NOVEL THOUGHTS
………
KNOPF, 2001
(available in paperback from Anchor, 2002)
BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS is set in Communist China in 1971, when Mao’s Cultural Revolution was sweeping the country, closing universities, banning Western literature, and sending young urban intellectuals to the countryside for “reeducation.” When their parents are named “enemies of the people,” two teenage boys—the unnamed narrator and his best friend, Luo—are sent from the city of Chengdu to the poorest village on a remote mountain, known as Phoenix in the Sky. Their reeducation means backbreaking labor carrying buckets of excrement up and down the mountain’s winding roads to fertilize the fields, and hauling coal from the mines.
Despite the harsh setting, the novel’s tone is lighthearted and comical, chronicling the boys’ adventures as they charm, outwit, and entertain the villagers. The spirited pals discover a way to obtain Chinese translations of forbidden Western classics, including Honoré de Balzac’s novel Ursule Mirouet, from Four-Eyes, a fellow exile in a nearby village. The narrator cherishes Balzac’s story and discovers “awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden.”
The daughter of a tailor from the next village, the “Little Seamstress,” enchants the boys, and a love triangle forms among the three. The boys hatch a plan to steal Four-Eyes’s cache of books to feed their souls and to begin their own reeducation program: transforming the illiterate peasant seamstress into a worldly, sophisticated woman.
When the boys become known for their storytelling abilities, the village headman dispatches them to watch movies in a neighboring town, so they can entertain villagers with oral presentations of the film upon their return. Their trips provide a respite from hard labor, and even the tiny village of Jong Ying, where they go to see movies, is one step closer to the city life—including the culinary pleasures—they have left behind. “Believe me, even the smell of beef and onions savoured of sophistication,” says the narrator, of the scents that greet the boys in Jong Ying. The boys feel like “criminals huddling conspiratorially around the oil lamp” during meals of ingredients purloined with their friend Four-Eyes, meals “delicious with aromas … that plunged the three of us, famished, into a frenzy of anticipation.”
Thematic food helps us focus on the time period and culture of the book we’re reading and draws us into discussion,” says Ellen Masterson of her Westborough, Massachusetts, book club. Masterson says choosing food to accompany Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was difficult because the characters didn’t eat “high off the hog.”
Masterson opted for a general Chinese theme. Along with shrimp and mango with green curry paste and store-bought fortune cookies, she served her “sure hit” Spicy Pork with Orange Hoisin Sauce in Wonton Cups, a recipe adapted from Bon Appétit (January 2001). “These pork wontons are delicious and easy to prepare using premade wonton wrappers and muffin pans to shape the wontons,” says Masterson. “I have been asked for the recipe many times.”
For the sauce 2 scallions, minced ½ teaspoon grated orange peel ½ cup hoisin sauce 3 tablespoons frozen orange juice, thawed 1 tablespoon Chinese chile-garlic sauce Salt and pepper |
For the filling 1¼ pounds ground pork 3 scallions, chopped 4 cloves garlic, minced 1½ tablespoons minced fresh ginger ½ teaspoon grated orange peel 2 tablespoons hoisin sauce 1 tablespoon soy sauce 1 tablespoon sesame oil 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg yolk 60 square wonton wrappers Vegetable oil for brushing wontons |
To make the sauce: Mix all the sauce ingredients in a small bowl. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Sauce may be made ahead of time and refrigerated up to 2 days.
To make the filling: Place all the filling ingredients in a mixing bowl and use your hands to combine well.
Using a 2¾-inch-round biscuit or cookie cutter, cut each wonton wrapper into a round and arrange on waxed paper.
Brush one side of each wrapper with vegetable oil. Press rounds, oiled side down, into the cups of a mini-muffin tin. Add a heaping teaspoon of filling to each cup. Bake, in batches, until wonton wrappers are brown and crisp, 10–15 minutes. Transfer to a serving platter and top with sauce. (Wontons may be made ahead of time. Cool, remove from muffin cups, and refrigerate, covered, up to 1 day. Reheat on a baking sheet in a hot oven until warmed through, then top with sauce.)
Yield: About 60 wontons
NOVEL THOUGHTS
The Lovely Ladies Book Club of Bryan–College Station, Texas—all members of the St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church—first met in a library for lunch. Surrounded by books, they discussed their mutual passion for reading, recalls Kathleen Phillips, and “the Lovely Ladies formed on the spot.”
The cultural repression under Mao was the focus of the Lovely Ladies’ discussion about Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. For a group of women who “devour” books, the forced absence of books in the novel was especially poignant. “We considered what we would do without our books, and to what lengths we would go to have something to read,” says Phillips. “We often come to our book club meetings with sacks of books we have read to share with other members. What treasures they would be for someone who’s been told they cannot have them.”
There is a scene in the novel where the protagonists burn books. “Luo, one of the boys, intended the books to revolutionize the seamstress culturally and turn her into a proper wife for the sophisticated man he was sure to become,” says Susan Parker. “The books fulfilled their mission, but in a way Luo never intended.”
Members compared their own youths to the lives of the boys in the novel. “I was going through the typical American teenage dramas at the same time these boys were hauling sewage day in and day out,” says Dianne Stropp. “And yet they found humor and continued to grow under adverse conditions. The boys demonstrated the resiliency of the young human soul through their refusal to let their present conditions become their identities.”
More Food for Thought
When they discussed Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, hostess Kathleen Dyke greeted members of the Lovely Ladies with instructions to remove their shoes—as is customary in China—and handed each a pair of hot-pink socks. “We pitter-pattered to the living room to begin our talk, with wontons, appetizers, and wine,” says Kathleen Phillips.
Dyke used the book’s “seamstress” theme as inspiration for her decorations. She wove a tape measure around miniature spools of thread and miniature parasols, the colorful umbrellas traditionally used by Chinese women to shield themselves from the sun. Travel sewing kits were given as party favors. Her dinner featured orange chicken with apricots and currants, and green tea and orange soufflé (a cold dessert garnished with mandarin orange slices and gingersnaps).
