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July 11, 2004 Issue 
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress By Dai Sijie Alfred A. Knopf, 2001 
The Pen - Mightier that the Sword Was it ignorance or amnesia that led the news commentators and political analysts, in eulogizing President Reagan, to suggest he had slain communism single-handedly? What a slap in the face of all those dissidents who rotted in the Gulags and even paid with their lives for the ambiguous freedom and democracy Eastern Europe has now. It is a historical fact that the erosion of communism started from within "the evil empire" long ago. The 1956 Hungarian uprising, the publications of Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago," Dubcek's Communism with a Human Face and the bloodily crushed Prague Spring, all those nameless youths who were gunned down trying to cross over the Wall, Lech Walesa and the Polish workers defying the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and Sakharov's and Havel's imprisonments and unstoppable dissident activities are but a few of the historical events that chipped away at communism. They led to the en masse trampling of the Berlin Wall and the candlelight vigils in the squares of Prague, Sofia and Bucharest. It is these thousands of nameless and ordinary people who brought down communism from within. In an act of desperate defiance and heroism they were ready to give the only thing left for communism to take - their lives. "Talk," on the other hand, as the saying goes, "is cheap." Ultimately, the past is best investigated and recalled through reading. Thankfully, there are still writers who will not let us forget the tragic communist experience and who write in forms that engage not only our minds but also our hearts. "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" by Dai Sijie is one of those special books, poignant and delicately wrought and full of insights about life under communism. It gives us a glimpse into a frighteningly oppressive world where learning and reading are political crimes punishable by death. The book is a fictionalized account of the author's own experience of surviving Chinese communism and in particular Mao's Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was Mao's grand experiment to reshape the very core of the consciousness of the Chinese people. Between 1966 and 1976, thousands of forbidden books were burned and millions of people were sent to remote villages to be re-educated. The re-education aimed to rid them of "intellectualism." In early 1971 the 17-year old narrator of the book and his best friend, eighteen-year old Luo are sent to a "village in a lost corner of the mountains" called the Phoenix in the Sky to which there are no roads but only treacherously narrow paths through craggy rocks and precipices. Their crime? "Intellectuals" and children of "enemies of the people." Although they have already lived with fear of denunciations and punishments, the contrasts between city and remote mountain village life are unbelievable. Here words like Western, intellectual, art, reading and books have even more sinister implications. To the peasants, the violin which the narrator has been allowed to bring along, is a suspicious "bourgeois toy" that has to be burned. But he woos them by playing a sonata the two boys, thinking quickly in communist political correct terms, call "Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao." They work hard plowing fields and carrying on their backs buckets of excrement out of the village. Late at night they tell stories by the flame of an oil lamp, stories on which soon the entire village and its headman become hooked. Occasionally the headman sends them down to the tiny town to see a movie so they could retell the story over and over to the entire village. Their storytelling talent wins them minuscule privileges thorough which they meet, and become totally smitten with, the uncommonly beautiful daughter of the local tailor - the Little Chinese Seamstress. Extraordinary events lead them to the discovery of a secret treasure trove of Western books. Forbidden books! If caught in possession of even one of these books, they stand to loose their lives. They seduce the Little Chinese Seamstress by narrating to her the stories in these books. Their re-education takes an entirely different turn from its intent. Instead of being rid of their "intellectual bourgeois thinking," the two boys and the Little Chinese Seamstress succumb to the world of Western thought and ideas, emotions and relationships. It is these books that alter their lives forever. This is but one example of how persecuted books refuse to die and instead mysteriously rise out of the ashes to sow the seeds of dissent. This tiny book is a powerful example of how the erosion of communism germinated and spread against the most terrible repression of the freedoms to read and think. Author Dai Sijie who has lived in France since 1984, was himself reeducated in some remote Chinese village between 1971 and 1974. "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" is his first novel. An immediate success and bestseller, it has been published in nineteen countries and will soon be seen on the screen. I only hope that the film would convey in the same way as the novel does, the awesome power of the printed word. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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