Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Reading Question pg. 158-184

50. The seamstress tells the narrator that she is pregnant. The seamstress will not be able to find a doctor who can help an unmarried pregnant woman. Luo and the seamstress can not get married because they are under 25 yrs old. The narrator offers to go to the town hospital to seek help. The law prohibits people under 25 to get married and yet if they don't get married, the seamstress will never be able to have her baby. Also no doctor will be willing to help her.

51. The narrator thinks that his parents would be devastated and they would throw him out. It is a crime that transcends the Cultural Revolution because it is more of a moral question.

52. He wants to consult the preacher about seeking an abortion for the seamstress. The preacher stuck to his beliefs and continue to speak in Latin when he was dying. He did not say any of Chairman Mao's beliefs as reqeusted by his son.

53. The narrator promised to give the doctor a book by Balzac in exchange for performing an abortion.

54. The seamstress begin to dress more fashionably and modern looking. She cut her hair short. She begin to wear a pair of white tennis shoes. She made herself a brassiere. Luo thinks that her new look made the seamstress even more attractive. He thinks that he has been responsible for transforming the seamstress from a plain mountain to a city girl.

55. The narrator is upset that the seamstress did not even bother to tell him that she was leaving. He thought that they were good friends and he should have been told. He was upset too because he thinks that after what he did to help her when she was pregnant, he feels that she had forgotten about this.

56. The seamstress thinks that anything is worth giving up for her beauty. She is willing to do anything for her own improvement. The seamstress' re-education backfire because they lost her.

57. They were burning the books because the re-education offered by the books has brought them more suffering. It has backfired on them when the seamstress left. It is a purging for the boys because they want to get rid of the images of love and women.

58. The goals of the cultural revolution did not work because it did not stop them from discovering about the outside world. They did not become re-educated as the government wished but they were re-educated in another way when they begin to read western literature.