Mao's Last Dancer (Movie Tie-In)

by Li Cunxin

  In the shady courtyard of my old home, a small square wooden table, knee-high, had been placed. Many little wooden folding stools were carefully positioned around it. A big floral teapot and teacups sat in the center of the table, and one of my sisters-in-law began to fill everyone’s cups. Plates full of roasted sunflower seeds, peanuts and sorghum sweets were passed around. We popped open the sunflower seeds with our teeth and cracked the peanut shells with our hands. I remembered the sorghum sweets I used to take to Beijing with me. Every object was drenched with memories.

  It was late in the afternoon by now. The sun was setting and had painted the sky a beautiful orange color. I watched Mary—she was surrounded by my sisters-in-law and nieces. They seemed to understand each other without me having to translate for them at all. It was almost as though Mary had always been a part of this family.

  Mary and I had brought some American cigarettes and candies, and these were passed around and shared. The children feasted on the chewing gum and sweets, and loved the American jump ropes that we’d also brought for them. But the thing that excited and astounded everyone was our Polaroid camera. They were beside themselves with amazement. How could their own images, pictures of themselves, come out so quickly! It was thrilling. I was sad to discover, however, that the children in my village no longer seemed to play the simple games from my childhood, such as marbles or one-legged fights. Instead, they were crazy about small Japanese electronic gadgets, just like children in America. I was amazed that these sorts of sophisticated games were available in my village at all. How times had changed.

  The children in my family welcomed Mary and me by putting on a singing and dancing show. We cheered and laughed as they each did their little numbers. The younger ones, from two to five years old, did their best trying to keep up. My two-year-old niece was knocked over a few times by the older children, but after a piece of candy and some encouragement she was participating once more. Then, just before dinnertime, many of the villagers returned from their work in the fields and popped their heads through the windows to get a glimpse of Mary and me. I could see they were too embarrassed to come in, so I took Mary outside instead. Within minutes a large crowd had gathered and an old man, whom I accidentally called Great Uncle instead of Great-Grand-Nephew, asked us to dance.

  “Yes, please! Dance for us, please!” the crowd urged.

  Mary and I looked at their eager faces. We exchanged a glance and Mary nodded.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  She nodded again. “Let’s do an arabesque lift from Nutcracker.”

  So a small space in the middle of the street was cleared for us and the crowd gathered around. I lifted Mary high above my head, then flipped her down into a fish dive. The crowd gasped, then cheered and roared with applause. “Zailai, zailai!” More, more! they demanded.

  I picked Mary up with one arm and twirled her around in circles. The villagers screamed with delight.

  By the time we went back inside, my niang and my fourth brother had prepared a tableful of colorful dishes. It was too hot inside so they set two more tables up in the shady courtyard, so there was one for the men, one for the women and a third for the children. Big bottles of local beer were popped open under the tables, and there were many gan beis that night. All of my brothers could cook, and each of them cooked his favorite dish.

  So many questions were asked about our life in the West. My parents had told them something of it, but still they wanted more and hung on our every word. They had little idea, of course, of the ballet world from which Mary and I had come. But they were not celebrating the famous dancer that night. For them, they were just happy that their sixth brother had finally returned. I fitted back into my sixth son position just as though I had never left, nine years earlier. So much had changed, but what endured was love and trust.

  My family bombarded Mary with questions. They wanted to seat her at the men’s table as a special honor, but she insisted on sitting with the women even though she only spoke very limited Chinese. She told my parents that she just wanted to be treated like everyone else in the family. She wanted no special privileges.

  Rather than stay in a hotel, Mary and I had decided to stay with my parents, but I worried that Mary would find it hard living in such poor conditions. There was still no bath or shower and no hot water. The hole-in-the-ground toilet outside was exactly the way I remembered it from my childhood. And although Mary liked Chinese food, I wasn’t sure she was really ready for three weeks of it in our village.

  But Mary took everything in her stride, and everyone loved her. I translated for her as much as I could that night, but when I eventually lost my voice through talking too much she stopped asking me questions.

  Then, within days of our arrival, the local police came. They took our passports. We became suspicious, worried. They told us it was for registration purposes. We could only hope that we would get them back before we were due to leave.

  Everywhere we went in the commune in those three weeks, people’s eyes were fixed on us. They couldn’t stop talking about Mary—her hair, the color of her eyes, her white skin. They watched her every move. Only when she said “Ni hao” to them, did they remember that Mary was a person too and they would burst into laughter.

  My parents’ house was still much the same as when I had left. Only a few changes signaled to me that now it was nine years later. The pigsty, chicken yard and vegetable patch were gone, replaced by a clean, paved courtyard, but the inside layout of the house was exactly the same. I was disappointed to see that my beloved newspaper on the walls and ceilings had been replaced with bright flowery wallpaper: I would have liked another word-finding game with my brothers. The earth kangs were still there, but now the windows had big panes of glass and there were even electric fans to keep the house cool. Now we wouldn’t have to rely on the breeze to blow the mosquitoes away. Small motorized blowers for fire making replaced my beloved wind boxes. There was clearly a huge improvement in my parents’ lifestyle. “And it’s all because of your financial help,” my niang said.

