| | At the start of the Great Beastly Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao Zedong exploited idealism and urged youth to smash the Four Olds, that is, anything like priceless cultural treasures or anybody like strict teachers that youth, in its arrogant stupidity, didn’t like. Imagine Mao’s surprise by 1972 when power struggles and political instability brought the country to near chaos. A piece of the solution was to get youth out of cities and into the country where they could be controlled more easily by slovenly violent peasants.
The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie is about the two teenage boys who are sent down to the country. They experience the hardships of lugging nightsoil and plowing fields with stone age technology. They are victimized by the sadistic village headman. Their souls are saved when they discover a cache of Western classic novels in translation. They also get a idea of the ups and downs of romantic love from the seamstress of the title. The novel is fairly light-weight but to Dai’s credit he implies that not all the effects of reading great literature are beneficial.
I’d recommend this novel to those interested in the Cultural Revolution or serious readers looking for a slender middle-brow read for a change of pace. I read this novel as the 7th book for the China Challenge.
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| | Posted 11/3/2009 10:36 AM - 2 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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