48 pages • 1 hour read
Dai Sijie, Transl. Ina RilkeBalzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 7-9 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary
Just before Luo leaves, he asks the Narrator to guard the Little Seamstress from rival suitors. The Narrator is touched by his trust and determined to honor his request, conquering his fear of the narrow ridge between their villages to visit the Little Seamstress daily. He reads to her as she works, embellishing the stories in his own style, and helps with household chores.
Walking home one evening, he is followed by a hostile group of the Little Seamstress’s suitors, who taunt and insult the Narrator. They scuffle, and the Narrator accidentally reveals the book he carries though the suitors don’t recognize its significance. He flees with the book in hand, and his ear is injured by the stones they throw after him.
That night he lies awake and tormented, fantasizing that the attackers are chopping off his ear only to be interrupted by the Little Seamstress. He pleasures himself while imagining that she allows him to lick balsam juice from her fingers, and afterward he feels ashamed of the perceived betrayal of his self-imposed duties.
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary
He visits the Little Seamstress the next day, planning to tell her that he can no longer visit, but instead she confides in him that she is pregnant with Luo’s child. Weeping, she says it has been around two months, though she didn’t yet know before Luo left, and if her father finds out he will kill Luo. The Narrator weeps too, deeply moved, and is willing to do whatever it takes to help.
The laws have trapped the Little Seamstress in an impossible situation: It is illegal to give birth outside of marriage, illegal to have an abortion, and illegal to marry at their age. She would never be allowed to keep the child as no doctor would break the law to deliver the baby in secret, and there is no way to hide from the government, even in the wilderness. The Narrator dissuades her from seeking an herbal remedy from the sorceresses lest she be denounced or poisoned, and from jumping off the roof in hopes of triggering a pregnancy loss lest she risk causing herself permanent injury. He admires Luo’s foresight in making him her guardian.
The Narrator goes to the small hospital in Yong Jing in the hopes of meeting a doctor willing to perform an abortion. He manages to catch a glimpse of the gynecologist before fleeing from the suspicion and hostility of the waiting female patients. He has no further luck until he notes the absence of the town’s street sweeper, an old Christian priest who had been forbidden from practicing his faith these past 20 years and sentenced to sweep the street as punishment for keeping a Latin Bible. The Narrator discovers that the old priest is on his deathbed in the hospital, and in desperation plans to visit him to ask for guidance.
The hospital ward is chaotic and bustling like a refugee camp, overcrowded with ill people and visitors cooking, very different from the hospitals in the city where his parents worked. The sons of the old priest, now bureaucrats in the city, want to record their father saying something pro-government so that his grandchildren will be able to hear his voice and know that he wasn’t actually a counterrevolutionary. Instead, the old man whispers a nearly unintelligible Latin prayer and slips into a coma.
At that moment, the Narrator notices the gynecologist passing in the corridor and follows him to the emergency room. The Narrator introduces himself, hoping the doctor might have known his parents, and claims that his sister needs his help. The gynecologist knows that the Narrator’s parents have no daughter and angrily dismisses him, so the Narrator instead offers to give the doctor a book by Balzac in exchange for his help, showing him the excerpts written in his sheepskin jacket as proof. The doctor recognizes the passages and the translator’s style, moving the Narrator to tears, and agrees to help.
The following Thursday the Narrator accompanies the Little Seamstress, in disguise, to the hospital. He waits outside until the doctor tells him that the abortion has been successfully performed, and that the baby would have been a girl. The Narrator gives him Jean-Christophe as well as Ursule Mirouet in gratitude.
The Narrator and the Little Seamstress leave Yong Jing full of relief, stopping by the simple grave of the old priest on the way back and leaving him an offering of tangerines in thanks for his part in the affair. They contemplate swearing an oath to learn Latin in his honor, but instead vow that if ever they should become rich, and Christianity decriminalized, they’ll erect a handsome monument on his grave showing the old priest with a crown of thorns and a broom.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary
The Narrator declares this the end of the story, and everything else that happened is merely the aftermath. He describes the scene of Luo setting fire to the books one by one. It’s night and he is drunk, crying and laughing as the paper goes up in flames and the Narrator plays his violin, both of them frantic.
The Little Seamstress left the mountain suddenly the prior morning, catching them by surprise, although retrospectively they were able to note signs of her impending departure. She had been putting significant effort into making herself appear like a city girl, copying Luo and the Narrator’s accent, cutting her hair into a modern bob, and changing her wardrobe. She revealed herself to them on the day of the Western New Year looking like a high school student from the city, sensual and stylish. Luo was delighted at the payoff of his work transforming her.
