Burda Style For people who sew

There are days, when you really don’t feel like working. Either, the sun and the sky are too bright to sit inside; or you are newly in love and you cannot think about anything but whoever you are in love with; or you are reading a book that you simply cannot put away… I am hooked on Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress written by Dai Sijie. It is definitely not a new book having been published in 2000, and maybe a lot of you have read it already, but for those of you who haven’t, it really is exceptional in its sensitivity and wit.

Let me just take you to the beginning of the story: it takes us to Communist China, and two city boys who have hardly finished primary school, are being sent to the Mountains of Phoenix under the re-education programme of Mao’s cultural revolution. They arrive at a village so remote that a violin and an alarm clock that the two boys bring along are novelties for the farmers. And so the book opens with the arrival of the two boys and the peasants’ discovery of the violin. It is beyond the villagers’ imagination that this could be a musical instrument, so the narrator has to prove it to them. What is he going to play? – A Mozart sonata. But what on earth is a Mozart sonata? And, isn’t Mozart, like so many other Western artists and writers banned in Communist China? The two boys quickly rename the classical piece into something more politically correct: “Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao” to the delight of the peasants.

The encounter between the farmers and the two city boys is setting the scene for what follows. But the real story starts when the two meet the little seamstress. Daughter of the tailor who is revered almost like a king in the mountain villages, she sits at home sewing on her sewing machine from Shanghai. She may not be able to read but there is something refined about her that attracts the attention of the two boys. She is different than the rest of the people in the villages….. and this is where the story really begins. I close here to return to my book and hopefully leave you enticed to read it yourself.