Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: So far, so good.

I remember seeing this novel in bookstores a few years ago and admiring its cover. The cover art is a striking photo of a bright-red pair of girls’ shoes. The leather is worn, but its color (possibly enhanced by the graphic artist) is warm and vibrant. Each shoe has a strap that buttons into place, and the toes are reinforced with what looks like brass. The background is vague---maybe the painted stone of a building---but the colors are rich. The cover copy appears in complementary colors, and the book’s spine includes a pretty red brocade design.

I forgot about the novel in the three years since it first debuted in the United States. A couple of weeks ago, however, a coworker forwarded me an absurd news story from the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune about a school district that recently banned Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress from its curriculum. The trouble began when a high-school student reading the novel in his English class found some of the novel’s sexual content questionable and showed it to his mother. Mom was similarly offended, circulated a petition to ban the book from local schools...and the rest of the unsettling details are in the article: http://www.tribnet.com/news/story/5057442p-4985266c.html

This same coworker expressed annoyance that a story with so much value---specifically, information about Mao Zedong’s “re-education” of the middle class during his so-called Cultural Revolution---would be withheld from students. She said the novel touched on a part of Chinese history Americans know little about, and she believes it’s something kids should learn about in school. My response to this was essentially, “What was Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution?” I’d never heard of it, much less learned about it in school. She told me the bits she knew, and I found it almost impossible to believe. Sending formally educated, city-dwelling adolescents out to the countryside to forego all their intellectual pursuits in favor of hard labor and agricultural education? Very bizarre. They were separated from their parents for indefinite lengths of time during this re-education process. Meanwhile, formally educated, urban, professional adults were distrusted and monitored by the state, and in some cases, declared “enemies of the state,” as is the father of Luo, a character in the novel. Luo’s dad is a dentist.

So anyway, I had to read this novel to see what all the fuss was about in Tacoma, and because the bits of information my coworker had shared with me about China’s Cultural Revolution had really fascinated (and repulsed) me. She lent me her copy of the novel, and I’m now I’m a little less than halfway through it.

It’s absorbing, for sure. It’s a first-person narrative; the protagonist is unnamed but has three friends who compose the whole of his life in the countryside during his “re-education.” The friends go by Luo, Four-Eyes, and The Little Seamstress. They’re all kids between the ages of 13 and 20, and they’re each endearing in their own way. The protagonist, Luo, and Four-Eyes have all been sent to the remote Phoenix of the Sky mountain region for re-education; The Little Seamstress is indigenous to nearby Yong Jing. She is beautiful, smart, and charming, and both Luo and the protagonist have fallen for her. Luo, however, is the one to become her boyfriend, and they---gasp!---have sex standing up, beneath a tree, “like horses.” It’s an honest and sweet description and, as I was telling my coworker, Luo clearly says “like horses,” not “with horses.”
Ha!
So far, the story is unique, sad, hopeful...but not at all sexually explicit. We’ll see what the remaining chapters contain in the way of love and desire and sex.

I haven’t even touched on the main plot line, which is that Four-Eyes has smuggled a suitcaseful of classic Western fiction to the countryside with him. This is dangerous, of course. Luo and the protagonist finally coax a novel from Four-Eyes' stash---it’s a Balzac volume, “thin and worn”---and both boys read it all in one sitting, and are forever changed. Right now, where I’m reading, Luo and the protagonist are doing things for Four-Eyes in exchange for the opportunity to read another of his hidden books.

And with that, I’m going to excuse myself to go read some more!