“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” said Chairman Mao
(or his spin doctor). The flowers bloomed. And then they chopped them down.
China’s “Cultural Revolution” was one of the cruellest passages in its long march to a communist hegemony that many see as simply a continuation, in a new form, of the most ancient and long-running empire on Earth. Beginning in the mid-Sixties, the Cultural Revolution was ostensibly a drive to purify Chinese communism, to rid it of “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary” elements. On the power level, however, it seems that it was mostly to do with Mao Zedong regaining control of a party apparatus that was slipping from his grasp. He stirred up a foment of activity by the young Red Guards, using their loose-cannon behaviour to purge the party, and the populace in general, of any opposition to him and, in the process, caused massive social disruption and suffering.
Whatever the historical analysis, Dai Sijie was one of the people sent for “re-education”, which in this case meant sending urban Chinese into the far countryside to live with the “revolutionary peasants”, to dispense with their bourgeois ways by doing some rudimentary farming, shit-schlepping and so forth. Sijie wrote
a bestselling autobiographical novel about his youthful experience of
re-education (which took place in the early 1970s), and it is that novel he has now turned into the film The Little Chinese Seamstress.
It starts with two 19-year-olds, Luo (Chen Kun) and Ma (Liu Ye), clambering up the mountainside to a remote village where they will learn about the true meaning of the revolution. Their sin is to be the offspring of urban professionals now deemed dangerously reactionary — Luo’s dentist father, for instance, had committed the sin of treating the nationalist and anti-communist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, way back in the past. Soon Luo and Ma are being interrogated by the local chief who will be in charge of their re-education. He can’t read, so he’s very suspicious of a cookbook Luo has brought along — even when Luo reads out a recipe, the chief denounces “bourgeois chicken” and chucks the book in the fire.
Ma’s violin is only saved from the flames when he passes off a tune
he plays as Mozart’s encomium to Chairman Mao.
Despite all that, Luo and Ma’s experience in the village is mild compared to what a lot of other people went through during the Cultural Revolution, and in that respect The Little Chinese Seamstress should not be seen as broadly representative of that dark period in Chinese history.
By the early 1970s, the violence of the Cultural Revolution had died down (Mao was back on top, just in time to die in 1976), though this kind of re-education continued as a means of social control.
The film has a great deal of fun with the peasants’ unthinking attitudes toward Mao and his godlike wisdom; they spout his words reverently, but when some bourgeois dentistry is needed they are happy to appeal to the dentist’s son — who, being a dentist’s son, must know what to do. (Peasant logic?) The film also has fun with, and makes a central conceit of, the power of literature in an illiterate society, and what that says about the cultural values under fire at the time in China. Luo and and Ma are desperate to read or re-read some classic fiction (in this case, mostly Balzac and Flaubert), though such foreign decadence has been outlawed. But they do manage to find those novels, and they find too an accomplice in the local tailor’s granddaughter (Zhou Xun) — the “Little Seamstress” of the title.
What follows from that is a love story and a rites-of-passage story. It is also the tale of how naivety is cast away and what the consequences are. What takes place is less a political than a sentimental education. The movie plays out with gentle humour, paced in a fairly leisurely manner — the speed of a peasant’s walk, perhaps. If you have no problem with that, or aren’t feeling impatient that day, you will find The Little Chinese Seamstress charming, amusing, entertaining and, indeed, in the end, moving.
One does wonder, though, about the great claims made for French literature of the 19th century. Why do Balzac and Flaubert (and the latter’s Madame Bovary is used rather neatly in the story) have the particular effect they do? Tribute is paid to the elegant work of the Chinese translator of Balzac, a translator then also tagged as reactionary, but surely Chinese literature itself contains a sufficient number of texts to demonstrate the power of reading? It was not only foreign books that were consigned to the flames of the Cultural Revolution, but thousands of years’ worth of high Chinese culture. The same goes for Mozart.
Sijie seems a little too willing to ascribe to such exemplars of high Western culture all the humane intelligence he wants to place against the slogan-spouting of simplistic Chinese communism. That’s something few Europeans, except the most jingoistic, would do nowadays. We all know about the commandants of concentration camps who revered Beethoven. High-cultural literacy is no guarantee of good behaviour; every text of civilisation, as Walter Benjamin noted, is simultaneously a text of barbarism.
Perhaps Sijie should have taken a look at that devastating movie, The Piano Teacher, by Austrian Michael Haneke, which tackles exactly this issue in Western culture. But then, probably, he wouldn’t have created a movie as sweetly likeable as The Little Chinese Seamstress.
The Little Chinese Seamstress has already been shown in Cape Town.
It opens in Johannesburg this weekend, and will be shown in
Durban later this year