While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. Their meager distractions include a violin-as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor.
At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. However, it is a beautiful and compelling (well, most of the time it's compelling) movie nonetheless.Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai Ina Rilke (Translator) An enchanting literary debut-already an international best-seller. "Xiao Cai Feng" is fairly subtle in it's demonstration of the evils of ignorance in a totalitarian society, unfortunately the same subtlety isn't applied to the love triangle element of the story. The boys decide to teach her to read, and they find a stash of banned books one of the other re-trainees has smuggled into the village. She builds models of the airplanes she sees fly overhead. She steals the boys' alarm clock and takes it apart to see how the animal on the face worked. She's not like the other peasants, she has a curious mind that doesn't necessarily fall in line with Mao's ideals. One day, the community tailor comes to the village, along with his teenage granddaughter, and both boys quickly fall in love with her. The two young men are quickly forced into menial labor, hauling buckets of human waste to be used as fertilizer and hauling rocks out of the tiny mine shaft. The mountain villagers are painted as savages, with no knowledge of technology or high art (they think the violin is some sort of toy which they pass around and bang on like chimps) and a serious distrust of anything foreign. One is the son of a dentist, the other is a violinist, and both are considered "reactionists" because of their apparent intellectualism. Set in 1971 communist China is the tale of two young men sent to live in the mountains to be "re-educated" as peasants in the Chairman Mao method.
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