2017 Reading Challenge - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Book 8 (April, China)

 

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie (read by B.D. Wong)

Reason for Reading: I picked this one for much the same reason as Wild Swans. It's a semi-autobiographical novella, rather than an actual biography, and also short, which is a mercy since I'm still on April's books at the moment. In some ways it's a bit of a cheat, as I've already seen the author's later film adaptation of the story.

If I have a regret about choosing Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, it's that it is so similar in setting to Wild Swans, or at least to the section about Jung Chang's re-education. Following the experience of two boys sent into the mountains of Sichuan from Chengdu, the tales of carrying wicker baskets of shit up treacherous mountain paths were very familiar. Where they diverge, however, is in the characters and the focus. Jung Chang was giving a factual account, as best she could, while Dai Sijie is writing a story of doomed romance and the loss of innocence.

The unnamed narrator and his friend Luo are sent to the mountains to learn from the peasants. Luo is quickly established as a silver-tongued devil when he convinces the village headman to let his friend keep his violin - a 'bourgeois toy' - in order to play the Mozart sonata 'Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao'(1). The children of disgraced medical 'experts', they fall in with a writers' son named Four-Eyes(2), whom they realise has somehow managed to smuggle a suitcase full of books up the mountain. When his mother gets him a job in the city(3), they steal the case and its wealth of translated French classics, reading them to the Little Seamstress, a beautiful young woman of whom they are both enamoured. It is Luo's affections that are reciprocated, but ultimately his desire to 'civilise' the mountain girl backfire, and she leaves her village to start a new life in the city.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a short novel, in which nothing much happens. There is only one point where the boys almost fall foul of the Cultural Revolution, and a number of instances which in a more melodramatic work would lead to danger or conflict are gently subverted, as when the narrator and Luo inscribe and sign favourite books as gifts to one another without this ever being used as evidence against them. BD Wong reads with a perfect intonation, shifting from the strident tones of the headman to the warm, plausible voice of Luo.

I'm not sorry to have chosen this novel, but it does fail in expanding my horizons beyond anything in Wild Swans.

(1) Sadly, as the book ends more abruptly than the film, we don't get the delightful scene where Ma (as the narrator character is named) meets the headman after the revolution and learns that he knew exactly what they were up to; he just liked the music.

(2) Luo is practically the only character with a real name.

(3) It is interesting that the semi-antagonist Four-Eyes is the character most like Jung Chang's description of herself.