Book Review: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I just finished reading Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.  It's a very moving story about a couple of teenaged city boys who were sent by the Chinese government to be re-educated in a remote mountain village of China during the Cultural Revolution. 

While enduring grueling manual labor in the fields and in the mine, they learned the ways of country life and were losing hope in ever returning back to their homeland.  The only bright spot in their miserable lives was the discovery of a collection of amazing classic Western works of literature (translated into Chinese), which were completely banned in China. 

They shared these stories with the beautiful daughter of the local tailor to win her affection.  These stories by Balzac, Hugo, Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Kipling, and Bronte gave them hope and changed their lives forever.

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