Mao's Last Dancer

  He was surprised, and for a while he just looked at me. Then tears slowly gathered in his eyes. “No, I don’t think I ever will.” He shook his head and wiped the tears from his face. “There always seems to be something missing in my heart. For all these years I’ve longed to be part of my real family, which is only next door. I wanted to go back, but I couldn’t. I will always have to push my sadness far away from my heart and mind. It is a constant battle.”

  It was only then, after so many years, that I told him I’d overheard his conversation with our niang that day, the day he’d begged her to take him back.

  “How did you cope with it for all these years?” I asked.

  “It has been hard, sometimes impossible, especially in my teenage years. At times I blamed my real parents for giving me away, other times I blamed my adopted parents for not giving me back, but most of the time I blamed myself.”

  “Why blame yourself? It’s not your fault.”

  “But I did blame myself. I blamed myself for all the desire and guilt in my heart. I felt bitter that my life and destiny had been decided by two sets of parents, but I loved them all. I could do nothing but be a faithful son to my adopted parents. If I hadn’t, I would have hurt everyone. I would have torn the Li family apart. What is done is done.”

  I tried hard to swallow the hot ball of tears in my throat. “Third Brother, I’ve always loved you like one of my other brothers. We all feel the same way,” I said.

  He nodded then, and we raised our glasses and drank a toast to happiness.

  Mary and I went to visit my fifth brother, Cunfar, next. He was now married to a lovely lady who loved him dearly. They had no children, but secretly wished for a son.

  Cunfar and my fifth sister-in-law took us to a restaurant on the Laoshan mountain, a place I had always wanted to go to, but could never before have afforded. In front of a spectacular view over the blue ocean, we sat and watched the fishermen row their small boats in and out of their sea farms.

  Cunfar told me that he had replaced my dia at the Laoshan Transportation Company when our dia had reached retirement age—that was the rule: one of his children was to replace him at his work and, had I stayed in Qingdao, I would have been the one, not Cunfar. But even as a child, Cunfar had dearly wanted to be the one to replace our dia. He too wanted to get out of the well, and becoming a truck driver or a factory worker was his only way. He loved the transportation business. He worked hard and was quickly promoted to a director’s position. Now he was in charge of a large fleet of trucks.

  My brother and I exchanged many childhood stories. “Remember the dead champion cricket you kept for me?” I asked.

  “How could I ever forget!” he said.

  After lunch we all walked along a rocky mountain path toward a small Buddhist temple, an old one built high on a hill, one of the few that had survived the Cultural Revolution. Suddenly, Cunfar and I stopped. “Listen! Did you hear it?” I asked excitedly.

  “Yes! But I heard it first!” he shouted.

  “No, I heard it first!”

  “What is it?” Mary walked up from behind us with my fifth sister-in-law.

  “A cricket!” I answered.

  My fifth sister-in-law laughed. “You brothers and your crickets, you never change, do you?”

  30

  ANOTHER WEDDING

  QINGDAO, 1988

  The time for Mary and me to return to America was fast approaching. But before we left, there was an important event to attend. During our last week in Qingdao, my youngest brother, Jing Tring, was to marry. His bride was a beautiful woman, the younger sister of one of my close friends from the local school.

  It was mid-June and a very hot day. Everyone was busy decorating my parents’ house for the wedding. Many different shapes and colors of double happiness papers were glued onto the walls, the doors and the windows. Even the chests of drawers were covered with them. Now, instead of using sedan chairs for the bride and groom, my family had hired two cars and decorated them with big red silk flowers and ribbons.

