My Review of the Book
I liked the ending of the book. When I first started reading I thought it would just be about a romance and the boys growing up in the Chinese Cultural Revolution but I liked how the ending focused more on the Little Chinese Seamstress. It ended by her kind of rejecting the boy’s view of her, as they wanted to make her more like the one- dimensional woman they had read about, and her understanding more about herself due to the literature. This allowed her to understand her own power and leave the mountain.
Questions and Responses
When the narrator first reads Ursule Mirouet, even though he’s heard “nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life,” he is transformed by Balzac’s story of “awakening desire, passion, impulsive action…in spite of my complete ignorance of that distant land called France…Ursule’s story rang true as if it had been about my neighbours” (p 57).
- What is it that enables him to identify so strongly with characters and situations he has never experienced?
He can see similarities between what he is experiencing in China.
- What does this suggest about the power of literature?
It suggests that people can find things to relate to through stories and things can be communicated clearly through literature.
- In what ways does Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress exert a similar power?
The book shows this perspective of an important time in China’s history and it works as a way to educate people on it and show what it was possibly like.
- What does Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress reveal about the nature and purpose of China’s Cultural Revolution and the suffering it caused?
It communicates about the reasons for the revolution and you get a perspective of multiple people experiencing the changes and restrictions which helps to give an insight of what it was like.
- In this novel, what is reeducation? Who is truly being reeducated? Luo, Little Chinese Seamstress, the narrator? Why?
Reeducation was a way to change the ideologies and control the education to fit with what Chairman Mao wanted. It was the narrator and Luo who went for reeducation but I think it’s more of the Little Chinese Seamstress being reeducated. She was the one who grew from the experience of the boys being there rather than the other way around and through their influence she understood more about herself and her worth.
- In Luo’s section, he mentions that there are things that just cannot be taught such as dancing, diving and writing poetry. What does this imply about re-education?
It controls the creative and free knowledge and skills which is a way to control freedom and freedom of expression through these creative mediums.
- What does the final line of the book “a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price” mean?
It shows how the Little Seamstress has changed and understanding that her beauty is power and that power allows her to rebel against the society
- How is the little seamstress planning to use her beauty?
She used it, inspired by the literature, in order to leave the mountain and escape.
- How does this ending complicate the novel’s apparent endorsement of cosmopolitan western culture and literature over rural Chinese culture?
I think it still shows how it is favoring western culture and literature as the literature caused the character development and plot that occurred in the book but I think that since it didn’t cause for the Little Seamstress to become like the women in the books but instead be her own version and still link with the Chinese culture, it changes the intention of the book.
Evie's Learner Portfolio 