Dai Sijie

I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.

I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.

It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.

She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price.