Balzac and the Tailor's Chinese Girl

«By the time we finally learned to read fluently, there was nothing left to read».

A tragicomic and touching story about teenagers from intellectual families, during the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution exiled for «labor re-education» to the mountain with the poetic name Heavenly Phoenix. Fortunately, youth is such a time when even hard work in the mines and rice fields cannot hinder dreaming and falling in love. Moreover, in these mountains, the heroes await a true treasure — the contents of a suitcase belonging to another «re-educated» individual nicknamed Four-Eyes. Books. Banned foreign books: Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Kipling, Dickens, Brontë...

For young people whose literary experience threatened to be limited to a collection of quotes from Mao, books became a door to a world of intellectual freedom, mighty passions, and refined imagery. And so one of the heroes, in love with the tailor's daughter, the first beauty of Heavenly Phoenix mountain, decides to introduce her to this world. What fruits will this «education of feelings» bear, and will they be sweet?