A testimony that literature can change your life and shape the way you think?

A story of two teenage friends who are, like so many other young students at the time deemed to be possible 'reactionary intellectuals' (under Mao's Cultural Revolution) and therefore sent to the rural areas of China for 're-education' in the ways that are deemed more useful...

When the teens come across a fellow friend from back home who they call Four Eyes and discover he has somehow managed to covet some books, they go about bartering for a copy of Balzac which opens a new world to them, and takes them far away from all the hard labour they are required to do.

As one of the the teens falls in love with a Chinese seamstress on the mountain he takes up the task of privately educating her to read and write to make her more 'sophisticated' but without realising what consequences the exchange of 're-education' will have on all of them...

Since I read this a few years ago, a film has been made also, which was interesting enough to watch too.