Alternate Perspective

I have been familiar with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress for a long time. Whenever I visit my grandma's house, the book is sitting on its usual spot on the coffee table. I have seen this repeated image of the red shoes since I was a little girl. I always wondered about the book's plot. Was it a love story? A riveting tale of adventure? Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is much more complex than I could have imagined. 

Before reading this book, I had little knowledge of communism. I had never learned about it in school so I decided to do some research. Everything I read about communism did not appear to be too awful. Some academic websites painted communism to be an "ideal society" in which people work together as a community and no one person (with the exception of Chairman Mao, of course) has power over another. From the perspective of academic sources, communism sounded decent to me, it even sounded like a smart idea but the lack of intimacy in the description did not allow me to truly grasp the horrors of communism. This book offers an entirely new perspective; it features raw emotion, true suffering, and the struggles that we go through as developing teenagers. The book puts "a name to the face" so to speak. It gives those who suffered through re-education a voice. Academic descriptions of re-education do not feature intimate details of the great struggles that these oppressed adolescents persevered through. 

I am so grateful to Sijie for enlightening me on this topic. I think this book exemplifies the importance of first-hand accounts as academic sources can sometimes be almost too neutral and inhumane. Sijie's work and exceptional writing allows me to be immersed in the struggles of the characters. I feel connected to these characters, even though we come from extremely different backgrounds and situations. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an educating work but it is also an intimate and raw account of re-education.