Mao's Last Dancer

  After that incident, the Bandit and I became good friends, and a few weeks later, to my great surprise, he asked me to become his blood brother, a tradition from the Kung Fu masters’ era and a bond that would last a lifetime. But in many ways the forming of this bond often rivaled real brotherly love, so at first I said no. I had six brothers already. I didn’t need another. The Bandit was very disappointed, but he wasn’t deterred and the following Sunday, he invited me to go for an outing. We got permission to leave the university (without this we were never allowed beyond the gate), and the Bandit took me to a small eatery at the base of a mountain on the outskirts of Beijing. He ordered a small bottle of rice wine and a small plate of pig’s head meat—a wonderful delicacy. It was white and full of lard. Delicious! What my niang would give for such a treat! I didn’t like the rice wine, though, because it was so strong, nearly 100 percent proof.

  After we’d finished, the Bandit took out a small knife, a piece of paper and a pen. He asked me once again if I wanted to be his blood brother. He had tears in his eyes as he prepared himself for my rejection.

  I thought carefully for a while, then told him my real fear, the fear that I couldn’t live up to his expectations. I took my six brothers for granted. I had never considered how best to be a good brother.

  He laughed at that, and said he loved me for who I was.

  I relented. We cut our fingers and dropped some blood into a cup of rice wine and shared the same drink together. We then made up a poem. The rhythm and the sounds of the Chinese words were beautiful, and we worked on it for over an hour. We knew our friendship would be special—life at the academy was so lonely and so tough, the only thing we had was friendship. When the Bandit and I became blood brothers, we knew we were establishing a bond that would ensure our emotional survival for the next few years.

  That year, the different academies in our university selected even more students, and our complex in the countryside just wasn’t big enough to accommodate them all. So Madame Mao ordered each academy to go back to its old location in the city. We were told to pack our few belongings, because we would be moving out when we returned from our next three-week summer holiday, which would be spent with the workers at a garment factory outside Beijing.

  Unlike our academy in the countryside, our new city site was much smaller and very cramped. Boys and girls occupied different sections on the second floor of a three-story building, with eight students sleeping in each small room. We slept in four-bed bunks with one tiny drawer for our personal belongings. Anything that didn’t fit there would have to be stored under our bed. We would share those poky little rooms until we graduated.

  We had a new director now too. And there were more new teachers. On the first day in our new academy, we were told we would have a new ballet teacher, Xiao Shuhua.

  Teacher Xiao was a small boyish-looking man. Other teachers called him by his nickname, Woa Woa, which meant baby. “I’m excited to work with you,” he said to us in the first class. “Although I’m your teacher, I’m also your friend. We will work together and learn together, and make our classes fun. Not only will I teach you ballet steps, I’ll also try to teach you the appreciation of ballet. Ballet is the most beautiful art form in the world. I hope, by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll have the same appreciation. We should know each other’s strengths and also our weaknesses. For a start, I want all of you to know that your new ballet teacher can’t turn. I have the worst pirouettes in the world!”

  Teacher Xiao was a happy man with a quick temperament. His happiness and emotions fluctuated depending on how his students performed. He encouraged us to write down our achievements, mistakes, new discoveries, even the combination of dance steps, every day, in our diaries. He was intolerant of laziness and lack of commitment. He would fume with anger if we didn’t remember the dance combinations or his individual corrections. But he was also quick to praise and to demonstrate. He had a breathtakingly enormous jump, and he was very lean and fit. He always carried a notebook to his classes, with every step and every combination written down in detail.

  Although Teacher Xiao’s own turning ability was poor, he was determined to help his students perfect their turns, so he embarked on months of turning classes. We would complete our barre work within fifteen minutes and the rest of the two hours would be all pirouettes. The first thing he wanted to tackle was our fear of turning. Sometimes I felt the whole universe spinning around me when I walked out of these classes. Many nights I dreamed about doing multiple pirouettes and the feeling was incredibly exhilarating. It was like a “millet dream,” I thought. There was a well-cited fable in China, which Teacher Xiao repeated to us many times:A poor Chinese scholar, on his way to the capital to attend the emperor’s annual scholars’ competition, suddenly ran out of money. He was still far from Beijing, and now he had no money to hire a horse. He was hungry and tired and as he passed a small, run-down home he smelled a wonderful fragrance coming from within. He knocked on the door and an old lady stood in front of him. He begged her for some food, but she was so poor she only had millet soup to offer him. He thanked her and sat in a corner to rest while the soup cooked. He immediately fell asleep and dreamed that he had won the competition and that he would live a wealthy and happy life with many wives, concubines and children. When he woke up from his dream he believed this was his fate, until he glanced at the millet soup cooking in the wok, and realized that he was in truth just an ordinary man and the things he had dreamed were too good to be true.

  “Great things don’t come easily!” Teacher Xiao insisted, and I thought of his unattainable pirouettes. We worked on three consecutive turns for over a year. It seemed impossible to master. The perfect balance on a high demi-pointe, the shape of the hands, the crisp spotting with our heads, the turn-out of both legs, straight back, pressed-down shoulders—the coordination of all these elements together. So many things to remember! For a long time, it seemed that we would never achieve more than three pirouettes but still Teacher Xiao worked us tirelessly, day in and day out.

