I chose to read Balzac
and the Little Chinese Princess, by Dai Sijie, translated from the French
by Ina Rilke in 2001 and published in 2002 by Anchor Books. This book had been lingering on my bookshelf
for the last four years until just a few weeks ago. I am grateful to have had this assignment
because it forced me to read it sooner than I otherwise would have.
Balzac and the Little
Chinese Princess is the tale of two precocious teenage boys during the
Chinese Cultural Revolution in the early 1970’s. The narrator is the youngest of the two boys
(only by one year), but he is never called by his name nor is it mentioned in
the book. His best friend and the other
main character, is named Luo. In this
story, the boys are considered by the standards of the then Communist
leadership to be “intellectuals” and are sent to a remote mountainous area
called Phoenix
of the Sky for the purpose of being re-educated. It is called Phoenix of the Sky because of its extreme
elevation and any sign of modern
civilization is a two day walk over “rugged mountain terrain” (page 11).
The boys are forced to perform hard labor on a daily basis
until the headman of their village realized their innate gift of storytelling
and reenactment. This gift, along with
the discovery of a secret suitcase full of banned books offers them the
opportunity to make the acquaintance of and build a relationship with the
beautiful and very curious Little Chinese Seamstress.
The author masterfully takes you on this journey through the
eyes of an inexperienced teenage boy who has been removed from his family with
no real hope to ever return. Along with
the main characters, I experienced the courage to
make the best of dreadful circumstances, the angst of forbidden love, the loyalty of friendship and
last but not least, the power of the written word.
The narrator explains his experience of escape through
reading the banned literature of Balzac best with this quote; “Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo
of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about
patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong
into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the
subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.” (page 57)
I was quite taken with the author’s poetic writing style and
detail.
Although this is a work of fiction, the author himself was “reeducated” during
the early 1970’s and therefore, for me, that offered some “reality” to the
reading experience. This story really
drove home the importance of steadfastness, courage and just how significant
literature is to us as human beings and was very powerful for me.
It is an easy read at only 184 pages and I highly recommend
it! Be sure to let me know if you do (or
you can borrow my book) so we can talk about the ending...
