What Is The Theme Of Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

The autobiography, Mao’s Last Dancer written by Li Cunxin, is effective in raising awareness of the injustice the Chinese people experienced during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution and later communist policies in China. When Li’s parents got married in 1946, they were not living in poverty. However, when the Japanese invaded China during WWII and forced all the civilians into communes, Mao then kept these communes and the Li family lost their wealth—they faced injustice and marginalisation. The Chinese population were marginalised by Mao’s use of communist principles and propaganda. They were forced into believing Mao’s views—that the West (Capitalist countries) were filthy and bad, while China was good. Li’s visit to America was an eye-opener.

The setting is in Muji, China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The leader of the communist party at the time is Chairman Mao and ruled based on a Marxist model by the story mentioning the concrete statue of him in the center of the square. The author states that “the Cultural Revolution was over already, and recently the Party has been propagating the idea that all citizens were

The Memoir Spider Eaters by Rae Yang is her personal account of her life during the Maoist revolution. In addition, she reminisces about her trials and tribulations during her active participation in the culture revolution and the great North Wilderness. Her family also had various misfortunes due to these changing ideological beliefs spread by the revolution. This memoir illustrates in great detail what Yang experienced under communist rule. Spider Eaters opened up a door to a young girl and her families struggle to be good Samaritans under communist rule and their final disillusionment of the revolution they whole heartedly believed in. Yang and her family struggled with the vast ideological changes during the Maoist Revolution, in turn,

The novel, “Mao’s Last Dancer”, was written by Li Cunxin. It tells his riveting tale of growing up in a poor family of six boys, living in a village in China under Mao’s reign. It goes on to share his eventual defection to the United States as an artistic dancer. His childhood was filled with both hardships and joys. But both helped him to grow as a resilient person to achieve once-thought impossible goals.

Throughout his novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie illustrates the powerful influence that books have on their readers. Through his narrative, he establishes his stance on the controversial issue of whether or not storytelling is good. He combines countless events and feelings to create a novel that demonstrates the good of storytelling and the iniquity of book banning and burning. In the end, Sijie portrays storytelling as a means of good entertainment, enlightening experience and positive encouragement.

During Chairman Mao’s rule, nearly all of the kids around Ji-Li’s age were sent to the countryside for “reeducation.” According to Mao, this was supposed to benefit both the young students and the farmers. The students would learn to respect the working masses, and the farmers would learn new technology from the students. They soon realized that the re-education system held them back from real education. “Like the Cultural Revolution, this did not work out as it was supposed to. After ten years of sacrifice in the primitive countryside most of these young people returned to the city with little education, few skills, and no beliefs. All regretted the waste of their youth, and all have struggled to start over again.” (Epilogue). Once these children grew up, they finally understood that Mao’s re-education program held them back from actually using their minds for what they might experience back in the city. All the children did was work in fields. They never understood how to strengthen their skills to prepare them for the concepts they had to know when they become adults. It is key for people to understand that in order to prepare children for the real world, they must learn in a class. Education is supposed to give us knowledge of the world around us and changes into something better. It helps people develop a perspective of looking at life, helps us build opinions, and have points of view on different

Originally, Liang’s “parents were deeply involved in all the excitement of working to transform China into a great Socialist country” (4). Over a serious of unfortunate events, though, he became the child of a “Rightist’s cap” mother and a “Reactionary Capitalist stinking intellectuals” father (9, 51). Impacted by the shattering of his family and horrific bloodshed created by fighting, Liang Heng began to question the Cultural Revolution. He claimed that his “family had scarified so much… but it had given [them] nothing in return” (148). Liang Heng presents his shift in ideology to demonstrate that most Chinese were no longer in support of a Communist nation. His “troubles were common enough and anyone could see there was a discrepancy between the glorious words of the newspapers and [their] painful reality (232). Even Liang Heng’s father, after many years of devotion, found that he could no longer defend the Party’s policies after he experienced the ill-treatment of the peasants in the country

