topics: |  fiction | china

Book Review

An irresistible story of love in Mao's China, the same period addressed in Ha Jin's haunting "Waiting".

Here the two protagonist teenagers are exiled to a remote village for "re-education". On arrival the headman is about to confiscate all their bourgeois possessions, including a violin, but this is saved only after he plays on it a sonata by Mozart and his creative friend titles it as "Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao."

Denied the opportunities of a free education -- the only Western literature ever found in the stores were "The Collected works of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha" (p.47) -- they have nonetheless been raised with an yearning for knowledge by their doctor parents who have now been labelled enemies-of-the-state. Only three people out of a thousand ever return from this exile. Here they meet a hidden horde of books from the West, and these stories change their lives, and also that of a pretty village girl whom they befriend.

The books become a lifeline for their soul, but it also provides a source for stories that they tell the villagers - in particular, the headman is very interested in stories...

The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it.

But clearly, this is the talent that wins them many benefits, including the attention of the little seamstress.

Excerpts

Luo was the best friend I ever had... 

[Luo's father, a famous dentist who has attended to the teeth of both
Mao and his predecessor - is the frequent subject of meetings where he
is publicly ridiculed - after witnessing one such inquisition, as they
were returning home, ]
    I suddenly felt tears running down my cheeks, and I realised how
fond I was of the dentist.
    At that moment, without saying a word, Luo punched me." - p. 10

...my violin . . . it was the sole item that exuded an air of foreignness,
of civilisation, and therefore aroused suspicion . . . Things were not
looking good. 
     'A bourgeois toy,' says the headman. 4

[Ma plays a Mozart piece; Headman, who's suspicious of the violin,
wants to know what the piece is. ]
     ‘Mozart . . . ’ I muttered . . . 
     ‘Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao,’ Luo broke in. 
     The audacity!" 5
... the headman’s menacing look softened. He crinkled up his eyes in a
wide, beatific smile. 5 

[After being sent to the Phoenix of the Sky mountain] it wasn't really
a phoenix but a proud rooster with peacock-like feathers of shimmering
green with flashes of deep blue.  Under the somewhat dusty glass cover
of Luo's alarm clock it could be seen pecking an invisible floor with
its sharp ebony beak, while the second hand crept slowly round the
clock face.  Then it would raise its head, open its beak wide and
shake its plumage, visibly gratified, sated with the imaginary grains
of rice. . . .
   We were surprised to see how the alarm clock seized the imagination
of the peasants.  It became an object of veneration, almost.  Every
morning saw the same ritual: the village headman would pace to and
fro, smoking his bamboo pipe, which was as long as an old-fashioned
rifle, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the clock.  At nine
o'clock sharp he would give a long piercing whistle to summon the
villagers to work in the fields. 10
    'It's time! Do you hear?'  he would shout, dead on cue, at the
surrounding houses.  'Time to get off your backsides, you lazy louts,
you spawn of bullocks' balls!  What are you waiting for?'  - p. 14
[Eventually they would manipulate time by moving the hours back and
forth until they lost track of the real time.]

The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories.  A pleasing
talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it.
Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-And-One-Nights,
and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have
done away with the old storytellers -- more's the pity.  - 18

[when they meet the tailor's daughter "little seamstress"- Luo makes a bet
with her - she'll sew his trouser for free if her second toe is longer than
the rest.]
Her foot, more timid than she but no less sensual for that . . . A small foot,
tanned, translucent, veined with blue, with toenails that gleamed . . . their
second toes were longer than the others.
[It's also true for Luo... ] 25

When the light suddenly appeared, it hovered in the air like the eye of some
nightmarish animal whose body had been swallowed up by the darkness. It was
Luo . . . He was naked except for a harness with leather straps that cut deep into
his flesh. This horrible contraption enabled him to drag a huge basket laden
with chunks of anthracite behind him . . . 26

To tell the truth, we accepted this infernal ordeal, because we were
determined to stay in the race at all costs, even though our chances of
returning to the city were no more than the infinitesimal three in a
thousand. We were not to know that our stint in the coal mine would mark us
for the rest of our lives, physically and mentally. Even today the fearful
phrase ‘the little coal mine’ sends shivers down my spine . . . 

I’m going to die in this mine . . . cold sweat . . . infected . . . I
shared his terror of not leaving the place alive.. 28

"since your visit I’ve come across several people whose second toes are
longer than their big does, just like our own. I’m disappointed, but that’s
life." 32

[But the village headman is fond of stories and the newcomers
entertain him telling stories from films.  And then he sends them to a
film in Yong Jing so they can come back and enact the story. ]

That summer the headman sent us to town several times to watch films.
I was convinced that the real reason behind his liberal attitude was
the irresistible attraction of our alarm clock, with its proud
peacock-feathered rooster: our ex-opium grower turned Communist was
besotted with it.  The only way he could have it all to himself, even
for a short time, was to despatch us to Yong Jing.  During the four
days it took us to get there, see the film and return to the village,
he would be lord and master of the clock.  - 75

'Ba-er-zar-ke'.  Translated into Chinese, the name of the French
author comprised four ideograms.  The magic of translation!  The
ponderousness of the name were quite gone, now that the four
characters -- very elegant, each composed of just a few strokes --
banded together to create an unusual beauty, redolent with an exotic
fragrance as sensual as the perfume wreathing a wine stored for
centuries in a cellar.  - 52

