Idaho Commission for Libraries

Originally published in French, this short novel takes place during the period of Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution in China during the early 1970s, when hundreds of thousands of scientists, artists, teachers, and other intellectuals were sent into the countryside for re-education. The novel, which occasionally touches us with the qualities of folk lore or fable, opens with the first-person narrator watching astonished as a village headman pronounces his violin to be just “a bourgeois toy.” The speaker’s 17 year-old friend Luo, like him a doctor’s son, promptly suggests that he play a “famous” (obviously nonexistent) sonata, “Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao.” The two young men suffer through the harshness of village life in a remote area of China, and they are forced to perform the most demeaning chores. They survive partly because they become storytellers, narrating to the peasants the plots of novels they have read and movies they see in another village. When the tailor’s beautiful daughter shows up, they read to her from a copy of Balzac, which they have stolen from a pampered boy from the city who lives briefly in their village. A gentle romance develops between the seamstress and Luo. Dai Sijie offers vivid descriptions of the natural settings, an occasional touch of fantasy, and a generous supply of humor in this prize-winning novel which has been translated from the French.

China's Cultural Revolution

Cover reprinted with permission from Anchor Books.

Author Information

Dai Siejie was born to an educated middle-class family in Fujian, China, in 1954 and was sent by the Maoist government to a re-education camp from 1971 to 1974. After returning, he completed high school and a university degree in art history. He migrated to France in 1984, where he wrote screenplays and directed films including China, My Sorrow (1989) and The Chinese Botanist’s Daughters (2006). He adapted for the screen and directed the movie made of his first novel, published in French as Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise, in 2003. His second novel, published in French in 2003, has been translated under the title Mr. Muo’s Traveling Couch. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

New York Times Article and Review

Discussion Questions

1. In a mostly negative commentary, the reviewer for the New York Times conceded that the novel “delivers an important message: any system that fears knowledge and education, any system that closes the mind to moral and intellectual truth, is evil and will prove in the end to be impotent.” How does this message come about in Sijie’s novel? That is, how does he go about making this point?

2. In a very positive piece in the San Francisco Chronicle the reviewer notes that in the West readers tend to discount fables, but in other cultures “the fable remains a respected literary form.” Typically the fable comes off as a deceptively simple tale, often involving magic or the supernatural, intended to embody some important message or truth. What aspects of the fable do you detect in this novel?

3. At one point the narrator copies passages from a novel by Balzac onto the inside of his coat, and eventually he and Luo steal a suitcase full of books from Four-Eyes; they are that desperate for good reading. In this respect the novel may remind some readers of Azar Nafisi’s nonfiction “Memoir in Books,” Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), in which the women must do their reading surreptitiously in the newly formed Islamic Republic. Do we in the West take our free press and public libraries too much for granted?

4. In the third part of this novel Sijie introduces three very short narratives entitled “The Old Miller’s Story,” “Luo’s Story,” and “The Little Seamstress’s Story” (pp. 145-156). Of these three variant accounts of Luo and the Little Seamstress skinny-dipping, which do you find most appealing?

5. What role do you think her exposure to literature has on the Little Seamstress’s eventual decision to leave Phoenix mountain for the city? Do you think hearing the stories has freed her from ignorance and prepared her for the outside world, or do you see her departure as perilous, “inspired” as she is by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (p. 191), in which the protagonist ends up committing suicide? Has she learned a realistic and sensible lesson from Balzac?

6. Given the narrative viewpoint in this novel we don’t often get inside the Little Seamstress’s head; that is, we are rarely informed of what is on her mind. Do you think you understand her from what you are told? What might you like to know about her that you do not?

7. Does your reading about the writings of Balzac, Dumas, Romain Rolland and other writers (mostly French) prompt you to want to look into their work? Do you feel attracted to any one of these writers or books in particular?