in upcoming winter months, so here's a thread to keep it all together!

Great, thanks for putting this up. I might just order a copy, it sounds interesting!

p.s. 'upcoming summer months' here in Australia (which means I try to read while watching the cricket on TV ;) ...

I read this back in August and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was enchanting, engaging and really well played out. I loved the idea of using occidental literature to educate the seamstress especially in such a treacherous time as the Cultural Revolution.

I have discussed this book in another community (off LT) and two of my replies were:
"Yes, the prose was marvelous! Such simplicity in its depth if that makes sense to you. :) And the story is so charming. I love thinking about how what I read affects me and those around me as well. Really delightful!"

"(...) there is certainly something mystical. I really loved the scenes with the crane on the other side of the treacherous passage.

The change in point of view also was quite surprising to me when Dai Sijie was suddenly narrating through the other character's eyes. Really enchanting!"

I can't wait till the rest of you read the book so that I can discuss it in more detail again. :)

lilisin, I agree with what you said about the simplicity and the depth. On a superficial level, it is a very charming story but when you really think about it, the characters are driven to brutality by their desperation. Four Eyes, the boys' friend, sends them on a fool's errand to the Old Miller on the mountain, luring them on with the promise of books he doesn't plan to give. His behavior seems inexcusable, but his selfishness is motivated by a deep desire to return home and to protect his parents from the consequences if the forbidden books are traced back to them. Later the "boys" -- the narrator and his best friend Luo -- torture the village headman during a dental procedure. The narrator feels the sadism welling up in him "like a volcano," a primal and uncontrollable expression of nature.

The narrator and Luo are undeniably close friends, yet left to his own devices, the narrator immediately attempts to steal his best friend's girl. The characters live in a world so devoid of comfort that everything of beauty is a resource to be fought for, whether it's a woman or a book. Selflessness is rare, maybe even non-existent, in this book. The headman spares Luo and the narrator only because he needs help with his teeth; the narrator washes the Seamstress's clothes and even arranges her abortion only because he hopes for her gratitude.

In spite of all the selfishness and brutality, my students and I didn't find it in our hearts to hate any of the characters. Each of them are misguided, but their actions seem motivated by the deprivation, both material and emotional, that they experience on Phoenix Mountain.

I read this several years ago now and can't be sure if I'd be commenting on the text or movie, which I bought and watched more recently (the author produced the movie). So the details somewhat escape me but I thought it was a marvelous book about the power of literature.

Was Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress going to be our December read? I finally have a copy, and will start reading within the next 24 hours.

Bob Campbell

Just wondering . . . for those who are reading the world, are you counting this book as France or China? (Personally I'd count it toward China, but I'm not sure what purists would do).

I go by the author's origins when tagging them by country so Dai Sijie would be China for me.

I put it down for China too. I'm sure Dai Sijie would be writing there if the government would allow him to and anyway, this book doesn't tell you much about France.

Just finished this book - it's a great, quick and easy read, and I think a great choice for December.

Question for those who have read it: were the three chapters about the swimming incident a bit discordant to you (from the perspective of the Miller, Luo and the Little Seamstress)?

Also, Cestovatela, I'm not sure our narrator was immediately trying to "steal the girl", though I do think he had mixed feelings - neither he nor the Seamstress succomb to the temptation. But I think there is a theme running through here of the individual protectiveness bred by the repression. Is that selfishness? I think we're helped by seeing where that protectiveness comes from, and what breeds it. Our characters have to survive and deal with it, and, other than 4 eyes, all seem to become so self-protective a bit reluctantly.

Question for those who have read it: were the three chapters about the swimming incident a bit discordant to you (from the perspective of the Miller, Luo and the Little Seamstress)?
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I suppose one could call them "discordant." I certainly see what you mean. But I think it worked. I really liked to see the story from various points of view . . . it reminded me that there was more than one way to look at the story.

Another question has come to mind on this book: is there actually a hint in here that the cultural revolution had a silver lining?

While there is plenty of criticism of the cultural revolution in the book, even a fair bit of dark humor lampooning some of its excesses, at the end of the day our narrator and Luo do an awful lot of growing up on Phoenix Mountain and, certainly, the Seamstress and many people on the Mountain benefit from their presence.

The critical scene at the end where Luo burns his own books strikes me as turning the Cultural Revolution's excesses into more human and understandable foibles - after all, one of our heros finds himself embracing their book burning. I have to say the book burning scene was absolutely tremendous for its metaphorical complexity. I'll be pulling that one apart for a long time.

