Mao's Last Dancer

I have a slight interest in ballet. I have an intense interest in China-related topics. Therefore, it is not surprising when I noticed a film based on a Chinese ballet dancer's memoir "Mao's Last Dancer", I decided to watch it.

Li Cunxin grew up in abject poverty in rural China, and was selected to be trained to be a ballet dancer at age ten or eleven. Nine years later, he got an opportunity to study with Houston Ballet in the US. This was 1981, when very few Chinese people had ventured outside of China, with portrayal of "Capitalist countries" like the US so distorted in China that it was downright comical. I am ten years older than Li Cunxin, and even I got a tail end of that wave of communist indoctrination which taught us that we were living in great happiness whereas the people in "capitalist countries" lived in pure agony.

Needless to say, he arrived in Houston utterly shocked and disoriented. He decided to defect and married an American dancer. The event caused quite a stir in the media at the time, and eventually the Chinese government decided to let him go but dictated that he could not return to China ever again. He went onto have a great career with Houston Ballet. Eventually the Chinese government softened the stand, and his parents went from utter shame of having a "traitor son" to the great pride of having a famous son returning to China to perform with Houston Ballet. It was a great personal story, with the upheavals of the times as the backdrop. Li Cunxin has retired from dancing, and is now working as a stockbroker and living in Australia with his Australian wife and three kids.

How times have changed! Back in the early 1980s, a ballet dancer's decision to stay in the United States effectively made him a traitor. Nowadays, the piano prodigy Lang Lang came to study in the US right after his talent was discovered. The basketball star Yao Ming moved to Houston to play professional basketball with the Houston Rockets. The amazing ballerina Tan Yuan Yuan joined San Francisco Ballet, and has been hailed as a role model in China. Even the daughter of the upcoming Chinese leader is studying at Harvard. Times have truly changed. It is mind-boggling.

Li Cunxin may not have been the best Chinese ballet dancer, but he certainly was the last dancer we know of from the Mao era.