Mao's Last Dancer (Movie Tie-In)

by Li Cunxin

  We were encouraged to tell everyone about our impure thoughts. We were rewarded for reporting when a fellow student’s behavior wasn’t in keeping with Chairman Mao’s great political vision. We were even told once, by one of the political heads, that a brave and faithful young Red Guard loved Chairman Mao so much that he informed the police that his parents had Taiwan connections. Both parents were arrested, and their son was upheld as a national hero, Mao’s model guard.

  I too would have done anything for Chairman Mao. Anything, except tell on my parents. I loved my niang and my dia too much to betray them for my belief in Chairman Mao’s revolution.

  Madame Mao also wanted us to spend three weeks each year with the farmers, the workers or the soldiers. These were called the “Learning Three Classes” sessions. We had to live and work among the peasants or workers or soldiers and at the same time keep up our dance training. At the end of each “learning session” we had to put on a performance.

  Our first three-week summer holiday was spent in one of these learning sessions, with the peasants in a nearby commune. How I welcomed the wheat and the cornfields, the smell of manure, the sound of the crickets! Even the raw earth was wonderful to see, but it all made me homesick too. I wanted to go back to my village and catch my beloved crickets and dragonflies again. I wanted both worlds: the good food of the academy and the freedom of my home.

  I worked well in the fields, and I was surprised that my classmates from the city had little idea about how to work on the land. I truly believed Chairman Mao was right: if these kids didn’t come to the commune and work with the peasants, they would have no idea where their food came from.

  We continued to practice our ballet, acrobatics and Beijing Opera Movement every day while we were living with the peasants. We used wire poles and walls for our barre. The dirt ground was uneven and uncomfortable and the scratching sounds of our feet brushing through each movement were unbearable—like fingernails scraping down a piece of glass. Our ballet shoes wore out so quickly, and they were always filthy with mud. We even had to do cartwheels and back flips in the fields. Sprained ankles were not uncommon.

  We slept and ate at different peasants’ homes during our stay, but by the third day so many students suffered stomach cramps and diarrhea that the school officials had to quickly call in our own academy chef to cook for us. The male students, including me, were assigned to guard our kitchen supplies so nobody would steal them.

  “Why would anyone steal our food?” I asked one of our political heads. “Aren’t the peasants our role models?”

  He thought for a moment. “We are not guarding against the peasants’ stealing,” he said. “We’re guarding against the enemy’s evil motives. They might try to poison us. It’s the hidden things we must watch for. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t understand, but I nodded anyway. I saw his expression and knew this was the end of the discussion. I thought that surely by now all our enemies would have been wiped out in all of Mao’s campaigns and revolutions.

  The weather was still hot when we returned to our university. And shortly after, the dreaded visit to the swimming pool occurred.

  “Students who can’t swim, raise your hands!” the same political head who’d asked me to wash his sweat-stained shirt instructed. A few hands went up—mine was one of them. Almost all of the kids who couldn’t swim came from Shanghai or Beijing. I was the only one from Qingdao who couldn’t swim.

  “A boy who comes from a city by the sea and can’t swim?” the political head sniggered.

  I felt the blood rush to my face. I wanted to go back to my dormitory. But I knew I couldn’t, so I followed instructions and hesitantly took off my clothes.

  “Where is your swimming suit?” the political head asked me. Everyone looked at my practice shorts.

  “I don’t have a swimming suit.”

  “Didn’t I tell everyone to buy one yesterday?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to tell him that I couldn’t afford one.

  He gave me an annoyed look and shook his head. “Okay, everyone. Students who can swim can go now. Students who can’t, follow me.”

  He took us to the shallow end of the pool and demonstrated the so-called “frog style,” or breaststroke. Following his instructions, I tried to swim but my body sank as soon as I started to circle my arms. I kept swallowing water. I looked across and saw my classmates swimming and diving like fish and wished I could be like them. The political leader spent all his time helping the girls. He never looked in the boys’ direction once. I dipped my head under a couple of times and my nose filled with water. I wondered if I would ever learn to swim.

  But by the end of that summer I did learn, even though I was still constantly afraid of the water. It was a couple of my classmates who eventually taught me.

  That summer in Beijing was hot. We had no air-conditioning or fans, and when the heat became unbearable, we slept on the floor in the dance studio. Over twenty of us slept in there, and even with the studio’s many windows, the body heat made it difficult to sleep. Mosquitoes would come out in the thousands and zoom around like little vampires. We slapped about frantically, trying to chase them away, and the slapping sounds could be heard throughout the night.

  During the second half of our first year, the school added several new classes. One of them was Art Philosophy, Madame Mao’s brainchild, the one we’d been told about on that first day, and surprisingly I liked it. It was designed to help us understand the relationship between the arts and politics. Chairman Mao’s idea was that the arts should be important political tools.

