Escaping the prison of the mind with the stench of literature. On Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

Kit Teguh
5 min readDec 23, 2024

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Dai Sijie, like the nameless narrator in the story, went through a period of re-education in Mao Zedong’s China where he needed to relearn what it was like to be a proletariat. In this regard, the book already comes from a very real place of experience and nostalgia, which clears the book off any clichés that might be attached to these types of stories. I didn’t know what the fuck I was expecting.

Balzac and China are not two things that you’d think necessarily would gel together (and in the book, of course it bloody well doesn’t). But Sijie, as an author and a person who had been through the same, is the embodiment of these two disconnected pieces: the Balzac novels and the little Chinese seamstress. And where these two fall in, there is a strange harmony in the plot.

The education of the re-educated

The children who were the victims of China’s re-education policy were children of the intellectuals and the upper class. The narrator’s father was a doctor; his best friend Luo’s father was a dentist. In an episode where the two witnessed the dentist being condemned, after having vowed to rescue him and unable to muster the courage to say anything, Luo ended up punching the narrator.

When they settled in the mountains grandiosely named “Phoenix of the Sky”, their re-education was nothing more than hard labour — a life in agriculture and coal-mining. Yet, there are some reprieves. When the two are commissioned to watch a movie and retell the story to the rest of the village, the two found a talent in storytelling. When the two friends stole a case of novels from a friend who was about to move back to the city, they found a treasure trove of stories to feed their starving imaginations.

Luo soon was infatuated with a little seamstress from the opposite side of the valley, whose father would travel around the region to sew outdated uniforms. The tailor has a reputation in the area and would be treated as a king whenever he comes to town. The tailor would stay where the two friends dwell to listen to their stories at night. Unknowingly, Luo was already doing the same thing whenever he visits the other side of the valley to tell stories to the tailor’s daughter.

Photo by Amirhossein Soltani on Unsplash

The relationship between Luo and the seamstress intensified over the course of time, to the point that she fell pregnant. As Luo was away when she found out, the narrator had to find a solution to save her honour, going to the city to see whether they could perform a safe abortion on her, but this is not a straightforward task, and the consequences dire.

Stories as the opium of the mind

I lived in Cambodia for seven years, in the small city of Phnom Penh. To be fair life was alright there, but looking back at it, I often thought about how I survived so long in such a place where nothing much really changes, the place frustrates you like no other and you’re somewhat aware of the heavy air of stagnation. I think I had my books to thank for that, as it kept me sane and grounded in a place where you could be unhinged at any given day. Yet, the fumes of literature had also managed to keep me there for so long.

There is more to it than just that, but I think my experiences mirror Luo’s and the narrator’s where they were able to find solace from the stories they read, that they were able to survive alone on food and literature were already small miracles. The stories allowed them an avenue of escape as they observe parallels in their lives with Edmond Dantes before he metamorphose into the Count of Monte Cristo. It furnished them with the bleak but melancholic world of Balzac, where daughters would betray their fathers for money. But the stories have also benefits beyond internal salvation. The stories, in fact, were the social currency which elevated their status, who also made them somebodies and in Luo’s case, to win the seamstress’s affections.

But this is a double edged sword. In the end, Luo and the narrator burned the books to ashes. The seamstress was lost to them after having resolved that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price, as Balzac would say. In the novels then, we would also select the information which suit our own internal biases. The tailor and the two boys were captivated by the Count of Monte Cristo and were enchanted with the idea of escape, but whether they did in the end is anybody’s guess. The seamstress had found an escape of her own and was willing to use her beauty as a currency for her own advantage. How she would use this treasure is ambiguous. Thus, we corrupt ourselves through stories as we get dangerously high on the opioid of our own reflection.

But there is something elusive in this novel beyond the words written on the pages. There is something here which we know is tangible, but any time we try to grasp it, it will escape through our fingertips. This is Luo’s keys lying at the bottom of the pond, where the snake is ready to bite anybody who would try to retrieve it. Should we be telling stories in that case? It is an action not fraught with its own dangers.

In Mao’s China this could mean the collapse of your entire family line and death to go with it. As Prospero drowned his books (and perhaps symbolically, Shakespeare himself retiring from storytelling), literature comes with its own warning signs. For somebody who reads more than enough, I am more than aware that after some point the stories we consume turn into poison. Yes, stories enrich us, they offer us an avenue of escape, but like anything else that can turn into addiction, moderation is imperative.

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Kit Teguh
Kit Teguh

Written by Kit Teguh

A full time project manager who loves to read on the side. Connect with me to chat anything tech and lit.

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