Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress By Dai Sijie

Young people always want to be older and mature because they want to experience all of the benefits of being older. Although this may be true, in Dai Sijie’s novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which focuses on the growth of three main characters in a remote village during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Dai expresses the idea that achieving full maturity isn’t a smooth road towards benefits, but it is one with bumps and potholes. Maturity can’t be obtained easily, it’s obtaining through experience the necessary amount to mature even more. Dai implements many writing strategies by using his own experiences with the Chinese Culture that he grew up with to convey this message. Dai’s repeated mentioning of the number “three” represents

The narrator expresses his anguish by stating, “We were doomed to spend our entire lives being re-educated… the chances of returning home were infinitesimal: three in a thousand”(17). The first of the three life stages, birth, can be seen with Luo’s and the narrator’s inability to look through other perspectives, when they both illustrate their oblivious personalities and their inability to cope with the raw emotions of being displaced from home. Luo’s and the narrator’s personalities at the beginning of the book [Such behavior is similar to] ] can be related to the moody behavior that adolescents and young adults show to their parents. Their inability to cope and process new and potentially complex situations results in their openly complaining and expressing their feelings in a dramatic fashion. This open communication, however, can strengthen the relationships between the parent and

The narrator recounts that “At my first shout she hastened her step...at my third she took off like a bird, growing smaller and smaller until she vanished”(184), showing how painful and significant that moment in their lives was. After the narrator and Luo find out that the Little Seamstress is leaving, the “funeral pyre” of books allowed them to acknowledge that the books weren’t just for entertainment value, but they also had the ability to expose readers to worlds and different ways of thinking beyond the reader’s immediate environment. The end of Luo’s and the narrator’s relationship with the Seamstress allowed them to re-evaluate their values and beliefs about books. This can be linked to the strengthening of other relationships due to the grief that follows. When something as traumatic as death happens, death has the ability to make the people experiencing the death to question their priorities and beliefs.The re-evaluation of lives can be seen as a positive outcome of death because despite being fully mature, the people who are experiencing the death are learning from their experiences and using that to improve their