Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

In this "funny, touching, sly, and altogether delightful novel" (Washington Post), two hapless bourgeois teenagers are exiled to a remote mountain village for "reeducation" during Mao's Cultural Revolution. There Luo and the unnamed narrator tote buckets of excrement and mine coal, until the villagers discover the boys' talents for verbally relating movies in great detail. When they meet the daughter of the local tailor, Luo is hopelessly smitten, and after the boys acquire a suitcase full of forbidden Western works, Luo sets out to educate his beloved in hopes of making her his cultural equal, with unexpected results. The author was himself reeducated in 1970s China before fleeing to France.