Written by Dai Sijie, and published in English in 2001, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a contemporary piece with a classic story. The book is about a boy, known to us as “The Narrator,” and his friend Luo. It takes place in communist China. Luo is the son of a well known dentist, while the Narrator is the son of a lung specialist and a consultant in parasitic disease. Due to their parents’ education and status, the boys are sent to a mountain village to be re-educated. While there, the boys live in treacherous conditions and live life, similar to that of Sisyphus, but instead of a boulder, they carry sewage. The Narrator possesses the skill of playing the violin beautifully, while Luo was graced with a story telling ability. While being re-educated, they become acquaintances with The Little Seamstress, eventually becoming more. They begin to read her stories, which they steal, and begin to put their lives in danger. By then, it gets interesting. One major scene that showcases their actions is when Luo has to tend to his sick mother, pages 158 to 160, leaving the Narrator watching over the Little Seamstress. Within this passage, the Narrator’s usual tone drastically changes into a militaristic attitude which reveals that when he is put into a position of power, he conforms to the idea that he should be emotionless and straightforward, in order to hide his true desires.

This memoir of Ma Bo’s sent shock waves throughout China when it was published and was even first banned by the Communist Government. This passionate story paints a clear picture for what the Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was really like. Many Chinese living today can attest to similar if not identical ordeals as expressed in Ma Bo’s story. The toils of being a young Red Guard in inner China were experienced by many if not millions. The horrors and atrocities were wide spread throughout the country, not just in Inner Mongolia. The experiences illustrated in Blood Red Sunset uniquely belong to Ma Bo’s entire generation of mislead Chinese. As expressed in the books dedication the Cultural Revolution

The book is a written as conversational memoir between two women, Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong about their experience during the first three decades of Mao’s era. The two women had gone through almost similar position and situations in their life, faced equivalent hardships, their approach or attitude towards those experiences in a completely different manner. This book is meticulous in its historical detail, making it a standout among similar memoirs of twentieth-century China. It also tries to add another dimension of the general perspective of historic events. The events are described in a chronological sequence and with the right amount of proper relevant information so the reader can understand the conversation.

The Sun of the Revolution by Liang Heng, is intriguing and vivid, and gives us a complex and compelling perspective on Chines culture during a confusing time period. We get the opportunity to learn the story of a young man with a promising future, but an unpleasant childhood. Liang Heng was exposed to every aspect of the Cultural Revolution in China, and shares his experiences with us, since the book is written from Liang perspective, we do not have a biased opinion from an elite member in the Chinese society nor the poor we get an honest opinion from the People’s Republic of China. Liang only had the fortunate opportunity of expressing these events due his relationship with his wife, An American woman whom helps him write the book. When

In 2001, Dai Sijie wrote Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. A book about two young men being “re educated” in communist China. While away in the mountains Luo, the friend of the narrator, meets a young woman, known to us as the Little Seamstress. In the selected passage, pages 151-152, Luo is retelling his account of when him and the Seamstress were at their hidden pool, and the Seamstress got bit by a snake. In this passage, the relationship between Luo and the Seamstress reveals to us that Luo’s feelings for her are fueled by a selfish desire for her body instead of her mind.

Storytelling can be found in every corner of the world. It is used to pass the time, tell of past or current events, and is the way that we communicate with each other. In Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie, storytelling occurs during times of hopelessness when life seems hard and allows the characters to live vicariously through the tales told. The narrator and Luo use storytelling as an escape from reality in times of desperation. The tailor is influenced by the stories to the point where he changes the style of clothing he creates to escape the boundaries of Mao approved clothing. The importance of storytelling to the little seamstress is that she learns the importance of beauty, and is able to leave the current life

Written in 2000, Dai Sijie’s Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress is a way for the author to portray his own experience of re-education in the mountains of Sichuan Province, and how the historical event of re-education from 1968-1975 supplied the framework for a very powerful story. The passage being analyzed is from pages 142-144 in which the narrator is threatened by the village headman for spreading “recreationary filth” and in order to avoid prosecution, the two main characters; the Narrator and Luo, agree to try and fix the village headman's tooth. In this suspenseful scene the relationship between Luo and the Headman reveals the negative psychological effects of living a life of limited freedom.

One event can be interpreted as both transforming and describing, due to the room for subjective judgement inherent in both of these two ideas. The concepts of description and transformation are abstract in nature. The idea that one event has the capability of both describing and transforming the world in different ways is evident in the area of knowledge of history. Here, the description of the past has the potential to transform the present. The discovery of what happened behind China’s metaphorical walls would forever transform the way Mao and his regime was perceived. A specific case of this is the French intellectuals involved in The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s which outlines first hand how a group of French students were seduced by Mao’s apparently pure ideology and the perceived cultural and intellectual impact of the East during the 1960s. This is an