Mao's Last Dancer (Movie Tie-In)

by Li Cunxin

  After a few hours of almost unbearable anticipation, the moment arrived: Chairman Mao, Madame Mao and the rest of the Gang of Four, the premier of China, Zhou Enlai, and many other central government leaders, appeared on the podium of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Rippling to the distant boundaries of the square, the crowd cheered, clapped and jumped like a crazed animal. The ground vibrated under my feet. The entire world would hear this! Millions of people shouted, “Long, long live Chairman Mao!” Everyone wore red armbands and red scarves. There were thousands of red banners and flags with “Long, long live Chairman Mao” written on them. People sang and danced, eagerly clutching their Red Books in their hands.

  I experienced an extraordinary sense of belonging, a sense of being in the presence of some divine being. I was so proud to be a young Guard of Chairman Mao. Tears rolled uncontrollably down my cheeks. I looked around. I saw others too, weeping with joy and pride. It seemed like hours before Chairman Mao gestured for us to sit down and, following the ripple through the crowd, we immediately obeyed.

  Mao spoke for no more than half an hour, his familiar voice seducing us through the many loudspeakers placed around the Square. His speech was constantly interrupted by thunderous applause. We went up and down, down and up, like yo-yos, our ovations many times longer than his speeches. He spoke with the heavy accent of Hunan, which made it difficult for me to understand him, but I didn’t mind: I knew, as everyone else in China knew, that we would study his speech in its entirety for at least the next few months.

  Many hours after his speech we were still in the square, singing and dancing for pure joy.

  Soon after that momentous visit to Tiananmen Square, we went on another trip, this time to an area on the outskirts of Beijing called Pingu. We were told it had similar terrain to Dajai, a model area where peasants cultivated fruit trees and crops in rocky mountainous conditions. We were told that the most precious gift one could take to Dajai was a bucketful of soil.

  Learning from the peasants was reaching fever pitch at around this time. Besides taking small trees, and two bucketfuls of soil, every student was asked to fill a pocket with soil as well, as a symbol of this most precious gift.

  I was so excited about going to Pingu. I imagined green wheat and cornfields spreading over the mountainsides, luscious fruits hanging down from the branches of the trees. No one could have prepared me for the disappointment to come.

  I suffered through dreadful motion sickness on the uneven and winding mountainous roads for over five hours on the trip to Pingu. But when we arrived I was shocked to see nothing but brown, bare hills and a few sprinkled patches of green. Many tourists were there too, paying homage to the great miracles of this Dajai-like place. But there were more visitors than plants. A local guide showed us some pictures of the abundant wheat and corn at harvest time and told us we’d come in the off-season, but I wasn’t convinced. I was a country boy. I knew nothing would grow on those rocks, not even weeds. Even if they put our soil over the rocks, one heavy rainfall would have washed it straight down the mountain. Of course I didn’t dare question Mao’s directive, but I did wonder if Mao had ever come to see places like this for himself.

  In the second half of that year the head of the Communist Youth Party at our academy asked me to apply for membership. This was indeed a privilege. Only the most politically devoted students could join. I was flattered and surprised.

  I handed in my application and then had to have private heart-to-heart discussions with three different party leaders. I also had to read a thick party manual, full of communist ideals, which were already familiar to me from the Red Book. When the committee felt comfortable with me they assigned two members to sponsor me. My friend Fu Xijun was one of them.

  After the final vote of all the Communist Party members, five new members, including me, found ourselves standing under the flag of China with Mao’s Red Book raised by our faces, pledging our allegiance to the Communist Youth Party: “I willingly and proudly join the Communist Youth Party. I swear to love Chairman Mao, love the Communist Party, love my country, love my people and love my fellow colleagues. I will respond to the party’s calling and strictly observe all party rules. The party’s interests come before mine. I’m ready to give my all, including my life, to its glorious cause. We are dedicated to the principle of bearing hardship and letting others enjoy the fruit of our work . . .”

  From that moment on I officially became a Communist Youth Party member. My life now had true purpose—to serve glorious communism. Once again I felt a powerful sense of belonging, of being closer to our beloved Chairman and Madame Mao, of being wholeheartedly embraced by the Communist Youth Party and of feeling a new beginning from that day forward.

  I took my role as a Communist Youth Party member very seriously. This had been my political destiny from birth. I was one step closer to becoming a full Communist Party member, my ultimate political dream. Now I could contribute to Mao’s political cause more effectively, enthusiastically participate in all of the party’s agendas and try my hardest to make a difference whenever I could.

  But politics was constantly changing around us—Mao knew the Gang of Four was incapable of managing China’s economic affairs and by 1974 Mao felt increasingly threatened by Deng Xiaoping’s popularity. Deng Xiaoping’s reputation was spreading fast. Within the walls of our academy, however, the influence of Madame Mao was still paramount and she alone controlled our political education.

  Madame Mao might have been pleased with our political development but she still wasn’t happy, apparently, with the standard of our dancing. The vice Minister of Culture, an ex-principal dancer with the Central Ballet of China and famous for dancing the leading role in Madame Mao’s model ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, was asked to do something about it. So he sent another retired principal dancer from the Central Ballet, Zhang Ce, to be the new vice director of our academy in charge of technical standards. Zhang Ce brought back one of his former teachers, Zhang Shu, to be head of the ballet department.