#10 - I think the scenes from alternate points of view are intended to be discordant. That moment is so important that it bears watching from 3 different perspectives. I think the seamstress's dive is really the moment that she transforms into the woman who's going to take off to the city and leave everyone behind her.

#12 - I'm not sure if I would say the Cultural Revolution had a silver lining. The boys grew up, but I don't think exile to a remote mountain village was necessary for that to happen. I'm not sure that I could really say the boys really learned something up there, except perhaps that you cannot re-educate people. I think the irony is the education worked the other way around. Luo and the narrator were meant to learn about village life, but in the end, they imported a lot of the city. From the perspective of Chairman Mao, they definitely corrupted the seamstress.

Interestingly, a lot of my students thought that Luo died on the mountain. Both Ma (the narrator) and the Seamstress slip in little details that show they're looking back on a distant past. Luo never does. His last story is watching the seamstress dive and his language sounds more like he recounted the story to the narrator not long after it happened. My kids thought that he either committed suicide after the seamstress left, fell down the mountain while he was drunk or maybe had an accident in the mine. I wondered whether the miller betrayed him. The number of times the miller says he didn't denounce anyone made me kind of suspicious...

So, I feel a little bit sheepish, but I found this really frustrating. I've not read The Count of Monte Cristo or Madame Bovary or Old Goirot or (as far as I can tell) any of the other books referred to, and I really hate spoilers (this is someone who just blubbed excessively at the end of Gone with the Wind because she had *no clue* how it was going to end). This possibly makes me childish, but I just didn't want to read all the bits with plot from other books, and I felt that the novel didn't really work without them.

I'm not sure that I can respect a novel which relies so heavily (and explicitly) on other literature for its meaning and depth. It's conceivable that I'm being uncharitable, especially given it's a book about the power of said literature.

Perhaps, also, I will go away and ponder and feel more charitable in the morning. Nonetheless, I'd be interested to know what people think about the referencing stuff. Did anyone else notice the fact that it was almost all French literature? I think as someone firmly brought up in the British Lit tradition I found that quite odd and just shows how many literary prejudices I've managed to pick up along the way...

Well, we're starting to get some discussion going!

I actually like all the references to other literature - I note that the references are really right out there, not thinly veiled allusions, and I'm not sure they really constitute "spoilers". I have read some but by no means all of the stuff referenced, and it strikes me that the individual works aren't as important as the idea of the works more broadly. While there's a bit of cleverness in using the Count of Monte Christo, for example, in a story about being exiled to a distant mountain, I don't think the references to individual works go much deeper than cleverness. I don't think the story leans on the reader actually knowing the books being referenced. For me, they didn't affect the flow of the story line.

As you mention it, it is a pretty francophile list -do I remember some Russian literature, as well, or am I imagining that? But Dai Saiji writes in French, and gets translated into English, so for his primary audience these authors would have been more common reading than, say, Dickens or Melville.

And, CV, I think you've found my silver lining, just aren't quite ready to call it that. The idea that Luo might have died on the Mountain is interesting - could it just be that he and Ma parted ways, while Ma met up later with the Seamstress? Are those three chapters outside the narrator's voice, or are they the stories of each of the three as told to and related by the narrator? I've been assumed the first - that they interrupted the narration - but I may have to look at them again.

The miller and the seamstress are definitely speaking to an audience because they refer to a "you." The Miller is absolutely speaking to the narrator because he refers to Luo as "your interpreter." Luo, however, makes no reference to the person he's speaking to and unlike the narrator and the seamstress, he makes no reference to the passage of time. I imagined that the narrator was relaying a story Luo told him but chose to tell this critical story from the first person point of view, perhaps because he is telling it exactly as Luo described it.

My own personal interpretation, which can't really be proven by the text, is that Luo is dead and Ma is writing this story as a kind of memorial. Not the kind where you venerate the dead, but one where you try to honestly convey the whole complexity of their lives. At the same time, Ma wants to provide a kind of memorial to this time in his life, which I think was both a birth and a death for him.

I'm kind of curious why Ma never told us his name directly but spelled it out in Chinese characters later in the book.

Well, nearly five months after I initiated this thread, I have finally finished this book. I am terrible at group reads. Once I got down to it, it only took a few hours, but it took me forever to get into this book. I actually checked it out from the library twice, because I failed to get into the first time (even after renewing it the maximum number of times!).

