Last week in English II we began a new novel, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress”. Set in Communist China in the early 1970’s, the novel centers around two teenage boys sent to be “re-educated” in a rural Sichuan village. While there they attempt to navigate their new surroundings while still holding onto the values instilled in them by their parents as part of China’s “intelligentsia”.
One of the central themes of the novel is the danger of knowledge, particularly in a society that finds freedom of thought and expression to be an insidious threat to the state. In Communist China, nearly everything “western” is considered subversive and, as such, all forms of western art are banned. Soon the boys surreptitiously gain access to western literature by the likes of Balzac and Voltaire and, while this opens up a whole new world for them, it also puts them in tremendous peril.
Serendipitously, we are starting this novel just a few weeks after National Banned Book Week. This is a week dedicated to celebrating the freedom to read and those behind National Banned Book Week seek to highlight those books most frequently challenged, empowering educators who see the benefit these books could bring to a classroom discussion. It might surprise my students to know that the most recent list of the top 10 most challenged “young adult” books includes I Am Jazz, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hate U Give, and 13 Reasons Why. Other well-known works that continually are challenged include The House on Mango Street, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Giver.
For this week’s blog entry, I want students to familiarize themselves with the list of most banned books. Have you read any of these books? Why do you think they might be challenged? Is there merit to those who say that these books are dangerous? How far would you be willing to go to read something that had been deemed “illegal” by your community?
