Two of the Same

In what ways does Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress relate to this passage from Pere Goriot?

Honore Balzac, much like Dai Sijie, layers the doom, gloom, and never-ending entrapment, thick; the language in both stories really convey the trapped feeling; "old age declining into death, bright youth pressed into drudgery"(Balzac) and "he didn't possess a single skill that might help him to become one of the three in a thousand. He couldn't even dream of it" (Sijie 18). Reading the book, at parts I started to feel claustrophobic myself. The feeling of being stuck in a position that is as dreadful as the one the protagonist has to live in, and not being able to get away, is not bad, it is depressing. The feeling is enough to make anyone go mad. In the Little Chinese Seamstress, Luo and the narrator have seen the outside; they know how good life can really be outside of "Phoenix in the Sky." Much like the first generation of slaves to America, the "city youths" feel the depression and enslavement more potently because they have known freedom, making living on "Phoenix in the Sky" much harder to cope with. When there seems to be something that will ease the pain, it turns out to be a disappointment; "suffering is always real and joy very often false"(Balzac). And if there is something to help, it is shrouded in resentment; "'So, are you weeping tears of joy?' I said. 'No. All I feel is loathing.' 'Me too. Loathing for everyone who kept these books from us'" (Sijie 99). Nothing can be taken as just joy or good without it being tinted by sadness or evil. Another way Balzac and Sijie compare in the way they portray the feeling of being stuck is through metaphor of the setting. The "valley of ever-peeeling plaster and muddy black gutters" (Balzac), gives a sense of never changing, never evolving, never getting better surroundings. Through setting, Balzac makes us feel and know the hopelessness of the valley. The cave in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a different metaphor conveying the same thing; "I'm going to die in this mine" (Sijie 30). The Little Chinese Seamstress and Pere Goriot are two different settings with the same feeling behind them. But there are more differences between the two stories then the setting. In Pere Goriot, it is "difficult to imagine any castastrophe producing more than a momentary sensation there" (Balzac) but that is exactly what happens in The Little Chinese Seamstress; "she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price" (Balzac 184). The "catastrophe" was the imagination the books opened in the girl and the "sensation" was so uplifting that she got out of the trap.