  Our teacher for Art Philosophy was a tall, talkative man. During class one day, he went into one of his little detours, talking about Mao as a brilliant political strategist. “The one political strategist I think was the best ever was Adolf Hitler! Like Chairman Mao, he seized on the psychological needs of an entire nation. He rallied millions of people to go to war for him. He made them believe it was all for their own good. Both Chairman Mao and he are master politicians, brilliant at understanding the people’s psyche.”

  I, like most of my classmates, didn’t have a clue who Hitler was. I thought he must have been a great communist, just like Chairman Mao.

  Our teacher was brave to draw parallels like this, and often his true interests seemed to lie in areas other than the subject he was ordered to teach. He tried to show us how to look at a subject beyond the surface, beyond the obvious. One day he brought a plaster model of a man’s head into our classroom. The surface of the model was as smooth as porcelain. He sat the model on his lecture table. “Raise your hand if you think the surface of the model is rough?”

  What a stupid question, we all thought. It was obvious the surface was smooth. Nobody raised a hand.

  “Now, raise your hand if you think the model has a smooth surface.”

  Everyone raised their hands.

  “I think you are all wrong or at best, you are only half right. I want you to look at it more closely and then tell me your answers.”

  This time there was a magnifying glass beside the model. We looked through it and were surprised to discover millions of tiny holes on the smooth surface of the head.

  That class lasted only one and a half years. It was mysteriously dropped after that, and I never saw Madame Mao’s Art Philosophy teacher again. I once asked one of the political heads about him. “He is no longer needed at our academy,” he answered bluntly. “He has been assigned a different job.”

  Throughout that first year at the Beijing Dance Academy, I was considered a laggard by most of my teachers. I labored through the days with no aim, no self-confidence, and I couldn’t keep up with the pace. It was too much for an eleven-year-old peasant boy. I felt that not a single teacher liked me. I wanted to shrink and run for cover. I longed for my parents’ comfort and love, but here there was no one to go to for help. So I pulled myself further inwards, desperately trying to stay afloat, but constantly sinking.

  We’
d been at the academy for about nine months when our teachers organized another day trip for us, this time to the Great Wall. Again, fear of motion sickness terrified me, but I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity for anything.

  It was a windy autumn day. We were given three hours to climb the wall. Its bulk and beauty stunned me. The size of the stones, its breathtaking height into the misty mountains, its endless snakelike meandering—it all made me gasp. I had seen pictures of the Great Wall before, but to actually stand on it, to look upon this incredible human miracle . . . I shook my head in disbelief. A fable that my niang had once told me immediately came to mind. It was about a poor young man, Wang Shileong, and his bride. Wang Shileong’s name meant “ten thousand humans.” It was said there was a section of the Great Wall that could never be built unless ten thousand bodies were buried as its foundation. Rumor had it that Wang Shileong’s body alone could support that section. When the imperial soldiers buried him under the wall, his new bride stuck a knife through her heart and was buried there with him. I remembered my niang had said that this story portrayed a Chinese woman’s determination to remain faithful to her man. “But this principle of faith also applies to a man,” she’d said. “You are expected to be faithful to your woman with all your might until death eventually separates you. A girl’s heart is pure and sincere. If you treasure her, she will love you unconditionally until the end. But you must never take a girl’s love for granted.”

  I was touched by my niang’s story and I admired the bride’s strong will and faithfulness. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see the Great Wall one day?” my second brother, Cunyuan, had said. Now, here I was, climbing on the ancient stone steps and wishing that my family could see it too.

  The end of our first year at the academy was approaching, and the end-of-year exams were coming up. Our possible grades were: excellent, very good, good, below good, above average, average, below average and . . . bad. Tension was high among the teachers as well as the students. It was judgment day for the teachers as well.

  I wasn’t worried about my academic classes because I knew I wasn’t the worst there, but my dancing classes were another matter.

  There were four dance-related exams that year: ballet, acrobatics, Chinese folk dance and Beijing Opera Movement. Acrobatics and Chinese folk dance were less of a worry, because the teachers were kinder and those classes were fun. But for my ballet and Beijing Opera Movement classes I was scared to death. We had to perform in front of academy officials, students from other classes, Chiu Ho and a panel of teachers who had pen and pad in hand.

  There were over fifty students, teachers and officials already sitting by the mirrors in the front of the studio on the day of the Beijing Opera Movement exam. The sunlight shone through the windows, and I could see the dust entwined in the beams of sunlight. We walked into the room in a line—and upon seeing the many pairs of eyes, I froze completely. My mouth went dry and my tongue felt swollen. It was as though all those eyes were focused on me, and me alone. I even heard the sound of my own breathing and felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  We were placed on the barre first and before the pianist struck the first note, I was already dripping with sweat. I panicked. I couldn’t remember the dance combinations even though we’d been preparing them for four weeks. It wasn’t so bad on the barre, because everyone did the same exercises at the same time and I could follow the others, but once we moved into the center of the floor, the ten of us were broken up into three groups.

