This book, Balzac and the Little Seamstress, is a little treasure. It was such a surprise find. One of friends had it on her shelf and I read it one morning. It's less than 200 pages, so it's a quick read.

Packed in those few pages is a great story of defiance in the face of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The tale centers around two friends from the city who are shipped off to one of the most remote parts of China to work in the fields. Their struggle for survival is helped along with the find of a cache of outlawed western novels including some, of course, from Balzac.

This is one of my favorite passages from the novel:

Watching them during fittings, Luo and I were amazed to see how agitated they were, how impatient, how physical their desire for new clothes was. It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.

The book really turns the Cultural Revolution on its ear. These youths who are sent to the countryside are not only not "re-educated", but instead infect the villagers with their "western" ways through their storytelling.

At first the village headman sends the boys into the closest town to watch North Korean movies and retell the stories to the peasants. When they find a suitcase full of books, they start reinacting the stories from this library of classics. This all has dramatic effects for everyone they come in contact with, especially the Little Seamstress.