Coming of Age Theme Analysis

At its most basic level, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress tells the coming of age stories of Luo, the Little Seamstress, and the narrator. While the three engage in the perfectly normal process of testing boundaries and questioning the truth of what they've been taught by parents and the government, the particularly oppressive nature of the Cultural Revolution makes this process significantly more dangerous and high-stakes for them.

Because Luo and the narrator's parents have been labeled enemies of the state, the chances that Luo and the narrator will be allowed to return to their families is three in a thousand. This creates a great deal of anxiety for them around their coming of age, as their time on the mountain doesn't necessarily have an end date. The boys find themselves in a state of limbo, which leads them to grasp for ways to try to control their futures. As a violinist, the narrator knows that if he becomes accomplished enough, he could possibly have a future playing communist music. Luo, however, has no such talent to get him away from the mountain. Instead, he turns to romance with the Little Seamstress as preparation for the future, as the narrator indicates that Luo marrying the Little Seamstress is a distinct possibility. Luo views his secret rendezvous with the Little Seamstress as a mental and emotional escape. However, even though knowing he'll marry the Little Seamstress makes Luo slightly happier, it can’t replace the hurt of being denied the future he once thought he would have.

The narrator and Luo's coming of age begins to take off when they're introduced to the possibility of reading literature. The narrator tells the reader that all literature, western as well as Chinese, had been banned at the start of the Cultural Revolution. By the time he and Luo learned to read, the only thing to read was Mao's "Little Red Book." He describes the thought of literature as being intoxicating: just hearing about it is enough to conjure the idea perfectly in one's mine. All the novels in Four-Eyes' suitcase open the boys' eyes to the western world and to adult concepts like love and sex. Notably, Luo and the Little Seamstress have sex for the first time after Luo reads Balzac's Ursule Mirouët, which suggests that western literature paved the way for his and the Little Seamstress's sexual coming of age.

The narrator develops his own unique view on life and the world around him after reading the novel Jean-Christophe by Romain Rollande. Jean-Christophe is particularly intoxicating to the narrator because it features a character who takes "free individual action against the whole world"—an idea that goes against every communist teaching the narrator has ever heard. This leads the narrator to wish for something that is wholly his own, not something shared with Luo as most of their possessions are. This idea of independence as a marker for maturity applies to the Little Seamstress, as well. Thanks to what she learns from western literature via the narrator and Luo, she finds the power within herself to actually take individual action against the world by leaving the mountain and her lover behind. Though love, sex, and education are some of the first ways in which the characters begin their coming of age processes, the novel suggests that the final tipping point to maturity occurs when a character seeks independence as a consequence of what they've learned from love or literature.