Dai Sijie’s book ‘Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’ Essay

In Dai Sijie’s book, ‘Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’, the two main characters are brought together to experience the hardships of re-education but even then they manage to stay ‘hopeful’. Dai Sijie focuses on the survival and the power of human spirit and imagination to endure of Luo and the narrator, Ma. The boys stay ‘hopeful’ by finding solutions to their problems during the re-education. Luo feels physically tired and so turns back the hands of the clock to get some extra sleep so he can get through the day. The Little Chinese Seamstress tries and cures Luo of his disease even though she doesn’t have the proper medical equipment. Four-Eyes on the other hand continues to try and impress the peasants by risking the chance of getting caught with all the banned books by leaving his door open just to display his trust in the peasants and by hiding away meat and pretending that he doesn’t eat meat to please them. The boys can be viewed as ‘hopeful’ in the ways in which they adapt to and find solutions to the hardships of re-education such as manipulating the start of the working day with the alarm clock. The boys confess a few days after getting to the mountain and carrying the buckets of shit up and down the mountain, ‘in the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times we had no idea what the time really was.’ The boys take advantage of the peasants’ ignorance of technology to cheat the village of their labor. But they are only doing this because of the harshness of re-education that led them to be this physically drained out. They were being forced to turn into cheaters but for them this wasn’t deceiving, it was merely how they believed they could bring their bodies back to normal and start adapting to the change. By saying losing track of ‘what the time really was’, Dai Sijie also symbolizes their fear of never returning to their families and leading their old lives. Besides Luo finding a solution to the hard working conditions during the re-education, the Little Chinese Seamstress found a solution to curing Luo’s malaria and stayed ‘hopeful’. Although during the time of the re-education, there were no proper medical care and due to that Luo may have suffered from malaria for a long time. On the way to the Little Chinese Seamstress’s house for the oral cinema in her town, another attack struck Luo and when they arrived at, Luo looked really sick so the Little Chinese Seamstress used a natural medicine on him and hoped that it worked. She didn’t panic and act irrationally. The remedy that used was a natural paste made of the leaves of a plant called ‘Broken-bowl-shards.’ This shows that the Seamstress believes in nature and tries her luck wherever she can. She says ‘In my opinion you can’t believe in them totally, but you can’t deny them either.’ This just proves that whethe r or not the results are going to be as desired, it is definitely worth a shot. Four-Eyes is a representation of a character who would do anything to escape re-education and his continuous tries are what make him seem ‘hopeful’ that one day he will succeed. Ever since he has been living on the mountain, he doesn’t lock the doors of his house. When the readers first hear from him about this he claims that he is ‘so anxious to demonstrate his trust in the revolutionary peasants that he never used to lock his doors.’ This just proves how desperate he is for their trust. He leaves his door unlocked even though he has a hidden suitcase of books that if found, can get him into serious troubles but he is willing to take that risk. He is also abstaining from meat. ‘He would spring to his feet, quickly hide the pan in a corner as if it were contraband, and put out a dish of marinated vegetables.’ This not only portrays his fear, but the use of the word ‘contraband’ by Dai Sijie is interesting as it brings up other suggestions. Contrabands are illegally smuggled goods and the comparison between the meat and the contraband shows how scared Four-Eyes is. To Four-Eyes, ‘eating meat struck him a crime typical of the bourgeois class to which his family belonged’ so he decided to sacrifice eating meat. Four-Eyes stops at nothing to gain his pleasures. This single-mindedness in the face of adversity (when he breaks his glasses and the boys find him trying to carry the rice sacks alone) could be viewed as a form of hopefulness. To conclude, I have to say that the boys need to be credited for having dealt with their situations so optimistically. They only had a ‘three in a thousand chance’ of returning home but even then they have stayed ‘hopeful’ through the novel and took things as they came their way. I believe that the characters’ main way of staying ‘hopeful’ is by finding solutions to the problems and hardships of their life currently during the re-education at the Phoenix Mountain. What the two boys have taken from this experience definitely has been the ability to be independent and solve situations they are faced with and most importantly learnt that success can be achieved by staying ‘hopeful’. Also the books and their passion for literature has indeed played a part in this as the books is what has kept them going for this long and they work so hard all day only knowing that later at night they have the book to go back to and relax. Their hope to keep them going through the day is the thought of knowing that this means they can go home to reading. Four-Eyes on the other hand has this obsessive pursuit of freedom and his hope is what is keeping that driving force in him going but in this battle, he has lost his temper and feels agitated as his results are not coming out positive.