  We got to know my six nieces and one nephew while we were there too. There was only one boy among my four brothers’ children. My parents would have liked more grandsons, but the one-child policy had now been strongly enforced in China. My second brother and fourth brother were the only two of my brothers classified as peasants, so only they were allowed to have a second child if their first wasn’t a boy. My other brothers were salaried people and so were considered in the same way as city folk—one child only, regardless of gender.

  “But what happens if you do become pregnant with a second child?” Mary asked.

  “The government will force you to have an abortion,” one of my sisters-in-law replied. “Even if you run away, they will track you down, force you to have an abortion, and you’ll be penalized.”

  Mary thought it was nothing short of barbaric.

  “Mary, can you have six extra boys and give us one each?” another sister-in-law asked, and everyone laughed. Deep inside, however, I knew how they felt. Not producing a son to continue the family line was considered the worst betrayal of your ancestors. I looked at my third brother while he was cooking and I realized that what my parents had done, all those years ago, giving him to my fourth uncle who couldn’t have children, was one of the greatest sacrifices they could have made. I looked at my third brother’s beautiful daughter, Lulu, then looked at my nephew and my other nieces. I felt sad that they, like most of the next generation of children growing up in China, would have no brothers or sisters. We had survived through generations of dark and impoverished living because of this one strength, because of the unconditional love and unselfish care of each other within our family unit. It was all we’d had.

  During our three weeks in Qingdao, Mary and I spent a day each with every one of my brothers’ families. We started with my big brother, Cuncia, and his wife and son, who lived in a small two-bedroom apartment provided by the Laoshan Post Office where he
was now a senior manager.

  Cuncia had spent over sixteen years in Tibet, one of many Red Guards who had responded to Mao’s calling. He had worked hard and been promoted to the head of the Communist Youth Party in the Tibet Post Office.

  It was then that my brother had met and married another native of Shandong Province, and they’d had their son. But then, in 1981, the Chinese government suddenly changed its policy toward Tibet. All Chinese living and working in Tibet were ordered to return to their home province.

  Cuncia told us that he had first been promoted to the position of deputy head of the post office in a large county called Jiaoxien. He was loved and respected. But one day, in 1983, he was suddenly called into his boss’s office and swiftly demoted. To his utter surprise, one of the opposition party Red Guards had become jealous of his rapid promotion and still held a grudge against him—he had lodged a complaint to the government about an incident where my brother had slapped a party leader during a heated argument at the height of the Cultural Revolution. It was an incident that had happened over twenty-five years earlier.

  “I’m only one of millions of victims,” my brother explained to Mary. “I am, like so many people in China, still amazed at how badly I was manipulated and betrayed by Mao and the Gang of Four. The Red Guards of yesterday were the epitome of the communist spirit. Now we are searching for answers. We have to live with our injured pride and our lost beliefs.”

  I felt so much sorrow for Cuncia. I knew what he said was true—he had spent the best part of his youth pursuing nothing but propaganda. But the Cultural Revolution didn’t just rob him of his youth; it crushed and destroyed his spirit and his soul. His trust in his society had vanished. Even his sacred family values had been called into question by Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

  The brother I became most concerned about, however, was my second brother, Cunyuan. He had built himself a two-story three-bedroom house on commune-provided land, and although his marriage wasn’t his choice, he had learned to love and care for his wife and their two daughters.

  Then in 1986, so he told us on the night we visited him, he was working for a lumber company and was on one of his business trips to a northern province called Dongbei. He had been walking back to his hotel when he’d found a newborn girl abandoned and crying on the roadside. There was a simple note attached to her blankets: “If my daughter has luck on her side,” it read, “she will be rescued by a kindhearted person who will love her as his or her own child. May the gods bless you—my beloved child, and bless you—the kindhearted person.” It was signed, “The child’s mother.”

  Another abandoned, unwanted baby girl. There are many such stories from China.

  Cunyuan brought this little girl home. He and his wife loved and cared for her like one of their own. Now they had three daughters. She grew up to be a beautiful girl, with a sparkling personality, and the Li family adored her. The local government at first refused to recognize her as a legitimate child, but after several years of persistence from my brother and his wife, the county officials finally allowed them to adopt her and register her as a local citizen.

  I had asked my second sister-in-law to cook us some typical peasant food that night, such as dried yams and corn bread, for Mary to experience. “Brother, you’ve been away too long!” Cunyuan said. “Some of the food we used to hate is now back in fashion—like corn bread.”

  “Even dried yams?” I asked.

  “Not dried yams. People feed that stuff to their dogs, and even they hate it,” he replied quickly.

  Mary did try the dried yams that night, but I noticed she mostly ate the dumplings.

  After the meal, while Mary was playing with my brother’s three girls, I asked Cunyuan to show me the farmland he had been allocated by the commune. But what I really wanted was a chance to be alone with him. I remembered our heart-wrenching conversation, years ago, on the way to the train station. I eagerly wanted to know how he saw life now, and I desperately hoped that he was happy.