  Zhang Shu was one of the founders of Chinese ballet, along with Chiu Ho and Chen Lueng, and was widely considered one of the most knowledgeable ballet experts in China. He was a small man with an even temperament, and he often watched our classes and occasionally taught us. From the very beginning he seemed to notice me, and I found out that he’d even told Teacher Xiao that I was one to watch.

  One day, soon after Zhang Shu’s arrival, I lay on my bed reading the Monkey King story, a Chinese classic and one of only a few stories we were still allowed to read. As I lay down I felt something hard under my thin cotton mat. When I put my hand under it I found a thin book. It looked very old, and when I flipped through it I saw that it was all in a foreign language. I couldn’t understand any of the words of course, but there were quite a few pictures in it too—all of different ballet poses. It seemed to be a schoolbook of some kind. The young teenagers’ ballet positions were beautiful and their figures were exceptional. I was especially impressed by a boy posing in arabesques. He was wearing a light cotton vest which looked like ours, with black tights, white socks and shoes. His lines were clean and extended. His placement was perfect. He seemed no older than I. I wished that one day I would be good enough to demonstrate in a book just like this, for the next generation of dancers.

  I didn’t know for certain who had put that book under my mat, but I had a rough idea and I knew it would be far too dangerous to show the book around. Whoever put it there would have wanted me to keep it to myself.

  Zhang Ce’s and Zhang Shu’s arrival at the academy marked the beginning of our new focus on technique. Extra time was devoted to dancing, and some of our academic classes were dropped. Like Zhang Shu, other experienced teachers who had previously been accused of being rightists were now rehabilitated and allowed to return. One was a Russian ballet expert who spoke very good English and who had also translated several Russian ballet books into Chinese before he was labeled a rightist. He’d had to do the lowest and fi
lthiest jobs while he was in the countryside, but his only crime had been his knowledge of Western arts.

  Around the same time another “antirevolutionary” also came back to our academy from the brain-cleansing camps. He was a piano tuner, about fifty years old, with large ears that curved forward. He’d been recalled because all the pianists had complained so profusely about the out-of-tune pianos and because there simply wasn’t anyone else the academy officials could hire who wasn’t classified either as a rightist or an antirevolutionary. That piano tuner tuned and banged on the piano keyboards all day long. He took his time and always walked with his head lowered, constantly afraid that if he ran out of pianos to tune, he would be assigned cleaning, washing or any number of other lowly jobs.

  The Russian ballet expert was not as lucky. He had to sweep, clean and scrub floors, walls and toilets. One day he was assigned to push a heavy two-wheeled cart while some of us loaded it with soil mixed with horse manure. Some of my classmates began calling him “the filthy rightist” and accused him of being too slow and lazy. I couldn’t stand it—I didn’t know what crime he had really committed, but after a few trips of pushing the heavy cart I could tell he was exhausted and I volunteered to help.

  “Thank you, young man,” he said quietly.

  “You’re welcome,” I replied.

  “What is your name?”

  “Li Cunxin.”

  “I will always remember it!” he said, profoundly grateful.

  The next day, during one of our political meetings, I was accused of being weak because I’d felt sorry for the rightist.

  “I wasn’t feeling sorry for him,” I lied. “I wanted to make the process faster so we could contribute more to the peasants.”

  In the second half of that same year, our academy auditioned some music students. They’d already had some music training and had come from all over China. I never understood why they didn’t go to the music academy instead, but they didn’t and they lived in a couple of small crowded rooms in our own studio building. One of the violinists in that group, Liu Fengtian, was also a good hairdresser. I often asked him to cut my hair because I couldn’t afford to go to a professional hairdresser. He was the first person ever to use a pair of scissors on me. Before that we roommates cut each other’s hair with a pair of blunt hair clippers, and our hair often got caught in the middle of the clippers. The only way to get it loose was to pull the hair out. Needless to say it wasn’t a very good look, but we were thankful all the same. A haircut was always a painful experience before Liu Fengtian’s arrival. He was a good violinist who played with real passion. I loved watching him practice on the sports ground. He became one of my closest friends.

  It was in this third year that my attitude toward dancing finally changed. For the first time since I had come to the academy I felt confident in my ballet class. I began to do well with our two new, technically difficult steps for the year: the single tour en l’air and the triple pirouette. With Teacher Xiao’s gentle nurturing I made noticeable progress. I worked hard and listened to every word he said. I tried to understand the essence of his corrections and wrote down my new discoveries in my diary every day. I practiced on the side or behind the first group, even if it was not my turn, and my rapid improvement surprised many of my teachers and classmates.

  My progress in ballet also helped me in other classes, especially in acrobatics. Now I was making good progress with backward somersaults, which I had been terrified of the year before. But one day, as I was doing one, I thought the teachers were waiting and ready to support me. I was wrong. They had turned their attention to another student. I took off, then suddenly panicked because I couldn’t feel their hands supporting me. I crashed down from shoulder height, my back and head landing on the hard wooden floor, which was covered only by a thin threadbare carpet. I was knocked unconscious.