The tailor came to their village the day she left, telling them of her departure. She had only informed him of her plans to move the evening before, having already organized the paperwork to travel, promising to write once she was settled. Luo and the Narrator tell him they had no idea of her plans, and Luo asks why the tailor didn’t stop her. The tailor says it was already too late, and he has told her that if she leaves, she can never return.
Luo and the Narrator both run after her, the Narrator fearing that she might have fallen, but they find her at her grandfather’s gravesite. The boys collapse in exhaustion, and then the Narrator cooks some sweet potatoes, secretly angry that the Little Seamstress didn’t confide in him. Luo and the Little Seamstress stand in silence for a while and then talk quietly. She then leaves.
The Narrator calls after her to wait, offering her a potato, but she flees. Luo is pale and tells the Narrator that she wants to go to the city because she learned of the immeasurable value of a woman’s beauty from Balzac.
Part 3, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
The focus in these final three chapters is on the relationship between the Narrator and the Little Seamstress, exploring Loyalty and Trust in Love and Friendship. Luo is absent through all but the final chapter, and the Narrator acts as his proxy and representative in the Little Seamstress’s household. The Narrator helps the Little Seamstress with household chores, up to and including doing her laundry, about which he is taunted by her jealous suitors. Through these domestic duties the Little Seamstress welcomes the Narrator into a private and traditionally feminine sphere. They consequently share a platonic intimacy that is presumably entirely different from that which she shares with Luo in their romantic entanglements, but no less deep.
The Narrator clearly desires the Little Seamstress, but that desire generally only surfaces in isolated moments when he is struck by her beauty, or otherwise overcome by a sensory yearning, such as when he longs to lick the balsam juice from her fingers. His desire to lick her fingers is checked by the presence of the snakebite scar she got while playing with Luo, and his other impulses are also reined in by his loyalty to Luo. He fantasizes firstly that he is a soldier tasked with protecting his captain’s wife, then that he is a secret agent with a mission, and only finally does he lose himself in imaginings of being the Little Seamstress’s lover.
However, he never acts on his desires or behaves toward the Little Seamstress in a way that is anything but platonic. Even in her absence, he tries to introduce her to the gynecologist as his sister first rather than his girlfriend. His dedication to Loyalty and Trust in Love and Friendship means that the Narrator still considers his pleasuring of himself to thoughts of the Little Seamstress as a betrayal of his self-imposed mission. The first-person narrative provides insight into his internal struggles even when they do not surface in his interactions with other characters, so that the private conflict the Narrator experiences becomes explicit to the reader.
When the Narrator visits the hospital in Yong Jing, he is surprised at the chaos and disorder in the wards. While he has perhaps become accustomed to the poverty of the countryside in most other spheres, his experiences with hospitals were previously limited to the modern and presumably well-funded city hospitals where his parents worked. The doctor he hires seems perpetually tired and tends to injuries in the emergency room on top of his role as a gynecologist. The lack of kitchen facilities and the overcrowding in the hospital waiting rooms and wards remind him of a refugee camp, which hints at the desperation of an overtaxed and outdated healthcare system.
The Narrator ruminates on the fact that his parents are just as morally strict as the Communist regime that condemns them, and knows that they would disown him if he ever approached them in need of an abortion. The Narrator and the Little Seamstress both seem aware that it was only luck that allowed them to meet with a sympathetic doctor capable of performing the operation, and that he was willing to accept books as payment. With the Buddhist temple closed and for want of a more apparent target, the Narrator and the Little Seamstress attribute their good fortune to the influence of the old priest, giving their gratitude and relief over to his memory.
The Narrator presents the final chapter as an epilogue, as though the end of the narrative is a mere afterthought. Both the romantic plotline between Luo and the Little Seamstress, and the plotline exploring the boys’ forays into the world of forbidden literature, end abruptly. Luo’s burning of the books and the Narrator’s passive acceptance of the destruction illustrate the depth of their grief, as well as their resentment toward the Little Seamstress. The books are their most precious possessions as well as a proxy for the transformed Little Seamstress, adding an unexpected twist to The Transformative Influence of Literature. By destroying them, the boys are punishing themselves and the Little Seamstress by rejecting the liberation offered by the books. The Narrator’s listing of each book and his detailed description of their destruction as they turn to ash builds up a somber mood, emphasizing the magnitude of what they are casting away in their grief.
The Little Seamstress’s departure also reveals a more self-determined aspect of her character, which the boys have failed to fully notice until she leaves. Her transformation and determination to leave the mountain forever, even if it means her father disowning her, is an ironic inversion of Luo’s previous belief that he was the one “transforming” her and influencing her into being the more sophisticated, worldly woman he desired for himself. His possessiveness of her and the credit he takes for her personal development are exposed as misguided and false, as the Little Seamstress instead defies him by taking control of her destiny and leaving him behind.
