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A picturesque look at China's Cultural Revolution

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Oct 21, 2001, Page 18

Even the most violent revolutions reach a stage when their heroic past becomes a subject for nostalgia. Quaint, picturesque and mildly amusing, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress fits into the category of purveyors of period charm.

The period is that of China's Cultural Revolution, and the banishment to the countryside of young intellectuals for re-education in the traditions of the wise and all-comprehending peasantry.

Two 17-year-old boys arrive in a remote mountain-top village on a back road to Tibet in 1971. The parents of one are doctors, the father of the other a dentist. As such the adults have been decried as bourgeois pigs, and their sons banished for unlimited periods of education through labor.

Soon the two meet up with another rusticated city boy who they call Two Eyes. His mother is, or was, an eminent literary figure, and it isn't long before the two discover that Two Eyes has secretly brought with him a bag of books, all classics by forbidden Western authors in Chinese translations. When they steal and read one of these, Balzac's novel Ursule Mirouet, they are astonished by its realistic depiction of love, female beauty and sexual desire. A world officially labeled as "decadent" is suddenly brought before their eyes.

The boys' own natural feelings are given authenticity, and in addition are treated with a psychological sophistication they can scarcely credit. Nothing like it had ever been suggested by the purveyors of world revolution under whose earnest instruction they grew up.

Needless to say, in a novel like this such ideas cannot remain abstract. A beautiful young girl from a nearby village, the "seamstress" of the title, is ardently pursued by both the boys, but to tell any more would spoil what plot structure the short book possesses.

It's small wonder the French literary establishment has gone into paroxysms of joy on the publication of this book. Of the classics of European nineteenth century literature the boys discover in the packing case, over half are by French authors. Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rousseau and Romain Rolland are all represented and mixed in -- rather grudgingly you feel -- with Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky from Russia, and Dickens, Emily Bronte and Kipling (a strange choice) from the UK.

This is clearly crucial to the French. Because virtually all Western books were banned in China in this period, their eventual re-emergence is taken to symbolize the return of civilized values. And there's nothing the French like more than to be regarded as the bearers of the torch of cultural excellence on all possible fronts.

And inevitably it was to France that the author, Dai Sijie, went when he emigrated from China in 1984. Clearly French culture formed a major part of his intellectual background. Indeed, as he himself underwent "re-education" in the years described here, it's very likely that there's a good deal of autobiographical material in this whole tale, the author's first attempt at fiction.

The fact that Paris was the breeding ground of much 20th century Marxism, and the place where many Asian revolutionaries received their training, is now forgotten. Or perhaps not. Maybe embarrassment at this particular episode in their history is what leads contemporary French critics to be so pleased at being seen once again as representatives of traditional European high culture. The gradual easing of the Chinese revolution's stringency and puritanism is presented in miniature in the plot of this book, and the history of part of a nation's evolution encapsulated, as it were, in a charming fairy tale.

Nevertheless, there is a "moral." Not only is the author himself telling a story that features classic storytellers of the past. The boys, too, manage to survive on account of their story-telling ability. They begin by going to the nearby town to watch North Korean movies, then returning and relating the plots to the locals. As this provides the only entertainment the village knows, the time thus spent is considered as a legitimate part of the boys' revolutionary labor.

Later they embark on the more risky enterprise of relating the stories of the French novels they have been reading. This is a far more ambitious project, and only selected individuals benefit from it. One of them is the young and all too impressionable seamstress.

So if you want to take this book seriously, and there's no reason at all why you should, then you can argue that it's a paean to the art of storytelling on a number of different levels. The moral, then, would be that the human need for fiction and the imagination in general is what finally proves the undoing of the Marxist intellectual's intransigent cultural materialism.

Of course, nothing so grand, or so theoretical, appears in the easy-going, genial pages of this would-be bestseller. There are incidental felicities that make you think the author has one eye, if not both, on an eventual film (he is described in the blurb as being a filmmaker).

This book is scarcely the masterpiece its publishers would like us to believe. Its weakness is that it is too sentimental. There are no horrors on show here, though there were plenty going on in the period depicted.

Nevertheless it is easy reading, benign, and neatly executed, and the English translation, by Ina Rilke, is flawless and exceptionally natural.

The book is also quietly witty. One of the boys brings a violin from the city and, as the villagers prepare to smash it as a bourgeois toy, he offers to play it. What's the song called, the headman asks. Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao, says his friend, quick as a flash. Everyone nods in approval, and the violin is saved.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
By Dai Sijie
172 pages
Chatto & Windus
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