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    A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress"
    A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress"
    A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress"
    Ebook39 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535819091
    A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress"

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      A Study Guide for Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" - Gale

      12

      Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

      Dai Sijie

      2000

      Introduction

      The Chinese émigré filmmaker and author Dai Sijie earned resounding praise among French-speaking audiences, as well as five literary prizes, with the publication of his first novel, Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise (2000), translated into English by Ina Rilke in 2001 as Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Dai directed the film version of the novel, which was released in 2002 and brought him further global exposure.

      The tale revolves around two urban youths who, during Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong's infamous Cultural Revolution, find themselves condemned to indefinite reeducation in a rural village near the peak of a mountain dubbed Phoenix of the Sky, where manual labor is intended to reorient the youths away from suspicious bourgeois interests. But the youths happen upon a friend's stash of forbidden books. The works of Honoréde Balzac (1799–1850), one of the most treasured figures in French literature, and other Western authors play revolutionary roles in the lives of the two young men and a mutual friend, the strikingly beautiful Little Seamstress. Offering meditations on the trappings of rural life, the value of literature, and the nature of love—with occasional discreet references to physical romance—the book is an enlightening read for younger and older adults alike.

      Author Biography

      Dai Sijie was born in the city of Putian, Fujian Province—on the southeastern coast of China, opposite the island of Taiwan—on March 2, 1954. Both of his parents were doctors, and in 1971, during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, he was sent along with three other teenage boys to a rural village for reeducation, a stay that would last three years. His circumstances and experiences under reeducation in many respects mirror those of the narrator of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000), his first novel, which is acknowledged to be autobiographical in foundation. As Dai told Yu Sen-lun in the Taipei Times, There was a real love story, but not as romantic. The stealing books part is true and the experience of reading stories to farmers is also true. The Cultural Revolution effectively ended with Mao's death in 1978. In 1984, Dai won a scholarship to attend France's École des Beaux-Arts and left China to study Western art and then cinema. He would become a permanent resident of Paris.

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