one for who he or she is, or what he or she thinks, changed by the politics of the killers, whether the killers are considered progressive or reactionary? Mao wanted to destroy old ideas, culture, customs and habits; however, new culture must have a foundation if it is not merely to be a reflection of impulse and ignorance. Art, books, and temples were destroyed. Mao ordered military takeover of various public and social institutions, including schools. Citizens were exiled, imprisoned, executed. By the time people affiliated with Mao suffered, many began to see what was happening not as ideological but as a recognizable, traditional struggle over personal power. I recall now a young Chinese woman telling me twenty-five years ago about life in China and referring to the Cultural Revolution, a phrase at which I—ignorantly—smiled: I wince to think of how recent that history had been to her and of what I did not know. What established authority may prefer we forget or never learn, art remembers.

In Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, written by Dai Sijie and Nadine Perront (based on Dai’s novel of the same name) and directed by Dai, young men climb mountain steps: natural movement, an arduous task, a lovely vista; and already we know we are in the realm of the unusual. The young men meet the village chief and area peasants (the chief refers to them as revolutionary peasants); and the chief is wary of books and of one of the young men’s violin. To stop destruction of it, one of the young men, Ma (Ye Liu), plays it—and the chief is told the music is called “Mozart is Thinking of Mao,” a ludicrously ahistorical assertion which success is made possible by the ignorance of the chief and peasants. The recipe book one of the young men carries is thrown into a fire (“We don’t need to corrupt revolutionary peasants with your bourgeois chicken,” the chief says, though several of the peasants are interested in the