  Around eleven o’clock the wedding cars slowly rolled into our narrow street. Cunsang and Cunfar immediately lit up long strings of firecrackers. I was the official photographer, with a video camera in one hand and a still camera in the other. The groom helped his beautiful bride out of the first car. She was dressed like a Western bride in a long white dress with a lot of frills and a floral veil. She even wore high-heeled shoes. My little brother wore a cream suit with a red silk rose pinned over his heart. A huge crowd of people gathered around, and everyone murmured lucky words: “Handsome dragon attracts beautiful pheasant,” “Arrival of daughter with many sons to follow,” they would say. In this wedding there would be no kowtowing in front of a fire, no stepping over a horse’s saddle, no three-day sitting for the bride. But the bride and groom did get a bowl of “widen your heart” noodles and the dates and chestnuts were still tied to their chopsticks, just as they were for my parents so many years before.

  The two refrigerators that Mary and I had sent on ahead for my family still hadn’t arrived, so there was nowhere to keep the food cool on the wedding day. Everything had to be bought and cooked fresh. Cunmao and Cunfar were the designated chefs, and Cunsang was the kitchen hand. Both lunch and dinner receptions were held in my parents’ house. The courtyard was crammed with tables and chairs: fifty guests, five tables of ten, and my brothers did all the cooking on one coal burner. Endless dishes were served. It was a feast. And since Mary and I hadn’t had our wedding in China, everyone insisted that Mary too should dress up like a bride. Somewhere they found her a Western wedding dress. It was pink and she looked beautiful.

  To say everyone had a merry time that day was an understatement. Many of the old traditions might have gone, but excessive drinking was one they’d certainly kept. Guests were falling on their faces from overdrinking. Some of the new traditions helped here, like trying to pick up hard-boiled eggs from a flat plate with a pair of chopsticks. Mary and I, and the bride and groom, had to walk around carrying trays laden with glasses of wine to give to each guest as lucky drinks. Before each of them could take one, they had to say something lucky to us, such as “wishing you a happy life with many sons” or “love each other until the silver beard touches the ground.” They were not allowed to repeat other people’s lucky wishes or more penalty drinks would be awarded. Trouble was, the more they drank the more likely they were to forget what others had said before. And so it went on.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the drinking binge, my big uncle, my niang’s eldest brother who was head of the propaganda department for the Qingdao Building Materials Bureau, made a request and everyone cheered him on. He wanted Mary and me to dance. We happily agreed and decided to dance one of our favorites, the second-act pas de deux from Giselle. We’d had a few drinks too, but it didn’t matter. We just hummed the music and danced while our adoring audience clapped and cheered our every lift and movement. It was one of our most rewarding performances ever.

  After our dance, our dia spoke as the father of the groom. I’d had no idea this was part of the new custom. “Welcome, dear relatives and friends,” he said. “This is one of the happiest days for the Li family. As you all know, I don’t talk much. My wife always takes the words out of my mouth.”

  His audience laughed and our dia looked over at our niang at the ladies’ table. She gave him a happy, loving smile.

  Our dia continued. “When I was twenty-one years old, my niang told me that I was to marry a nice girl aged eighteen. I told her, ‘I don’t want to marry anyone, I don’t know how to be a husband. ’ She replied, ‘All you have to do is love her. She will teach you the rest about life.’ Little did I know then, but by fate I had married a rare jewel, the most precious jewel I could ever wish for. I treasured and loved her from the time I lifted her veil. I still love her today and will love her for the remainder of my humble life. My niang was right. My wife took care of everything. She taught me everything I needed to know. She mad
e me a better man.” He paused. “We have been through tough times together. Sometimes we felt like we couldn’t go on, but then some sparks of life reminded us why we should go on. These sparks gave us such pleasure. These sparks are our children. We are fortunate . . .” Our dia hesitated. He was finding it hard to speak. “We are fortunate to have seven sons,” he said, holding back tears. He looked at his fourth brother. They held hands and my dia continued. “We are proud of each and every one of our sons. The fact that you are all still alive today is such a miracle. Each one of you is so fortunate to have survived through those harsh years, and now all of you have married nice wives and four of you have your own beautiful children. All I want to say to you today is . . . love and treasure your wife and children with all your hearts. It doesn’t matter what happens in the world around you. As long as you have your family, everything will be all right.”

