BETRAYAL : give up treacherously, be disloyal to, lead astray
Two forms of betrayal in the book – actual betrayal and the fear of betrayal.
Fear of Betrayal:
Fear of betrayal is a key theme in the book caused by the fact that the book is set during the cultural revolution in China, when each person lived in fear of showing the “bourgeois tendancies” that were unacceptable. Powerful officials, like the village headman in the village that Luo and Ma lived in, had enormous power - even of life and death. Ma describes him as a “political and economic despot”.
When Ma meets Four-Eyes mother on the road to the village her “voice sank to a whisper” when she says “one day the need for good doctors would be recognised once more”. This shows how careful she feels she has to be to check no one else around hears and betrays the words she says.
When Ma opens the suitcase of books and says out loud that he feels “loathing of everyone who
kept these books from us” he is then terrified of what he has said, “Hearing myself uttering this last sentence frightened me, as if there might be an eavesdropper hidden somewhere in the room. Such a
remark, casually dropped, could cost several years in prison.” When they have the books he is suddenly frightened that if Four-Eyes denounces them for stealing the books “we would be finished”.
This shows how deep his fear of betrayal to the state ran –even in a situation where Four-Eyes couldn’t denounce them without denouncing himself – he was still terrified.
The person most frightened of betrayal in the book is Four-Eyes, who Ma notices is permanently terrified that he might betray “bourgeois tendencies”, and so reduce his chances of being allowed back to the city. He does things that the others find strange, like hiding nice meals if there is a knock on the door while they are preparing dinner. He is so frightened of being betrayed to the villagers that he has a suitcase of books, that he doesn’t tell his only friends on Phoenix mountain - even when they guess his secret. This fear seems to drive Four-Eyes and by the time he leaves, the reader really doesn’t like him at all because he seems so selfish and uncaring of his friends.
The second kind of betrayal in the book is actual betrayal, some of this also involves the state and the Cultural Revolution:
The boys feel very betrayed by the state for their limited education and the position they find themselves in. Their school closed when they were 12 to 14, when it reopened lessons were restricted to agriculture and industry and there were very few approved books the rest have been burnt. Ma says “By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read”. They are then sent to countryside to be “re-educated by the poor peasants”.

The State punishes acts of betrayal, as it sees them, by its citizens. Luo’s father is punished for betraying the fact that he had treated Mao’s teeth. The old Preacher is condemned to roadsweeping for the rest of his life by betraying the state by keeping his Latin bible and presumably his faith.
Many of the most dramatic moments in the book involve acts of betrayal by the characters on each other:
Luo and Ma feel that Four-Eyes betrays their friendship because he doesn’t tell them about his books, even when they have found the heavy suitcase and guessed what is inside it. After they have been lent one book they say they “were under illusion he would lend us more books...but he wouldn’t hear of it”. Strictly speaking it wasn’t betrayal, but there is no doubt that Luo and Ma feel betrayed. Then when Four-Eyes is leaving “although we were the only friends Four-Eyes ever made on the mountain, we were not invited” to the leaving party. Four-Eyes totally betrays his friendship once he has a way out of the village, he tells his mother that he was only friends with them in case
Luo’s father the dentist might be useful. When you think of how Luo and Ma help him do things like find his glasses, in the end it feels like Four-Eyes has only been friends with them out of self interest.
The way that Four Eyes is prepared to change the old Miller’s songs to make them acceptable to the authorities is seen by Ma in particular as complete betrayal of the authenticity of the songs and of the old Miller. He is absolutely incensed.
In turn Ma and Luo betray their friendship with Four-Eyes by stealing the suitcase when he is leaving.
The theft is a very dramatic moment in the book and has very dramatic implications for what happens next. We don’t feel that they have behaved particularly badly because of the way that
Four-Eyes has behaved leading up to this.
From the moment that they meet the Seamstress, Ma is trying not betray his friendship with Luo by stealing his girlfriend. He definitely betrays him by lusting after his girlfriend “I was so utterly captivated I wanted to marry her there and then, regardless of her being Luo’s girlfriend”. When Luo goes back to the city to visit his mother Ma is obsessed with visiting the Seamstress and with trying not to betray Luo when he is meant to be guarding her. We never find out whether he would have given into temptation had he had the opportunity. “My sole preoccupation was to honour the faith he had in me”. He tries in his mind to turn it into a heroic role, but he finds it incredibly difficult and one of the key themes of the book is Ma wrestling with his love for the Seamstress – his best friend’s girlfriend.
We could argue about whether Luo betrays the Tailor by seducing his daughter. Ma certainly feels some guilt when he notices that he has the same cap on that Ma wore to see the Tailor. The Tailor is nothing but kind to them – he tries to protect Ma when the Headman wants to arrest him, he welcomes them into his house, he goes straight to them when she runs away. There is no sign that
Luo feels any guilt, but Ma possibly does.
At the end of the book both Luo and Ma feel betrayed when the Seamstress leaves. Luo, because his girlfriend abandons him to go to the city – where he would love to go – without even telling him. Ma feels betrayed for other reasons, he says “I felt just as betrayed as Luo ….by the fact that she had not thought to tell me about it”. This means that he felt he meant nothing to her, that he was just a

friend of a friend, despite everything he had done to help her get an abortion, which it is implied Luo still doesn’t know about.
The one explanation that the Seamstress gives for leaving is that it was to do with Balzac. So at the very end of the book Luo and Ma burn every book – each of which Ma describes as if it is a person going up in flames. They clearly feel betrayed by the books that have led to her departure. However
I don’t think they were betrayed by the books it was just that the Little Seamstress had learnt different lessons from the books than they had.