Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

During the Cultural Revolution, two teenage sons of denounced doctors are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village in Sichuan, where they haul coal, work the paddies, and discover a hidden suitcase of forbidden Western novels that changes everything, above all for the tailor's daughter one of them loves. Dai Sijie, himself sent to the Sichuan hills, draws on that real world of re-education: the mountain village, the mine and the fields, the tailor's house, and the county town far below.

The narrator

The mountain village

Re-education

High on the mountain called Phoenix of the Sky, the narrator and his friend Luo arrive for re-education, city boys among peasants who have never seen a violin or an alarm clock. Dai Sijie draws the isolation and strangeness of the re-education village, where a talent for storytelling becomes the two boys' only currency.

The opening chapters

inspired by The village of 'Phoenix of the Sky' where the boys are sent is drawn from the remote mountain communities of Sichuan to which city youths were sent for re-education; sited in that highland region.

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