Learning From Sijie

Recently, we've been reading Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie in english class. Although this book is considered to be a fictional novel, it is very effective in telling a historical event happened during the Cultural Revolution. Sijie wrote this book in an informal and relaxing tone, which makes it easier for readers to relate the fictional story to the historical period of the revolutionary period. Learning about a time in history is sometimes more personal when it comes from fictional novels because it shows history in a interesting and engaging way. A plain and wordy historical account will get its point across, but it is much harder for readers to understand fully.

This novel has increased my understanding of the Cultural Revolution just by the way it is written and presented. The author uses relatively simple and straightforward contexts and dialogues to portray the time of Cultural revolution and his experience of "re-education". At first I had absolutely no clue what re-education meant, but through his explicit historical contexts I began to grasp the significance of it. The narrator himself was sent to a rural countryside to be re-edcated by the peasants at his teen-ages. Apparently, those children from bourgeois families are required to be re-educated by lower class people. My understanding of the book becomes more vivid as I dive in further to this well-written novel.

This book absolutely opened my eyes to the Cultural Revolution and especially to the teenagers being sent away to the countrysides. I imagine myself in the shoes of the narrator and experiencing the unfavorable process of re-education. At least for me, historical fictions is more appealing than the account of the same exact events.