.balzac and the little chinese seamstress.

It isn't an everyday affair that a book affects you. A good book keeps your mind in sweet captivity, cajoling it to go on a wild flying carpet ride in an imagined world. Then, like a voyeur, you swiftly rub shoulders with familiar people you would never meet, and experience the emotions they might have felt. All these, right in your very own bedroom, and on your very own bed.

Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (a pressie from t) is a book that reminds me of the power of words. It tells the story of two youths sent to a village for "re-education" during mao's cultural revolution. There, they fell in love with a seamstress, and acquired a suitcase of forbidden life-changing books that fed their hunger for ideas. It's an account of how literature opens the mind to possibilities, and how, when coupled with reflexivity, can undo the invisible chains that hold one enslaved. At its last few pages, i was unsure whether to laugh, or to cry.

The book, reading the book, and the person who first brought up the book in a conversation, remind me that the mind can be free, even if the body is not. as long as the mind is free, there's a chance that the body can be too.

...

My thumb is still blue-black. with dark purple nail polish now. it hurts so much that i couldn't sleep properly at night. thank goodness my fingernails aren't long, else i'll look like a vampire right out of some b-grade chinese horror flick.