  There was silence. I had never heard him speak so much, so eloquently. I quietly went over to the ladies’ table and told Mary what the man of few words had just said.

  Mary got up. She walked over to our dia and kissed him on his cheek. She raised her wine glass and shouted in her best Shandong dialect, “To Dia, to Niang! Gan bei! ”

  Everyone stood and raised their glasses high. “Gan bei! ” they roared in response. This was the last thing they’d expected from a Western girl.

  There were only a few days left now before Mary and I were due to leave Qingdao. Yang Ping, the boy whose arm I’d broken when we were only nine years old, had organized a class reunion in my honor. Over thirty of my old classmates were there. Many childhood stories were retold, some happy, many sad. Teacher Song was there too. She immediately recalled the moment she pointed me out to the auditioning teacher from the Beijing Dance Academy. “Strange how things happen,” she said. “I wondered so many times what your life would have been like if I hadn’t tapped on that person’s shoulder that day. You know, I so very nearly didn’t.”

  Three days before our flight back to Beijing and America, I sat by my niang’s side on the kang, watching her sewing furiously. She was making a cotton quilt for Mary and me. We’d told her that there was no more room in our suitcases for a quilt. But, she’d said, to give newlyweds a quilt was a Chinese tradition, and she’d wanted to make me another ever since I’d told her that the officials of the Beijing Dance Academy had burned my precious quilt. “Jing Hao, I know, for all these years, how much guilt you must have felt for having more than your brothers, how much responsibility you must have felt carrying your entire family’s dreams on your shoulders, how much burden you must have put on yourself by realizing that you had to succeed. I also know how much you loved your family and how much you wanted to help us. Now you’ve seen how well your brothers are doing, you should let go of all your worries. You have given all of us so much already. The one thing your brothers will always treasure is what you’ve done with your life. Your success has given them hope, courage, pride. It will be their inspiration to move forward. You have no idea how proud of you we all are!” Just then I noticed Mary walk in with my youngest sister-in-law, but when she saw my niang and I engaged in such an intimate conversation she quickly led my sister-in-law out.

  “Mary is such a nice girl,” my niang went on. “I hope you will treasure her, respect her, forever. Never take her love for granted. I hope you will love Mary like your dia loved me. We love her! I have no doubt you will make a happy family together.”

  That afternoon, after my conversation with my niang, Mary suddenly became ill. We suspected food poisoning, so my brothers and I took her to Laoshan Hospital and a doctor prescribed intravenous medicine for her. There was no room in the hospital for Mary to stay, so the doctor allowed us to take the two intravenous bags, the tubes and the needles home with us. My third sister-in-law called a friend who was a nurse in her factory and they helped set the treatment up in our house, hanging the bag from a windowsill while Mary lay on the earth kang, pale faced, watching the fluid dripping into her blood. I looked at her beautiful, peaceful, sun-darkened face and remembered my dia’s words at the wedding, and my niang’s that morning.

  The treatment soon worked, and Mary quickly recovered and was well enough to make the trip back to Beijing. “Mary has become a commune girl,” my niang said during our last dinner together. At first my parents had been worried that Mary might not get used to the harsh commune life and wouldn’t enjoy her experiences in China. But Mary loved the whole thing, except perhaps the food poisoning and the hole-in-the-ground toilet. She fought to wash the dishes with my sisters-in-law. She became the favorite sixth niang of my nephew and nieces. She even remembered what to call the many uncles, aunties, great-grand-nephews and other relatives.

  We had only been able to buy one-way tickets to Qingdao. We were told in Beijing that they didn’t sell domestic return tickets. So my brothers had to use some personal connections to get us the return tickets back to Beijing. And, just a couple of days before we were to leave, the local police gave us our passports back. We were to take my youngest brother and his bride to the capital with us, for a honeymoon, and they would stay and explore Beijing after we left.