  I was trembling all over. My legs felt weak, and I couldn’t remember a single thing. I was in front now, and I had no one to follow. I peeked at the mirror, and I could see that others were following my mistakes. Teacher Gao Dakun looked at us with such anger, but he couldn’t call names out because of all the people watching. As the exam went on I performed worse and worse as the dancing steps increased in difficulty. The agony lasted for over an hour. I wondered what other names Gao Dakun would call me after this!

  I knew that exam had been disastrous. I was so distressed that I missed lunch and ran to my weeping willow trees. It was over two hours later that I went back to our dormitory. My confidence was shattered.

  When I entered the roomful of eyes again the following morning, I noticed our ballet teacher, Chen Lueng, was already standing by the piano looking very tense. My heart pumped faster. This exam was to be judged mainly on barre work—we spent over three-quarters of our class time on it—and with our thin vest and shorts, I felt every muscle, every technical fault would be exposed and magnified, even the scar on my arm. Each exercise seemed slower and more excruciating than in class. I didn’t hear a single note of the music and before I’d even lifted my legs, I could already feel them cramping. Chen Lueng had screamed at us all year for holding on to the barre too tightly, and here I was, gripping onto it for dear life.

  Finally the torture of those end-of-year exams was over. We waited for our grades, and I knew in my heart this was not something I should be looking forward to.

  I was right. My highest grade was “below good” for math and Chinese. The rest of my grades were “average,” even for ballet, and my worst grade was “below average” for Teacher Gao’s Beijing Opera Movement exam, which was no surprise to me at all. Nothing I did would ever please him.

  I wasn’t the worst student in my class, but with my poor results I was definitely near the bottom and I still felt wretched. We all knew each other’s scores because our teachers read them out, loudly, in front of the entire class. My face flushed with each announcement of my low grades. Twenty-two pairs of eyes pierced me like needles. It summed up my miserable first year. I was convinced that soon Director Wang would call me into his office, tell me I was no good, and ask me to go home and never return.

  11

  THE PEN

  Our first year was finished. Soon I would see my family again. My beloved niang. The Chinese New Year holiday was coming up and the school gave us our food allowance for the month to buy our train tickets home.

  Everyone was excited. The school bus even took us on a shopping trip to Beijing to buy presents for our families. I only bought one yuan worth of sweets, though, and kept the rest, three whole yuan, to take back to my family. I knew three yuan would make an enormous difference to my dia and my niang, more difference than any number of gifts I could buy.

  The last two days before going home seemed excruciatingly long. I counted every minute. I was terrified the whole time that I’d be called up by Director Wang about my poor grades, so I avoided our political heads at all times. But on the final day, just after lunch, I accidentally bumped right into the very person I’d been trying to avoid.

  “Ni hao, Director Wang.” My faced blushed. My heart thumped.

  “Ni hao, Cunxin. Are you looking forward to seeing your family?”

  I nodded, petrified. Here it comes, I thought.

  “Have a safe trip!” He smiled at me and walked on.

  What about my poor grades? What about expelling me? I was so relieved. I became excited beyond description. Now I could think only of seeing my parents and brothers and it made the final hours seem even longer.

  On the way to the Beijing train station, my heart raced faster than the wheels of the bus. A political head and two teachers escorted us and again, the grandness of the station and the number of people rushing about amazed me.

  We fought our way onto the train and settled in our seats. A siren sounded. The train slowly moved off. My heart was already in Qingdao with my family, and the anticipation was unbearable. Thoughts of my parents, brothers, relatives and friends, memories of making firecrackers, images of New Year’s Eve, the scent of incense, the flame of candles, the delicious taste of my niang’s dumplings, the drinking games and my second uncle’s singing—all rushed to my mind. Images lingered—fond memories, wonderful thoughts. Then suddenly I remembered my report card. I imagined the gossip, how humiliating it would be for my family. It would be the most reputation-damaging, face-losing
event in the Li family’s entire history! How could I explain such low grades? How could I tell my parents that I hated dancing? It was all too confusing, and I told myself to worry about it later. I was tired from the exams anyway, and I fell into a deep sleep and didn’t wake up until three stops before Qingdao Station.

  It was still dark outside when we arrived, but dawn wasn’t far off. My second brother was going to meet me at Cangkou Station, one stop before Qingdao, because it was closer to our commune. I looked at the familiar countryside gradually emerging in the dawn light, and my heart raced faster and faster.

  As the train pulled into Cangkou Station I saw my second brother, Cunyuan, standing among a crowd of people under the dim light. I shot my head out of the train window. “Erga! Erga!” I called excitedly. “Second brother! Second brother!”

  He saw me then, and started to run alongside the train. “It’s so nice to see you! I waited for half an hour!” he shouted as he ran.

  That image of Cunyuan running by the train was so joyful an image that it would remain with me, always.

  My dia had walked to work that morning so Cunyuan could pick me up on Dia’s bike. Our ride home together took nearly an hour. I sat on the back seat with my legs dangling on either side, my bag hanging over one shoulder, the early morning mist cold on my face.