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“Having a dream is what keeps you alive. Overcoming the challenges make life worth living,” said Mary Tyler Moore, a seven-time Emmy Award-winning American actress and comedienne (qtd. in quotationspage). This idea is definitely legitimate and also what gives us inspiration and motivation behind our livings. However, not every tough experience would strengthen and develop our character in the right direction; some difficult incidents, instead of promoting character, would just lead you to a downfall and become eternal nightmares. In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, written by Dai Sijie, the two main characters, exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s Cultural Revolution, suffer intense hardship, but most likely if kept following what orders given by the government, they would probably end up somewhere their leader, Mao Zedong, wants them to be, not themselves anymore. And at the end, they would realize all their painstaking effort turned into ashes and they were a huge step behind rest of the world.
During the Cultural Revolution, one of the most chaotic period in China, every Chinese languished, especially schooled ones, such as the two main characters from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. People worked hard, but didn’t earn any valuable, like education. Under the most dreadful conditions you can imagine, the two main characters must labor numerous hours, and act according to the rule form by the village headman and the state, including not peeking any banned writings. In the first part of the novel, the writer descriptively pictures the simple and crude place where the narrator stays, and all the exhausting, terrible jobs that they have to do every single day, such as carrying huge buckets of excrement on their back for miles and miles of walk on steep, cliffy mountain routes, and working in an inadequately ventilated mine for half a day. Yet despite of the terrible condition are given, they basically risk...