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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie
New York, NY: Anchor Books (division of Random House, Inc.), 2002 English
translation (original in French, 2000). Anchor ISBN-10: 0-385-722206; ISBN-13:
978-0385722209 (paperback), $11.95 US. 192 pages. Available online at
www.anchorbooks.com
“Every nook and cranny of the land came under the
all-seeing eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had cast its
gigantic, fine-meshed net over the whole of China.”
Dai Sijie makes this statement near the end (page 160) of
his first novel, a quasi-autobiographical tale about two young men sent from the
city to the hinterlands of China in the early 1970s to be “re-educated.” The
author left China for France in 1984, at age 30, but he did spend part of his
youth between 1971 and 1974 in a re-education environment.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was an
overnight sensation when it appeared in France in 2000. The novel begins in 1971
with the protagonist at age seventeen and his boyhood friend Luo at age eighteen
arriving at a small peasant village in the mountains of northwest China. They
are cold, hungry, and muddy after days of trekking with few belongings. Mao
Zedong had launched the Cultural Revolution in 1968. Intellectuals and
professionals by the millions had to submit to relocation to work for
agricultural and industrial laborers. The peasants would “re-educate” Luo and
his friend, who faced a potential lifetime of hard labor. The Communists have
stripped schools of many subjects already, so the boys have only a rudimentary
education anyway, but their parents, one a famous dentist, have been well
educated and are “dangerous” to the revolution. Their parents have exposed the
youth to Western music and literature. That “contamination” condemned the
friends indefinitely.
Officials have
confiscated and burned books that do
not promote Mao’s Communism. The
friends soon discover and befriend
another relocated youth called
“Four-Eyes” because he wears
glasses. Four-Eyes keeps a secret
stash of books locked in a suitcase
in his room. After some cajoling,
Luo and his friend manage to borrow
one or two novels by Balzac from the
stingy intellectual. One is a
Chinese translation of Cousin Pons
and another is Ursule Mirouet. Early
in their internment at the village,
the friends meet the striking young
daughter of the local tailor. She is
an illiterate seamstress whom they
entertain with stories from Balzac,
and she is quite taken with Madame
Bovary. The friends earn a
reputation for skillfully presenting
stories for the villagers, and the
local leader sends them regularly to
the closest movie house more than a
day’s walk away. Upon their return,
the young men act out the entire
Madame Bovary film for the locals,
who delight in their performances.
Luo courts “the
Little Seamstress,” (she has no
formal name in the story) and they
become secret lovers. The novel reaches a crucial turn when the Little Seamstress discovers
that she is pregnant. To spare Luo knowledge of the conception and the agony,
the protagonist and the Little Seamstress go to the closest clinic, in the same
town as the movie house, to arrange for a secret abortion. (The government
forbade marriage for someone so young. The Little Seamstress’s traditional
father would have been mortified that she “dishonored” him so. Luo would have
been banished from her and she could not have kept the child anyway.)
I will not reveal the end of this intriguing tale that has
many wonderful layers of meaning, with penetratingly simple descriptions of the
people and their behaviors at that time and place. My interest in reviewing the
book is less for its literary worth than for what it tells us about the
cult-like milieu of the Cultural Revolution. My colleagues in the
exit-counseling and cult-awareness arena often refer to the work of Robert J.
Lifton, especially to Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A study
of “brainwashing” in China, first published in 1961. In that book Lifton
includes overviews of interviews he conducted in Hong Kong with several dozen
victims of the early coercive thought-reform policies in Red China. Twenty-five
of these individuals were Westerners released from Chinese prisons, and fifteen
were Chinese refugee intellectuals. Lifton synthesized his findings in a model,
or his “eight themes” that appear in any effective thought-reform program.
Lifton has applied his themes to cult formation wherein “ideological totalism”
becomes the rule. The all-or-nothing quality catapults a cult into harmful
behavior as moderating influences diminish. Citizens who resist the totalist
system find themselves reduced to non-persons or even persons of criminal status
and must suffer the consequences.
Sijie introduces us to a kindly Christian minister who
refused to praise Communism. The old man swept the streets with an oversized
broom in the town with the movie house. He could not utter a word about the
Gospel, but he appeared to live his faith in silence. Small children mocked him,
and his own adult children pleaded with him to accept the new policies as they
had. He died uttering a short prayer in Latin, one that his sons did not
understand. The protagonist, who witnessed this death and who was not religious,
nevertheless wanted to build a shrine to the old man. He envisioned a statue of
the old man wearing a crown of thorns and holding a long-handled broom. I will
not give out any more details, but I will summarize why I feel that students of
cult behavior might value this book.
As Lifton points out, victims of thought reform have
different responses and outcomes. Much depends on their individual traits and
needs. In the novel a young intellectual finds relief from the tensions of
forming an adult identity by becoming “a Communist.” You will meet peasants who
enjoyed a rise in status for the first time in their lives. Lifton’s “psychology
of the pawn” comes alive in a village headman. Relocated and demoted
professionals learned to play the game of confessing their admiration for
Chairman Mao, hoping to wait out the years of atrocity. Our young heroes learn
some hard lessons about freedom and about what might happen when someone is set
free from a totalist ideology.
Despite the pervasiveness of ideology in the milieu, Sijie
inserts funny incidents and humor in unexpected places—as Lifton indicates, even
in totalism the human spirit will find and seek freedom in any way possible. The
novel is also instructive to those who wish to grasp what is happening in the
new China that struggles to adapt old totalist values to a free market economy
with its inevitable Westernization. In her struggle to express her essential
spirit, the Little Seamstress eloquently captures Balzac’s Modernist perspective
in her striking beauty and confounding complexity. Indeed, Balzac has reappeared
in China.
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