Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel by Dai Sijie

By Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little chinese language Seamstress is a fascinating story that captures the magic of examining and the beauty of romantic awakening. an instantaneous overseas bestseller, it tells the tale of 2 hapless urban boys exiled to a distant mountain village for re-education in the course of China’s notorious Cultural Revolution. There the 2 acquaintances meet the daughter of the neighborhood tailor and find a hidden stash of Western classics in chinese language translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly consume those banned works, the 2 buddies locate transit from their grim atmosphere to worlds they by no means imagined.

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Example text

That was something which progressive and wise Tibetans, including the Dalai Lama, had wanted to do themselves, but without the use of force. At present negotiations are still in progress, and the Dalai Lama can afford to wait. In consequence, there is no immediate prospect of the return of the approximately 100,000 Tibetans living in exile. But do they want to return to their old homeland? The 40,000 to 50,000 Tibetans settled in southern India are said to be anxious to return, nearly all of them, even though they have put down new roots and, thanks to their adaptability and hard work, have found accommodation and own their fields.

In June 1980 they devised a program of reforms that was to grant the Tibetans selfdetermination and self-administration. They would now be able to decide for themselves what crops they wanted to grow, and they would be free to sell their harvest surpluses. They were once more allowed to cultivate their own plots of land and to keep yaks and sheep. It was promised that eighty percent of the 200,000 Chinese would leave Tibet by 1982, and those remaining were advised to learn the Tibetan language.

These were predominantly nobles, semi-nobles and lamas; they were punished by being made to perform the lowliest tasks, such as laboring on roads and bridges. They were further humiliated by being made to clean up the city before the tourists arrived; they were subsequently packed into trucks and kept out of sight while the first tourists and, more important, the Dalai Lama's delegation arrived. There was a camp for these outcasts a short distance east of Lhasa— Tsal Gungthang—originally for beggars and vagrants.

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