-Study Guide for Balzac the Little Chinese Seamstress-

Directions: First, respond to each question and provide at least one good contextualized, tagged, properly punctuated, MLA-cited quotation from the novel within each of the responses. Do this in your journal. Second, chose ONLY ONE of the prompts below and write at least one page in your journal as a response to the prompt. For Assignment #3, there is only one prompt for you to respond to. For Assignment #4, there are no prompts to respond to.

Reading Assignment #1: page 3-41

Focus Questions:

Be prepared to answer each of the following in class. Take notes as needed.

  1. Where, exactly, are Luo and the narrator? Why are they there? How remote is it?
  2. For the villagers, what does the violin represent? What does the alarm clock represent?
  3. What 'crimes' had Luo and the narrators' parents committed? How was Luo's father treated? Based on the opening section of the novel, how would you characterize Sijie's view of Chinese Communism?
  4. Characterize the boys. How do they differ from the villagers? What job must they do? Where do they live?
  5. Why do they have "plenty of cause for dejection"? What role does music play in their lives? What music do they find most cheerful, and why?
  6. How is Luo rewarded for his storytelling skill? How do stories help them cope with their situation? Did re-education 'backfire'? How were the rural villagers educated by the urban exiles?
  7. What do the seamstress's eyes represent? What might the seamstress find attractive about the boys? Why does Luo claim that he is not attracted to the Seamstress?
  8. How do the coalminers treat Luo's malaria? How does the Little Seamstress treat him?
  9. According to Sijie, what was the state of rural Chinese medicine in the early 1970s?
  10. Why does the Little Seamstress find Luo attractive?

Prompt #1

Create a scenario in which you must endure 're-education' here in the U.S. Where would you be sent? Why? How would react to being removed from your home and family? How would you react to a rural authoritarian who forces you to do the worst jobs? How would you react to the absence of 'civilization', technology, and education?

Prompt #2

Luo and the narrator do receive a "re-education". What do they learn that they never would have learned in the modern, urban, bourgeois world they were forced to leave? What do they learn about themselves, and what do they learn from the rural villagers?

Reading Assignment #2: pages 45 - 89

Focus Questions:

  1. Who is Four-Eyes? What do Four-Eyes' parents do for a living? Why is he filled with fear? Do you trust him? How does he differ from Luo?
  2. If Mao had not banned books and sent the boys to the country, would they have spent so much time thinking about books? How and why did the ban on books increase their interest in literature?
  3. What is "the magic of translation"? What is lost, and what is gained, in translations?
  4. Why Balzac's Ursule Mirouet? Why can the boys relate to the nineteenth-century French novel?
  5. What is the significance of copying Balzac passages into the wool coat from the villagers?
  6. Were you surprised by Luo and the Little Seamstress's sudden union? Based on Luo description, what sort of love do you think they share? Why did Luo save the leaves?
  7. How does the Seamstress react to Balzac's story?
  8. What concern does Luo's comment, "that would have made her more refined, more cultured..." suggest about Luo views and concerns about his relationship with the Seamstress? (61)
  9. What contrast does the Miller on the Thousand-Metre-Cliff provide? How do his "authentic folk songs full of romantic realism" differ from the literature that the boys covet? What comparison does Sijie make between the people of rural China and those, like the boys, who were "re-educated" in the countryside? What is Sijie's critique, and how does he deliver it?
  10. How does Four-Eyes revise the Miller's "authentic" tales? What is absurd about this revision?
  11. How does Four-Eyes' mother arrive? What does her character suggest about Mao's attempt to erase class lines and eliminate social status in Communist China?

-2-

Prompt #1

If the U.S. government, like Mao's Chinese government, decided to ban all books that might arouse dissent or controversy, what books would you hide from the censors? Pick four books for which you would be willing to risk your life. Explain your choices.

Prompt #2

What makes forbidden books more appealing? Why do we want what we can't have? What makes it difficult to ban ideas? How are the boys enacted their own form of resistance to Mao? In your own 'banned books bag', what sort of resistance do you envision?

Reading Assignment #3: pages 90 - 134.

Focus Questions:

  1. Why doesn't our narrator tell us his name?
  2. What does the red-beaked raven symbolize?
  3. What might the buffalo tail represent?
  4. What do the narrator's dreams predict? Should we take them seriously?
  5. What does the vertiginous ravine crossing represent?
  6. Why does the narrator find Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo compelling? To what can he relate?
  7. Note the narrator's comments on Chinese Communism. What are his political views? How does use dentistry to take enact and express his political anger?
  8. What does the tailor represent? Why do women seek him out? In a time of sartorial standardization, what is problematic about his role and his appeal?
  9. What does the narrator tell us about his "cultural education" in China? How does he feel about his official education? What does he seek from Western literature? What has he learned from his forced "re-education"? How does Sijie's novel contrast the lessons learned from books to the lessons that can only be learned from life?

Prompt #1

How does the literature the boys obtain change them? Based on the specific changes you identify, what is the power of stories?

Reading Assignment #4: pages 135 - 184.

Focus Questions:

  1. What do the red-beaked ravens represent?
  2. Why does Sijie introduce three new perspectives? Why doesn't he let our 'regular' narrator tell the story of Luo and the Seamstress' love? How do the narratives offered by the Miller, the Seamstress, and Luo differ from that offered by our 'usual' narrator? What role might jealousy play in the narrative shift?
  3. What does Luo want to change about the Seamstress? What does this tell us about Luo and his "re-education"?
  4. What do Luo's keys represent? Why did the Seamstress dive to the keys' rescue?
  5. How does Chinese law make the Seamstress's bad situation worse?
  6. The final section of the novel criticizes the many restrictions and hardships created by both Mao and traditional Chinese culture. What does Sijie criticize most severely?
  7. What does Sijie's novel suggest about the role and fate of women in rural China? In the end, is this a fundamentally feminist novel? If so, what is surprising about its feminism?
  8. How does Western literature change the Seamstress? How does the re-education program end up changing her in ways not intended by the program's Communist creators? How did the Seamstress transform herself, and why?
  9. Why do the boys burn their beloved books?