  Teacher Xiao didn’t seem to notice me much in the first two classes. I was shy and physically underdeveloped. He seemed to think I was the one with the least interesting face and couldn’t understand why I had been chosen in the first place. But during our third class he apparently noticed something unusual about my eyes. He began to try to find out what kind of boy I was. The more he found out, the more interested he became. He discovered that I remembered every word he said, as long as I was interested. So he made me interested in ballet, and quickly realized that I didn’t cope well with forceful shouting, which was common practice among the teachers at the Beijing Dance Academy. Instead I responded well to gentle encouragement. He noticed every subtle improvement I made. He made sure that I knew he’d noticed. He gently and gradually led me into the intricacies of ballet, nurtured me, dealt with my self-doubt and inadequacies with encouragement, and slowly moved me from the back of the class to the front.

  Apart from more and more ballet, we also started geography and history classes that year. We spent very little time on international geography. Our teacher tried hard to mention America as little as possible and no one took his class seriously, but I wanted to know about the other countries, even though I had to hide my interest. Our history class also dwelled mainly on China, but here I found the rise and fall of the different Chinese dynasties fascinating, especially the Tang and Ming dynasties with their great art, crafts, porcelain, medicine and splendid poetry.

  We had a new teacher for our politics class too that term, Chen Shulian, but we really only studied communist history and Mao’s political ideas. We were starved for knowledge from anywhere outside of China. We learned a little about Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, but only as a backdrop to Mao’s great political achievements. “Our Chairman Mao is the one who has brought Marx’s communist philosophy to life!” Chen Shulian told us one day. “He is leading us to the first stage of communism.”

  “Are we
in the first stage of communism now?” a student asked.

  “Yes, but this is a long road. We have to work hard at it.”

  Another hand was raised. “What is the final stage of communism like?”

  “Oh, it is the ultimate wonderland! There is no starvation, no class distinction, no need to work long hours. There will be total equality. Everyone will work willingly and share equally. There will be no greed or laziness, no cheating or unfairness. We will have the best of everything! It will be total happiness!”

  Chen Shulian’s vision was like morphine for the sick. It gave us a reason to bear our present harsh conditions. She portrayed Chairman Mao as the greatest political strategist ever, a man who could outmaneuver all his political enemies. She rigidly followed the textbooks. It was uninspiring to me, but I felt this was an important class all the same if I wanted to become a true communist of tomorrow. Chen Shulian must have impressed her superiors, though, because she became the head teacher of our group the following year.

  Our Chinese folk dance class became my favorite class that year. I liked Teacher Chen Yuen’s jokes. Sometimes he took students to catch frogs in the rice fields, or cicadas at night with our flashlights. On weekends, we would fry the frogs’ legs and cicadas in his room on a small electric burner. His hobby was photography, and he often invited some of the students to help him.

  But during the first half of that year, Chen Yuen’s personality suddenly changed. He joked less. He stopped organizing out-of-school activities. He stopped his photography and became withdrawn and sad. I didn’t understand and asked if there was anything wrong. His answer was always the same. “Nothing is wrong.” Then one day, suddenly, he disappeared. Later we heard that he had been discovered engaging in homosexual activities. He was sent to a pig farm in the countryside to cleanse his filthy mind. Homosexuality in Mao’s China was a serious criminal offense.

  A year later, just as suddenly, Chen Yuen returned to the school as a carpenter. He had lost his reputation, his teaching job, his wife and his position in society. Most significantly, he had lost face. His association with dance had come to an end. He was now in the lowest class of people in China, and his every move was monitored. He had to write a weekly self-criticism and progress report to the Communist Party Monitoring Committee in our academy. I never saw him smile again.

  But Chen Yuen’s misfortunes went from bad to worse. One Sunday he was using the big machine saw and lost three of his fingers. There was no compensation, and he had to pay all his medical expenses. He couldn’t use a saw after that, and he ended up cleaning the toilets. His loss of dignity was unbearable to watch, even for a young boy like me.

  Chen Yuen’s replacement was his former teacher, Ma Lixie. Small, thin and animated, he had an unusually loud voice and a habit of rubbing his palms together at furious speed before demonstrating an exercise, as though this gave him courage or inspiration. I learned so much from Ma Lixie. His demonstrations were of perfection. He taught us a Korean crane dance, encouraged us to learn the essence of the dance, every subtle eye and even hair movement to feel like the bird’s feathers. He dared us to think the unthinkable and explore the unexplorable. He dared us to be better than he. “Qing chu yu lan er sheng yu lan,” he would say: the color green comes from the color blue, but it is the stronger of the two. He challenged us to be the color green.

  That year I also met a new student, Chong Xiongjun, a tall boy with a pimply face, from one of the outer suburbs of Beijing. He was two years older than I. After lunch one day, he asked me if I’d like to spend one Sunday with his family.

  “I would love to, but I don’t know if my teacher will let me,” I replied.

