Luo is the narrator's best friend. They've been friends their whole lives, as they grew up next door to each other in the city of Chengdu. Luo is sent to the mountain to undergo re-education with the narrator, but life on the mountain makes him very depressed; he battles insomnia and moments of deep desperation. His chances of getting off the mountain are even slimmer than the narrator's because his father, the dentist, is serving time in prison. The narrator claims that Luo possesses no useful skills, but Luo is a skilled storyteller. He performs "oral cinema shows" for the village headman, in which he sees a film and then recites the film's story for the village, making his story last the length of the actual film. This earns Luo and the narrator a reprieve from their manual labor, as the process of seeing a film entails a four-day round trip journey to the city of Yong Jing and the headman agrees to pay the boys for their time. Luo is often selfish (when the boys obtain their first novel, there's no question that Luo will read it first) and convinced of his superiority. Luo is quite taken with Balzac's novels, and he sees that Balzac's work has a transformative effect on his girlfriend, the Little Seamstress. Though Luo loves the Little Seamstress, he's patronizing towards her, believing that she's uncultured and less intelligent than he is. By reading Balzac to her, Luo intends to make the Little Seamstress cultured enough to be worthy of his affections, but his education has an unintended effect: she gains the confidence and vision to leave the mountain for good by herself. Distraught, Luo burns the beloved novels in an emotional and drunken frenzy.

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3 years ago