  When the final moment came for Mary and me to bid farewell to my niang, my dia and my brothers, my heart was a twisted knot. It felt just like the first time I’d left for the Beijing Dance Academy sixteen years earlier. Leaving my beloved niang would always be hard. I watched the tears flood down her face. Even the family rock, my dia, tried hard to control his emotions when we finally shook hands in farewell. As our truck pulled away, I saw he too was wiping tears from his face.

  It was time to leave China, time to bid another farewell, this time to my little brother, Jing Tring, his bride, the Bandit, Teacher Xiao, Fengtian, Chong Xiongjun and all their wives at Beijing Airport. By now Mary and I were totally incapable of holding back our tears. We were constantly touched by my friends’ kindness. All of them would have given us their hearts and more, and by the time we found ourselves sitting on the plane we were both emotionally drained.

  I was going home. But I was leaving home too. I was closing a full circle within my heart. I thought of my beloved ones. Now they didn’t have to eat any more dried yams. Now they had better food to eat. Now their living standard had improved considerably.

  But Mary and I couldn’t stop comparing our life in the West to theirs in Qingdao, and at times I was again overwhelmed with guilt. Ever since I had been selected for the Beijing Dance Academy, I had felt this guilt, this burden, this sense of responsibility for my family. I wished all of my brothers could have had the opportunities I’d had, but deep in my sad heart I knew it was not to be. I was the one who had to fulfill my niang’s, my dia’s and my six brothers’ dreams. Mary and I had given each of them as much money as we could afford, but I knew that it didn’t matter how much I gave them; it would only ever provide them with temporary help. What they needed most was the one thing I couldn’t give them—opportunity. Maybe, just maybe, now for the first time in their lives, there was a glimpse of hope under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. I had gone back home and had expected to leave them feeling light and optimistic. Instead I was leaving with a confused heart.

  I sat on the plane and watched the thick clouds pass beneath. I had no desire to sleep. I could think only of my family, my family and friends who lived so simply yet made their happiness in their own ways.

  Mary was sleeping now. I looked at her kind and peaceful face. I felt truly blessed to have found her, to have her by my side.

  I had no idea what would happen next in our lives, but my guilt at leaving my family in China began to be replaced with excitement. The road I had traveled so far had had so many detours. Nothing had been smooth or easy. I knew the road ahead wouldn’t be smooth or easy either, but what I could see was possibility. The possibilities of the world were so vast. And no matter what lay ahead or behind, I always had my niang, my dia, my brothers and friends, and Mary as my lifelong companion.

  I looked out of the
aircraft window into the darkening sky. I saw myself as a small boy, running barefoot through the commune fields. I saw myself as a Red Guard, and I saw myself once again as Mao’s last dancer endlessly practicing in a dim and dusty dance studio in Beijing. I thought of my journey toward the most precious thing I had, my freedom, and of what had always propelled me forward—my dia’s pride and dignity, and my niang’s extraordinary courage and unlimited love.

  AFTERWORD TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

  Melbourne, 2003

  Mary and I visited my family in China many times after that first visit in 1988. The speed of economic reform there and the improvements in people’s living standards greatly impressed me each time.

  Over the years, both Mary’s dance career and mine continued to flourish. We were invited by companies internationally to guest-perform, and both of us felt we were at the height of our dance careers.

  Our first child, Sophie, was born in 1989. She brought such happiness and laughter into our lives. My parents came back to Houston to help us look after Sophie so Mary could go back to dance again. They adored Sophie, especially my niang. Sophie was the daughter she had always longed for. They talked to her in Chinese endlessly: they knew she would be an important link with her relatives in China when she grew up. So Sophie had four adults showering endless love and care onto her, and for us life seemed perfect.

  But then something happened that changed everything. Sophie was just eighteen months old, and we had brought her and my parents to Australia while Mary and I were guest-performing with the Australian Ballet. One day, a birthday balloon Sophie was playing with suddenly popped. The noise was so loud that it took all of us by surprise. All of us except Sophie. We became suspicious and had her hearing tested as soon as we returned home to Houston.