In his novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie makes the point that the Narrator learns much more during the time of his re-education than if he had remained at home. Riddled with irony, the story begins with the beginning of the Narrator’s and Luo’s re-education, a time allotted for forgetting all previous education and learning provincial things from the peasants. Dubbed “young intellectuals,” although they only completed the state-required three years of middle school, Luo and the Narrator are sent to the mountainous regions of rural China. It is there the boys discover Western classics by Balzac and others, as well as a beautiful young woman they both have an eye for. By titling the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Sijie directly tells the reader the two things that the Narrator learned from most;…show more content… The first significant thing the Narrator discovers is that he has a hidden love of literature. On page fifty-one, the Narrator describes that “By the time we had finally learnt how to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.” Growing up in a communist culture under Chairman Mao, he never had access to any literature other than political drivel, much less Western classics. After reading Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët, he becomes enthralled by Balzac’s work and longs for more. He develops such an affection for the language that he copies his favorite passages onto the lining of his sheepskin jacket. After the boys steal the books from Four-Eyes, a world he has never seen before is available to him: a world outside of China. Not only is he exposed to this new world, but he becomes knowledgeable about it, something both unheard of and somewhat impossible at this time.
