Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

The village headman sits in the center of the house on stilts, inspecting the narrator's violin. The entire village looks on as the headman declares the violin a toy. The headman passes the violin to the villagers and deems it a "bourgeois toy," chilling the narrator and his friend, Luo. The room erupts with shouts to burn the violin, but Luo casually interjects that the violin is a musical instrument.

The headman passes the violin back to the narrator as Luo explains that the narrator is going to play a Mozart sonata. The narrator is terrified—all music by western composers has been banned for years. The headman asks what the song is called, and Luo says the song is called "Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao." The headman says that Mozart is always thinking of Chairman Mao, and Luo agrees. The narrator begins to play, and the villagers listen attentively. Luo lights a cigarette.

The narrator addresses the reader and explains that in 1968, Chairman Mao began a campaign to close universities and send the "young intellectuals" to the countryside for re-education by the peasants. He continues that Mao's motives were unclear, but that the narrator and Luo decided that Mao simply hated intellectuals. However, the fact that the narrator and Luo are considered intellectuals is ironic, given that they've only completed middle school by the time they're sent to the mountain in 1971. The narrator says that even in middle school, he and Luo learned nothing, as the official curriculum consisted solely of lessons on industry and agriculture. All books aside from Mao's Little Red Book were forbidden.

Luo and the narrator were deemed intellectuals because their parents had been labeled "enemies of the state." The narrator's parents were doctors; Luo's father was a famous dentist who claimed to have performed dental work on Mao, Mao's wife, and Jiang Jieshi, the prior president of China. Claiming to have worked on Mao's teeth was already a crime; saying in the same sentence that he'd worked on Jiang Jieshi's teeth only compounded the severity of the crime.

The narrator says that he and Luo grew up in apartments next to each other and were best friends. Luo only hit the narrator once, in 1968. A political rally was happening, and the dentist was going to be publically humiliated. Luo and the narrator ventured to the rally, where they saw the dentist on his hands and knees, wearing a heavy cement sign around his neck bearing his name and the word "reactionary." A man, speaking angrily over a loudspeaker, interrogated the dentist about sleeping with a nurse. The narrator began to cry, and Luo punched him.