A Twist on Balzac

The town of Yong Jing in northern China is "so small that when the local canteen prepared a dish of beef and onions the smell reached the nose of every single inhabitant." And the 17-year-old narrator of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Knopf; 197 pages) and his friend Luo, 18, city youths from Sichuan's capital, Chengdu, are dispatched to a small village so remote it is a long day's journey from Yong Jing. It is 1971, midway during the Cultural Revolution, and they are the unwitting — and unwilling — assignees to a program of re-education through labor. Their crime:...