Little Chinese Seamstress

Words: 1753
Pages: 8
Open Document
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie is a story about love, desire, and individual action. The novel is set during the Cultural Revolution, and follows the stories of two young boys that were sent to the mountains to be re-educated. On the mountains, they meet another boy who shows them his personal books, written by Western writers. This was the first time that the two boys were introduced to Western novels. They become obsessed with the Western ideas that they read about in the book and apply them to their own life. So truly, the boys become more educated by the novels instead of the Communist regime. In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, the books re-educate the narrator and introduce him to Western …show more content…
The books introduce the narrator to the feeling of desire, and more specifically, the desire to live. One book in particular, has a main character, Jean Christophe, who the narrator idolizes. When the narrator is crossing a narrow ridge he recalls the character when thinking to himself: “After all, how could I die now, without having known love or sex, without having taken free individual action against the whole world as he [Jean Christophe] had? I was filled with the desire to live.” (Dai 114). The protagonist becomes self aware of his own life as he relates it to the life of the book character’s. And in doing so, he becomes filled with the desire to experience life as the character has. He says that he couldn’t die now “without having know love or sex” which are common sentiments, learned from writers of the Western world, that he talked about in his quote listed in the paragraph above. The narrator is not ready to die without having experienced these things, especially after reading about them so much in his books. The narrator is aware that in his life, he has not experiences these things and starts to long for them. When describing his life, he recognizes that he was “so far removed from human desires” (124), referencing the desires he learned about from the …show more content…
The narrator is educated about independence Jean-Christophe. When describing him, the protagonist says “But Jean-Christophe, with his fierce individualism utterly untainted by malice, was a salutary revelation. Without him I would never had understood the splendor of taking free and independent action as an individual.” (110). The narrator literally says that the character taught him the greatness of taking independent action. Independent action is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “to not depend on anyone else before doing an act”. Not only does the narrator learn independence from the books, but he becomes more self aware and then initiates it into his life. This can be shown when the narrator tells stories to the tailor. This is independent action because it is something that the narrator decides to do on his own. To take independent action means to take a risk. This is just like Jean-Christophe who takes independent action and is “untainted by malice”. The narrator shows that he is also untainted because he chooses to go against the status quo and spread reactionary stories despite the risk. In fact, he calls it a “revelation”, which is defined by the Oxford English dictionary as “The disclosure or communication of knowledge, instructions, etc., by divine
Show More

Related Documents: Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

Written by Dai Sijie, the novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is about two teenage boys during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Luo and the unnamed narrator were assigned to re-education through labor and are set in coal mines and with rice crops. The two boys falls in love with the Little Seamstress, the daughter of the local tailor. As well as the girl, the narrator also got attached with books he was able to read throughout the novel. In pages 116-117, the narrator describes his feelings…

Words 472 - Pages 2

Little Chinese Seamstress essay final

Katherine O’Connor 6th period Finley Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress From 1966 through 1976 Mao Zedong and the Chinese communist party implemented a plan, known as the Cultural Revolution, to rid China of its feudal and bourgeoisie backgrounds by re-educating the intellectuals with vocational skills. In the book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie, the re-education that was forced on the main characters, Ma and Luo, which was supposed to make them less intellectual…

Words 1072 - Pages 5

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Essay

Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, written in 2000, is a novel about the Narrator’s struggles through the Communist Chinese re-education program. In this passage, on pages 60 through 63, it is apparent that the Narrator moves from complete isolation to curiosity in a new interest. The first part of this passage shows how the Narrator’s deep isolation is caused by the lack of attention. The Narrator and Luo had discovered this book by Balzac together and had found great pleasure…

Words 674 - Pages 3

Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Summary

The All-Important Effect of Re-Education 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…

Words 975 - Pages 4

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 4 Essay

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…

Words 1323 - Pages 6

Marke Family Interview

used common colors such as, soft shades of brown, beige and white. These colors are mostly used in traditional Albanian families, especially the ones from the town of Diber, where the Marke family comes from. The mother of the family, Merita, was a seamstress and she had made these beautiful beaded curtains for her apartment…

Words 613 - Pages 3

Essay about Final Examination and Ch 20- Pages

grade in the course is based on the writing assignments. Required texts: World History since 1500, Vol. II, 7th ed., W.J. Duiker and J.J. Spielvogel (WH) Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World, Louis Fischer Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie Please be aware that as the course proceeds the instructor reserves the right to make changes to the syllabus if necessary. To do well in this course, you must attend all lectures and do the assigned readings. Missing classes…

Words 892 - Pages 4

Margaret Siren Song My Children Essay

Humans naturally crave choice, when that essential ingredient in humanity is taken away the desperation that follows is rabid and frantic. In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie, both Luo and The Narrator are stripped of their choice in education, or rather their choice to have an education. As a result of the sudden vacuum, they crave education even more, quite the opposite of what was intended. The…

Words 1162 - Pages 5

Essay Unit 12 Cornell Notes Chapters 29 and 30 MARGARET TEBBE

school four blocks from her house. The nearest all­black elementary school was 21 blocks away. ● In a landmark verdict the Supreme Court struck down school segregation as a slam on the 14th amendment's equal protection. Rosa Parks Was a seamstress and a NAACP officer, took a seat in the front row of “colored” section of a Montgomery bus. As the bus filled up, the driver ordered Parks and three other African­American passengers to empty the row they were occupying so that a white man could sit down…

Words 3242 - Pages 13

13th Amendment: An Amendment To The US Constitution

Disabilities Act – a civil rights law, passed in 1990, that prohibits discrimination based on disability anarchist – a person who opposes all forms of government Angel Island – immigration station located in San Francisco Bay where roughly 50,000 Chinese immigrants entered the United States between 1910 and 1940 Anthony, Susan B. – leading proponent of woman suffrage, co-founder of the National Women Suffrage Association appeasement – the granting of concessions to a hostile power in order to keep…

Words 4746 - Pages 19