Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Analysis

Dai Sijie is the Chinese author, who opposites side of the government of China during the Cultural Revolution, which is his childhood that he has to go to be re-educated by poor peasants. The setting of this book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, is the re-education at that time, and the main characters of this book, Luo and Ma, are re-educated students like Sijie. He uses these literary elements to reveal political or social issues about the social class by the education difference, the area of living, and desire to read.
In the Sijie’s book, the characters’ traits are used to explore the education difference because the villagers, who live in the Phoenix of Mountain, learn how they survive by farming and mining rather than reading and writing. In the movie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, directed by Sijie, when the headman of the village examines Luo and Ma’s bag, he finds the “Cookbook.” The headman and villagers, however, do not know that was the cookbook, even the headman holds it upside down. Though this, it shows that the villagers and headman, who live in a rural area, do not have literacy. This illiteracy represents their social class. The headman and villagers are living in rural area and lower class. Unlike them, Luo and Ma can read that cookbook, and it shows they are from urban area and upper class. However, it does not mean that they are not educated at all because they are educated how they are farming and mining, but the narrator, Ma, and