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komposxoini 's review for:
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie
“The all seeing eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat […] had cast its gigantic, fine-meshed net over the whole of China.”
Up on the Phoenix of the Sky, a mountain towering over the Chinese-Tibetan border, two boys are living in exile. They’re our unnamed narrator (who I’ll be conventionally calling Dai, after the author) and his best friend, Luo. They’re sons of bourgeoise parents sent away to the country as part of Mao’s “Down to the Countryside” reeducation movement. The ultimate goal of this relocation, which affected millions of Chinese youth, was to rid them of anti-communist sentiment and improve relations between the classes. The boys and the villagers who receive them are culture-shocked in different ways. For example, Dai has brought his violin with him, which fascinates the locals, who treat it with curiosity as well as suspicion.
During their stay, between back-breaking shifts on the mountain, Dai convinces one of the residents that Mozart has written a piece called “Thinking of Mao,” and Luo performs a tooth extraction on their headman using a sewing needle, earning himself some needed respite from work. An acquaintance of theirs, Four-Eyes, another reeducated boy, has brought with him a suitcase full of forbidden Western books, including those of the French realist-naturalist Balzac. The books come into Dai and Luo’s possession, changing their lives.
Eventually, they meet the titular Seamstress, a girl around their age, and she emerges as one of the most interesting parts of the book. Though initially objectified by Dai—who doesn’t even dignify her with a name—and Luo—who aspires to refine her by reading to her from the forbidden books—she’d always been her own character, and only becomes more spherical as the story progresses. The attempts of men trying to sculpt her into something different—treating her as an experiment or a block of clay to be metamorphized— reminded me of Pygmalion and Galatea’s myth. However, as the story unfolds, I discovered more similarities to Shaw’s adaptation (Pygmalion, 1913) than to the myth itself: the Seamstress gets the last word. She is a descendant of Shaw’s Eliza, or even Obayashi’s Miyoko, from the movie His Motorbike, Her Island (1986): all women who are not satisfied to remain mere animated “sculptures.” In the end, Eliza scoffs at her “benefactors,” Miyoko steals Koh’s motorbike, and the Seamstress runs off, away from Phoenix Mountain and into the bustling city.
Although I did not completely adore this book—most characters were unlikable and the style unremarkable; maybe I just don’t like realism—this is a narrative with real heart, and I learned a lot about China by immersing myself in its intricately textured world.