A Chinese Re-education in the Cliche

This is a novel about the power of literature to refashion and enlarge our imaginations. It’s about the irrepressible nature of the human spirit. It’s about first love, individualism, personal liberty and choice, at a time when freedom is in short supply. All of it, wrought together in a novel that is at once witty and wistful, funny and sad.

Two 19-year-olds — one of them is Luo, whose dentist father fixed Mao’s decaying teeth, and the other is the nameless narrator — are pulled out of their citified existence and assigned to a remote village for ‘‘re-education’’ in the ways of peasanthood. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the boys are victims because their parents are ‘‘class enemies’’ of the people. Made to carry hods of excrement and dig for coal in the village mines, the duo have little other than a buoyant sense of humour to keep them going.

To beguile their tedium, and make their tasks seem just a little less arduous, there is the beautiful Little Seamstress, daughter of the local tailor, and a suitcase full of books of Western authors, including Balzac, Dumas and Flaubert.

They manage to get their hands on the first book, a beat-up volume by Balzac, by bullying Four-Eyes, another ‘bourgeois’ friend. It’s a book that will transform three lives. While the narrator and Luo gorge on page after page of the French author, it’s the Little Seamstress, a cultural ignoramus, whose life is touched and transformed beyond recognition by his writings.

As the narrator says: ‘‘Picture if you will, a boy of 19, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had… been hidden from me.’’

This true ‘‘re-education’’ proceeds with twists and turns of humour, some of it wry. Sijie’s adolescents, however, are a slapstick duo. They introduce a Mozart sonata to the village as ‘‘Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao’’, fiddle with the hands of the clock to buy extra time before work, mistakenly down lamp oil instead of alcohol when drunk, and take great pleasure in drilling a hole into the village headman’s cavity with a sewing machine. Luo is also a great storyteller, and after a few weeks in the village, the boys are allowed to attend the movies in a nearby town, and then put on an ‘‘oral cinema show’’ for the villagers.

Sijie has obviously put his cinematic vision to use in the book. Scenes are simply but delightfully etched out, and the characters spring to life easily. But what makes Sijie’s debut truly enchanting is his success in lifting the story out of the Chinese countryside and into the realm of universal human experience.