A short novel set in China during the Cultural Revolution. It focuses on two city teens who have been sent for reeducation to a remote, backwards mountain village. It basically sets the lie to the Cultural Revolution and the re-edcuation process. You see peasants who submit. You see educated people maintaing there sense of self in hidden, secret ways. You see the cadres fulfilling the role of petty dictators in love with their power.
The seamstress is a young girls that the boys introduce to a collection of forbidden Balzac novels, through storytelling. This is the only real re-education that takes place in the book.
The book is a study of the importance of literature and even of storytelling, as the boys become the village storytellers in several contexts. It shows how literature serves to develop and keep alive a sense of self, of the personal, in a sea of propaganda and mass culture.
Very well-written, spare storytelling.
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