I am still trying to figure out how I felt about this book. I guess that probably means I neither loved nor hated it. I didn't really get engrossed in it until Part Three, despite the fact that all the previous material was interesting and made me feel that I was learning quite a bit about Maoist China and the Cultural Revolution, something I have read nothing about.

The references to Western literature were somewhat troubling to me. Not in the sense that I felt that they were distracting or that they spoiled other books - I actually now feel, for the first time in my life, that I might want to read The Count of Monte Cristo. The joy that Ma and Luo felt when they read these books was energizing and deeply engaging and I definitely could relate to the feeling of discovering a new writer or genre or literary style for the first time.

I guess the thing that troubles me about the literary references is that both this book and Reading Lolita in Tehran seem to be books in which "non-Western" oppressed peoples living under totalitarian regimes find "liberation" through the Western literary tradition & that this narrative is hugely appealing to Western audiences, as evidenced by how well these books have sold. Now while I am not suggesting that either of these stories could not possibly be true (i.e., because Western literature is oppressive or "bad" or whatever, or because "they" are so different from "us" that they cannot possibly find meaning in "our" literary tradition - please note, just examples, not my actual beliefs) or that there is anything wrong with finding inspiration in a non-indigenous literary tradition, I find it sort of curious to imagine how well these books might have done if they were instead about Iranian women finding inspiration in ancient Persian poetry or Chinese men discovering the joys of The Analects of Confucius. I think stories about oppressed non-Western people finding liberation through Western literature appeal to Western audiences because they simultaneously convey the feel-good multi-cultural message that "they're really just like us!" while still upholding the superiority of Western cultural products.

Just an idea that struck me. I'm still kicking it around in my head & even I'm not sure if I'm willing to go along with the ideas I've outlined above. I'm just trying to think about how books by authors get marketed & why certain books become successful in the US and other Western countries. I am NOT AT ALL trying to cast aspersions on the authors themselves or suggest that their memoirs/novels are inauthentic or somehow "crafted" for mass consumption.

Also - and not to continue to pick apart this book in such a way that gives the impression that I hated it, because I really didn't!

Was anyone else a bit disturbed by the fact that the only thing the Little Seamstress seemed to have learned from her exposure to Western literature was profoundly negative? That woman are judged by their physical appearance and that this was how she would make her way in the world? Or did I totally mis-interpret that ending?

It was my impression that it was not the author's position that women are judged so, but that the seamstress was also a survivor and that she would use whatever she had to change her life. Very sad that it was her appearance. She was also a naive, idealistic youth at the beginning of the same developmental journey as the young men, just not as far along.

For me, it's not about finding liberation through Western literature so much as enjoying a forbidden fruit. Certainly controversial Chinese or Iranian authors were banned during each country's cultural revolutions, but decadent foreign literature was singled out for special attention. In the case of Reading Lolita in Tehran, the author had previously been passionate about Western literature and integrated it into her life, so I'm not sure that she exactly became liberated through it. However, it's definitely true that a book about reading Iranian classics during the revolution would not appeal to American audiences because we'd have little familiarity with the literature.

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, I thought French literature served two specific purposes. First, it highlighted the irony of the Cultural Revolution. The boys' exile to the mountain was part of a specific plan to cleanse city youths of dangerous foreign and non-Communist influences; the fact that they should find those exact things during their banishment demonstrates how foolish and ineffective it is to try to control something as large as a human being's life experience. At the same time, I thought it highlighted something universal in our love of art, whether it's books, music or cinema. What I took away from the book is the idea that many kinds of art transcend cultural boundaries, and I'm not sure that the point would have been so strong if the boys had discovered forbidden Chinese literature. However, the book is not without a nod to the artistic traditions of its own countries. The movies the boys watch are sanctioned official films from non-Western cultures. While they don't have the same resonance for the main characters, they still offer escape in the form of a story.

I don't think it is unusual in any culture to find some liberation from the strictures of our by looking to another culture. Certainly, Western orientalism is a history of such readings. I do think he finds much Irony, though, in the Seamstress' inspiration, and fannyprice is right that there are some very negative influences of Western literature shown. Did the cultural police have a point?

The issue isn't overplayed, but there is a tragi-comic element here, and the book should leave us torn. Of course, if the point were overplayed, the book wouldn't have sold in the West. Are we missing some good books that really tackle these issues, and aren't afraid to embrace some of the cultural revolution's xenophobia?