Little Chinese Seamstress

“Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.” These wise words by Roman Payne, author of The Wanderess, perfectly encapture the central theme of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Sijie’s novel tells the story of a trio of friends who live on an isolated mountain village during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. During their time on this mountain, the young protagonists grow up and mature together, bringing the unmistakable ideals of coming to age to life. Throughout the duration of the story, Dai Sijie emphasizes the point that coming of age can often cause people to lash out if their future is threatened, or feel defeated when something of importance is suddenly taken away

This most commonly occurs when people lash out at those around them, especially when they are worried that they will not be able to change their future. For example, when the village leader visits the narrator and his close friend Luo with a request to fix his tooth, they are happy to help, but as soon as the village master threatens to blackmail the two friends, the narrator suddenly becomes cruel towards the village leader. During the procedure, the narrator, “pedaled more slowly, this time to punish him for threatening to take me into custody” (134). The narrator, who is commonly portrayed as a peaceful character, is suddenly overcome with anger at the thought of having his freedom taken away. He feels the need to get revenge for what the village leader has said, as a way to relieve some on the tension. Through this character, Sijie depicts a person’s common transformation when threatened. Although reacting in such a way is childish, it is important for maturing individuals to go through this process. If this crucial step is skipped, then many of us would continue with these behaviors well into adulthood, and never learn to change our ways. Additionally, as people mature, they lose memories that are significant to them, which ensures that they long for how things one were. During the narrator’s

The Seamstress shows us these first two phases, beginning with accepting other’s help. She has dreamed of becoming educated and sophisticated all her life, and the arrival of Luo and the narrator finally allows her to do so. After Luo and the narrator have gained access to one of the many forbidden books one of their acquaintances, Four-Eyes, has in his possession, Luo begins to read to the Seamstress quite often as part of his plan to educate her, after insisting, “‘She’s not civilized, at least not enough for me!’” (27). What Luo fails to realize in this situation is the fact that the Seamstress is the one who allowed Luo to help her, since she realized that he is her ticket to becoming a new person. Through the Seamstress, Sijie is showing us that the initial step towards maturing is to recognize your flaws, and allow yourself to change. While this could be accomplished alone, it is easier to have another person aid you in this process, since admitting you want a change is the best way to go about doing so. Once you have completed this step, you can move on to putting the change in action. At the end of the novel, we see the Seamstress leave her home in pursuit of a better life. According to Luo, her final remarks were, “‘that she had learnt one