"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress" takes place in Communist China during the 1970s. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution is in full swing, and part of that movement was the Countryside Movement. Because of the Countryside Movement, the narrator and his friend Luo are sent away from their families and homes in the city to live in a rural village on a mountain known as the Phoenix in the Sky. There they must work the same way the villagers do--on the land and in the coal mine. A little ways out of their village lives a seamstress who has taken a liking to the narrator and Luo, and their feelings are reciprocated. She is pretty well-to-do because her father is an esteemed tailor, which gives her some authority to request that the boys get out of their work and visit her. The boys are willing to make the trek through the muddy forest and mountain paths to see her.
*All images used for setting are from google.com/imghp
Some quotes from the book that describe the mountain on which the village is located, where the boys must be re-educated:
"THe name was a poetic way of suggesting its terrifying altitude; the poor sparrows and common birds of the plain could never soar to its peak, for that was the reserve of winged creatures allied to the sky: mighty, mythical and profoundly solitary" (p. 11).
"THe Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the gloomy valleys. Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city. But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me" (p. 12).
"Looking up at the vertiginous slopes all around me, I could just make out a footpath rising from the shadowy fissures in the cliff towards the sky, where it seemed to melt into the misty air" (p. 12, a quote from French Missionary, Father Michel, the only Westerner ever to have been there).
"It rained often on Phoenix mountain. It rained almost two days out of three. Storms or torrential downpours were rare; instead there was a steady, insidious drizzle that seemed to go on forever and the peaks and cliffs surrounding our house on stilts were constantly veiled in a thick, sinister mist" (p. 16).