I stayed in bed until nightfall, without food, completely wrapped up in the
French story of love and miracles. Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen,
still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but
revolutionary blather about patriotism, communism, ideology and propaganda
all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion,
impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been
hidden from view. 53

Ursule’s story rang as true as if it had been about my neighbours. 53

Suddenly I felt a stab of jealousy, a bitter wrenching emotion I had never
felt before." 54

By the end of the day I was feeling quite at home in Nemours,
imagining myself posted by the smoking hearth of her parlour - 53

[Bawdy folk-verse sung by old drunk miller.]
	Tell me:
	An old louse,
	What does it fear?
	It fears boiling water,
	Boiling bubbling water.
	And the young nun,
	Tell me,
	What does she fear?
	She fears the old monk
	No more and no less
	Just the old monk.  - 69

[Four-Eyes converts this to:]
	Tell me:
	Little bourgeois lice
	What do they fear?
	They fear the boiling wave of the proletariat. - 73

[Four-Eyes' submission is accepted by a literary journal and his mother
comes to take him back to the city.  She bribes the headman into
having a farewell banquet, at which a buffalo is to be slaughtered.
Since working animals cannot be killed, a buffalo is pushed off a
mountain path and lies in pain for hours at the foot of the hill while
permission is obtained to kill it.]  Four-Eyes was collecting the
blood pouring from the gash in a big upturned hat woven of bamboo
leaves.  . . .  It's a remedy against cowardice.  To gain courage, you
must swallow it when it's still lukewarm and frothy. - p.87

(See also reference to killing animals in Gordon Liddy's Will. )

We were beside ourselves. My head reeled, as if I’d had too much to
drink. I took the novels out of the suitcase one by one, opened them,
studied the portraits of the authors, and passed them to Luo. Brushing them
with the tips of my fingers made me feel as if my pale hands were in touch
with human lives. 93

we were seduced, overwhelmed, spellbound by the mystery of the outside
world, especially the world of women, love and sex as revealed to us by these
Western writers day after day, page after page, book after book. 101

[on reading western novels stolen from four-eye]
once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would
ever look the same. (103)

the transformation of our house into a tailor's workshop meant that we
bore witness to scenes of feminine intimacy such as we had never seen
before.  It was an on-going festival of almost anarchic proportions,
with girls and women of all ages, plain ones and pretty ones, well off
and poor, vying with each other over the fabrics, the lace trimmings,
ribbons, buttons, even the sewing thread of their dream wardrobes.

Watching them during fittings, Luo and I were amazed to see how
agitated they were, how impatient, how physical their desire for new
clothes was.  It would evidently take more than dire poverty to stop a
woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the
world, as old as the desire for children.  - 113

[They tell the story of The count of Monte Cristo to the tailor for three
days non-stop, so gripping does he find it. ] 125

[Headman threatens Luo with deportation]
You've been spreading reactionary trash.  Just as well for our village that
I never sleep,that I'm always on guard.  I have been here since midnight
listening to everything you've been saying, the whole reactionary story of
Count Whatsisname. p.128

[unless his tooth can be fixed by the narrator (dentist's son)]
The headman's teeth resembled a jagged mountain range.  Three incisors
protruded from blackened inflamed gums like flames of prehistoric basalt,
while his tobacco-stained canines were snaggled rocks of diluvian
travertine. 122

[The little Seamstress' last words as she leaves the village (and the
two boys) to seek a new life in the city. ]
She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac:  that a woman's beauty
is a treasure beyond price. - 172




Dai Sijie is a China-born French author.   The name is written 戴思杰 or
Sijie Dai in Pinyin.  It is not clear what his last name is; in some
movies, he has written it Sijie Dai; elsewhere as Dai Sijie.

"It's nothing but a love story . . . There was a real love story," Dai said
of the autobiographical aspects of the story, "but not as romantic. The
stealing books part is true and the experience of reading stories to
farmers is also true." - Dai Jie

author bio

Dai Sijie was born in the Fujian province of China in 1954. As both his
parents were doctors, he was sent for 're-education' during the early 1970s,
at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
In 1984 he won a scholarship from the University of Arts to study abroad. He
left China for France, where he still lives, and began making films. Although
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was his first novel, it was an
overnight success in France, winning five literary prizes and became a
bestseller across Europe and America. His film adaptation of the novel,
released in 2002, was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

---blurb

 
In 1971 Mao's campaign against the intellectuals is at its height. Our
narrator and his best friend, Luo, distinctly unintellectual but guilty of
being the sons of doctors, have been sent to a remote mountain village to be
'reeducated'.  The kind of education that takes place among the peasants of
Phoenix Mountain involves carting buckets of excrement up and down
precipitous, foggy paths, but the two seventeen- year-olds have a violin and
their sense of humour to keep them going. Further distraction is provided by
the attractive daughter of the local tailor, possessor of a particularly fine
pair of feet.

Their true re-education starts, however, when they discover a comrade's
hidden stash of classics of great nineteenth-century Western literature -
Balzac, Dickens, Dumas, Tolstoy and others, in Chinese translation. They
need all their ingenuity to get their hands on the forbidden books, but
when they do their lives are turned upside down. And not only their lives:
after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, the
Little Seamstress will never be the same again. 

Without betraying the truth of what happened, Dai Sijie transforms the
bleak events of China's Cultural Revolution into an enchanting and
unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit and the magical
power of great storytelling.