Dai Sijie is a Chinese–French author and filmmaker.
Early life
Dai Sijie was born in Chengdu, Sichuan in 1954. His parents, Professor Dai Baoming and Professor Hu Xiaosu, were professors of Medical Sciences at West China University. He grew up extensively reading and thinking. Dai excels in many things, including being a skilled tailor himself. The Maoist government sent him to a re-education camp in rural Sichuan from 1971 to 1974 during the Cultural Revolution. Though, as the only child in the family, he would have been excused, he went there with the idea of the spartan training. Much of this experience was the source of his first book. After his return, he completed his professional certificate as a teacher. He briefly taught in The No. 16 High School of Chengdu upon his enrolling to the Department of History of Sichuan University in February 1978 where he studied art history.
Career
In 1984, he left China for France on a scholarship to study at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. There, he acquired a passion for movies and became a director. Before turning to writing, he made three critically acclaimed feature-length films: China, My Sorrow , Le mangeur de lune and Tang, le onzième. He also wrote and directed an adaptation of his novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, released in 2002. He lives in Paris and writes in French. His novel, Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée, was published in 2007. L'acrobatie aérienne de Confucius was published in 2008.
Novels
His first book, Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise , was made into a movie in 2002, which he himself adapted and directed. It recounts the story of a pair of friends who become good friends with a local seamstress while spending time in a countryside village where they have been sent for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution. They steal a suitcase filled with illegal Western classical novels from another man being re-educated, and decide to enrich the seamstress's life by exposing her to great literature. These novels also serve to sustain the two companions during this difficult time. The story principally deals with the cultural universality of great literature and its redeeming power. The novel has been translated into twenty-five languages, and finally into his mother tongue after the movie adaptation. His second book, Le Complexe de Di won the Prix Femina for 2003. It recounts the travels of a Chinese man whose philosophy has been influenced by French psychoanalytic thought. The title is a play on "le complexe d'Oedipe", or "the Oedipus complex". The English translation is titled Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch.