  As we walked I noticed that we were heading in the direction of our na-na’s burial place. I felt a rush of shame. I hadn’t visited her grave yet and promised myself that I would take Mary there the very next day.

  “Here is my land.” My second brother pointed to a small area, no bigger than four meters by six.

  “Is this it?”

  “Yes, this is ours. It is not really even ours. It’s on loan from the government.” He gestured for me to sit down.

  I sat next to him on the edge of his precious land and looked at the layered fields in front of us.

  “See those buildings over there?” Cunyuan pointed at rows of newly built ten-story apartments on the east side of our village. “Some of our land was sold to state-owned companies to build apartments for their employees. I’m afraid I will lose even this land soon.” He shook his head.

  “Won’t they compensate you?” I asked.

  “All land belongs to the government. They can take it back any time they want to.”

  “Is there any kind of central planning?”

  “None whatsoever. Soon we will have no land left to farm. We are forced to put our faith, and our future, in the hands of a few government officials. I’m so afraid they will swindle our land away, and our livelihood, all in the name of reform,” he replied.

  I asked him about his marriage next.

  “I love her,” Cunyuan said of his wife. “She is a nice person with a kind soul. She’s a good wife and a wonderful mother. She wasn’t my choice and I have struggled to come to terms with it, but I have learned to love and care for her, just as I have learned to accept life as it is.” He paused. “Do you remember our dia’s story about the frog in the well?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Even though life is better now, I still feel like the unfortunate frog trapped in that deep well,” he said. “The only joy in my life is my beautiful children. My wife and I pour all our love into them. We hope they will be better educated and have a happier and better life than ours,” he said. “It’s a shame that I will never have the privilege to see the world out there. Maybe my children will one day.”

  At that point we saw Mary and my sister-in-law coming toward us, the children with popsicles in their hands, and we left our discussion at that.

  The following morning our dia led all of his sons, his grandchildren and Mary, to our na-na’s grave. We carried stacks and stacks of yellowish rice paper with gold bars stamped on it, several boxes of incense and a bottle of water.

  I was sad to see that there was not much of the grave left. Years of rain had washed away part of the hump of earth, but my family had prevented the weeds from becoming overgrown. Our dia knelt in front of our na-na’s grave and murmured, “Niang, your seventh son is here with all my sons, Jing Hao’s wife, Mary, and all my grandchildren to give you our love. We’ve also brought you money, food and drinks.” He then kowtowed three times. Cuncia followed him, then my other brothers from eldest to youngest.

  When it was my turn, both Mary and I knelt down in front of the grave together. No words could express what I felt. I remembered na-na’s kind face, her toothless smile, the way she would hobble around on her bound feet and the sweet, kind deeds she did. I remembered the time I broke six of my niang’s precious new plates and she pretended that she’d been the one who had broken them instead. She was still so vivid in my mind, even though it was over nineteen years since she’d died. I kowtowed, and kowtowed, and kowtowed, to make up for the lost years, and Mary followed in turn.

  After all the children had finished their kowtows, our dia placed a stack of paper money and eight pieces of incense on top of our na-na’s grave. He secured the paper money with a piece of rock so the wind wouldn’t blow it away. Then we lit all the paper and incense and our dia poured the bottle of water around the grave. We will never know if her spirit knew we were there, but it satisfied something deep inside me, this tribute to my beloved na-na.

  This was also the day Mary and I were
to spend with my fourth brother, Cunsang, and his family. True to his word, as soon as he’d finished his four-year term in the navy, Cunsang had come home and married Zhen Hua. My parents tried in vain to persuade him to serve for longer, but he didn’t want to be apart from Zhen Hua. Now they were happily married with two children, and living on a small egg farm that they’d started on a piece of rented land up on the Northern Hill. When Mary and I went to visit, he proudly showed us his fifty hens and about a hundred chicks. He cooked us many different chicken and egg dishes—and they were all delicious.

  Cunsang’s family lived simply and happily. He was so proud of his achievement with this farm. He so desperately wanted to expand it, but he had no money. So Mary and I gladly gave him some to help him realize his dream. Cunsang was overwhelmed by this. He couldn’t speak for several minutes, just held the money in his shaking hands, and looked from me to Mary and back to me again. Eventually he put his hand on his heart. “Thank you!” he murmured.

  The following day, it was my third brother’s turn for our visit. Cunmao had married a beautiful girl he’d met at high school, and they dearly loved their six-year-old girl, Lulu. They lived in a two-story house, similar to my second brother’s, and by now Cunmao was a successful businessman. He did all kinds of business deals, and his wife was an accountant in the Qingdao Carpet Factory. Cunmao had remained a kind and considerate son to his adopted parents—my fourth uncle and aunt. I was relieved.

  Cunmao cooked us a tableful of food for lunch that day, and after many gan beis, Fourth Uncle and Aunt went to bed for a rest. When my third sister-in-law and Lulu took Mary for a walk to the village shop, I took the opportunity to quietly ask Cunmao how he was.