  That afternoon I went to one of our political heads to ask permission to go to Chong Xiongjun’s home. He said that my parents would have to write a letter to the academy. The academy couldn’t take responsibility if something should happen to me, and even if my parents did give their permission, I would only be allowed to go once a month.

  A reply from my parents would probably take at least three weeks by the slow Chinese post.

  In the following weeks, I received my parents’ reply, written by my second brother, Cunyuan. They were excited about me going to the Chongs’ home, especially my niang, who was happy that I would have a family close by to go to.

  Xiongjun and I set off at eight o’clock the following Sunday morning. It took three different buses to get to Chaoyang district, and it was nearly ten o’clock by the time we arrived at their house. Xiongjun’s grandmother was outside waiting for us. She gave him a big hug and told him she missed him so much. Xiongjun called her Lau-Lau. She reminded me of my na-na—she was old, small, with bound feet, poor eyesight and very few teeth. She looked at me and smiled broadly. “You can call me Lau-Lau too!”

  The Chongs lived in a row of single-story concrete apartments, very much like the commune layout in Li Commune, except that the space was wider between each row and the apartments were built with concrete blocks. Even the floor inside was concrete.

  The Chongs’ apartment had three rooms. The entrance room was used as the kitchen, dining room and living room, and the rooms on each side of the entrance room were the bedrooms. There were no doors between each room; instead they had black cotton curtains. There was no toilet, only one outside the building that was shared by about twenty families.

  I soon learned that both of Xiongjun’s parents worked at a local glass factory. His father reminded me of my dia, a hard worker and a man of few words. His mother seemed a little younger than her husband and, like my own niang, she was the personality of their family.

  We played cards after our tea, a game called “Protecting the Emperor,” which at first concerned me a little. I thought it sounded very antirevolutionary. Then I helped to make dumplings. Xiongjun’s mother was surprised. “Look at Cunxin’s dumplings. They are so pretty, and I bet they will taste good too.”

  “Ma, if you keep embarrassing my friend, he won’t come again!” Xiongjun said.

  That day was also the very first time I’d tasted beer. It was room temperature because there was no refrigeration, and my first mouthful was all foam.

  “Do you like it?” Xiongjun asked, laughing at me because the beer made me cough.

  “Yes, I like it a lot,” I replied, but I felt very light-headed after my second glass.

  Besides the dumplings and the beer, we also had a dish of freshly caught fish, stewed with soy sauce, vinegar and different spices, cooked until the bones were soft enough to eat. It was delicious. Xiongjun’s mother was a good cook, and I could tell they had spent a lot of money on this meal. They were clearly in a much better financial position than my family. Here there were two full salaries feeding five people, and plenty of food.

  After lunch, his father took us all to the glass factory where he worked. There I saw hundreds of thousands of crystal-clear marbles in huge piles, and special machines that heated the glass up and pulled it into thin threads. I loved playing marbles at home and they were expensive to buy, so I asked Xiongjun’s father if I could keep one as a souvenir and take it home to show my brothers. Without a word, he went over to talk to the gatekeeper and when he came back I couldn’t believe my ears. “You can have a pocketful of them,” he told me.

  “Really?”

  He nodded. I was so excited when I put my hands into the huge pile of glass marbles. My brothers and my friends would be amazed. There would be enough to give one each to my brothers, cousins and even a few to my best friends. I held the shiny balls in my hands and looked at Xiongjun’s father again. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded once more and smiled. I was beside myself with excitement. It was as though they were balls of gold.

  That Sunday with them was the best Sunday I’d had since leaving home. They made me feel like I was a member of their own family. Before I left that day, Xiongjun’s mother handed me a small bag of dates. “I hope you like our family. You will come back again, won’t you?” she asked sincerely
, holding my hand tight.

  I nodded excitedly. I only wished I could go home to see my own family on Sundays too.

  The next Sunday visit was a whole month away, and I longed for it to come sooner. But after my second visit the bus fare had nearly eaten up all my spending money, and I knew that I couldn’t ask my parents for more. The third time Xiongjun invited me to his home I had to make an excuse. “I don’t feel well, I can’t go.”

  He was very disappointed and went without me.

  The next month I tried to make another excuse.

  “Are you still my friend?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Don’t you like my family?”

  “Don’t be silly, of course I like your family.” I felt dreadful not telling him the truth.

  “Are you embarrassed by my mother’s praises of you?” he persisted.

  “No, you have a wonderful mother!”

  “Then why don’t you come? When you don’t come, they think we’ve had a fight and that you don’t like me anymore. I had to defend myself! Please come, everyone is looking forward to seeing you again.”

  Tears welled in my eyes. I looked away. “I can’t afford the bus fare. I only have eight yuan for the entire year. I can’t ask my family for any more.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier! I have enough money for both of our bus fares. My family will kill me if they find out that you couldn’t come because I had the money and didn’t pay for you! Come on, the bus will be full if we don’t hurry.”

  We left around nine o’clock and the lines at the bus stop were so long that by the time we arrived at Xiongjun’s home it was nearly noon. But, as before, my day with the Chongs was filled with happiness and affection. “The dumplings aren’t the same without Cunxin’s involvement,” Xiongjun’s mother said at lunchtime.