  When I recovered I looked up to see my teachers and my classmates leaning over me with anxious, panicky looks. My head and neck throbbed with pain.

  They carried me to my bed and told me to have a good sleep. At lunchtime, the Bandit and Fu Xijun brought me a bowl of noodle soup with an egg in it—a special treat if you were ill. We had to have the academy doctor’s written report to be allowed such special food.

  No official assistance, no medical care, no X ray was offered. I was told to go back to my normal routine that afternoon. But my neck pain was intense and persistent.

  By the next Sunday I was no better and the Chongs took me to a seventy-five-year-old lady, a local healer, who massaged my neck and cracked it with amazing force. A few days later the pain disappeared, but my neck was never the same after that accident and it often gave me problems. Regardless of injuries, however, the teachers in our acrobatics classes believed in working under harsh conditions. Once they even made us do our class, including somersaults and backflips, in the snow. Luckily for us, Teacher Xiao complained to the academy director and lessons in the snow never happened again.

  A few weeks before our midyear exams, Teacher Xiao finished our class late one day, and I was desperate to go to the bathroom before our next class. I only had ten minutes, and as usual there was a long queue. I was a couple of minutes late for Gao’s Beijing Opera Movement class.

  He stopped the music. “Here comes my prized student with the brainless big head! Why are you late?” he shouted.

  I had intended to apologize sincerely to him and explain why I was late, but to my great surprise, entirely different words came out. “I’m not a brainless big head! I do have a brain!” I was so angry and short of breath that I stuttered badly.

  “Get out of my class! Get out! Never come to my class again!” He pointed at the door, and his face was red with fury.

  I ran to our dormitory and sat on my bed. There were no tears. I was in such a rage that I simply felt like killing him. He had treated me unfairly. He had called me names. He hadn’t even noticed my improved attitude over the last few months—he probably never would.

  I couldn’t just stay in my room, though—I feared he might report me. I had to do something, and I had to act fast.

  I ran to Teacher Xiao’s office and found him alone, reading. I stuttered my way through my story, telling him what had happened with Teacher Gao, and he listened attentively.

  “Sit down,” he said when I’d finished. “Cunxin, I understand your anger and I think Teacher Gao was wrong. He shouldn’t have called you names. I will go to Director Xiao and tell her what you have told me. If Teacher Gao goes to her, she will at least have both sides of the story and I will carry a little more weight than you. However, before I go to Director Xiao, I would like you to do a difficult task for me,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, puzzled.

  “I want you to go to Teacher Gao and talk to him.”

  “I don’t want to go near him! He hates me!” I jumped up from my seat.

  “I know how difficult this will be, but I want you to give it a try. Have you ever told Teacher Gao how you feel about him calling you names? Are you the only boy he has singled out?”

  Teacher Xiao’s questions made me think. I wasn’t the only student Teacher Gao shouted at and called names.

  “Sit down, Cunxin,” Teacher Xiao said again. “I want to tell you a story ...”

  One of the guards in an emperor’s palace went to his teacher and wanted him to make him the best bow shooter in the land. The teacher told him to go away. The guard returned every day and begged his teacher to teach him. Day after day, week after week, month after month the guard came. He came in the rain and he came in the snow. After one whole year, the teacher was moved by the guard’s perseverance and determination and finally accepted him as his student. The teacher asked him to pick up a heavy bow and hold it up. After a few minutes the guard’s arms started shaking with tiredness. The teacher made him carry very heavy loads in each hand every day. After a while when he picked up the heavy bow again it felt like a feather in his hands. One day he asked his teacher, when would he te
ach him how to shoot an arrow? The teacher told him that he wasn’t ready yet and instead asked him if he could see anything far into the sky. He looked up and looked as hard and as far as he could but couldn’t see anything. His teacher told him to look at a tiny little spider in a faraway tree that he could hardly see. He kept focusing on it with one eye at a time. Gradually he began to see the spider clearly and eventually when he used both of his eyes the little spider seemed as large as his shield. His teacher said that he was now ready to teach him how to shoot an arrow. Soon the guard became the best bow shooter in the land.

  “Remember, Cunxin, nothing is impossible,” Teacher Xiao said.

  I left Teacher Xiao’s office full of hope. I ran to Teacher Gao’s office as soon as our next class was finished. He was just coming out of the door, with bowls and chopsticks in hand, going to the canteen for lunch.

  “Teacher Gao, may I talk to you for one minute?”

  He looked at me angrily. “Better be brief! Come in!”

  Once I closed the door he said, “Why were you late for class today?”

  “I was waiting to use the toilet,” I replied.

  “Why wasn’t anybody else late? Are you the only person needing to go to the toilet?” he asked.

  “I tried to hurry but there wasn’t any toilet available. I’m sorry.”

  “If you showed as much enthusiasm for your dancing as for the toilets, you wouldn’t be where you are with the standard of your dancing,” he fumed. “Okay, I accept your apology. Now, go to lunch!” He rose, ready to go, but I didn’t move.

  “Teacher Gao, could I tell you something?” I said.

  “What?” he asked impatiently.