Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Luo and the Narrator pass the village of their friend Four-Eyes on their return home. Four-Eyes was also sent from the city for re-education because of counter-revolutionary parents and is in the middle of tilling a waterlogged field with a buffalo-pulled plow. The tail of the buffalo repeatedly swipes mud in his eyes and knocks his glasses into the water. The enraged Four-Eyes is unappreciative of the Narrator’s help in retrieving them but invites Luo and the Narrator to rest in his house until he finishes work.

The three of them often spend time together, though Four-Eyes is terrified of appearing bourgeois or objectionable to the peasantry. Since Luo is still unwell, the Narrator searches Four-Eyes’s belongings for a sweater he can borrow. He comes across a heavy, locked suitcase which Luo assumes is full of forbidden books. Four-Eyes denies everything and soon hides the suitcase elsewhere, buying a lock for his front door.

Luo and the Narrator speculate about what forbidden books, Chinese or Western, might be inside, and bemoan the fact that the Cultural Revolution so limited their access to literature. Eventually Four-Eyes’s glasses break, leaving him nearly blind, and he grudgingly lends the Narrator Ursule Mirouet by Balzac in return for their help carrying rice through the snow to the district storage.