Mao's Last Dancer (Cunxin)

Mao's Last Dancer
Li Cunxin, 2003
Penguin Group USA
451 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425240304
 

Summary 
From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America—and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting cloak-and-dagger fiction, he defected to the United States, where he quickly became known as one of the greatest ballet dancers in the world. This is his story, told in his own inimitable voice. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—1961
• Where—Qingdao, Shandong Province, China
• Education—Beijing Dance Academy
• Currently—Melbourne, Australia

Li Cunxin was born in a village near the city of Qingdao, in northern China. At the age of eleven, he was selected by Madame Mao's cultural advisers to become a student at the Beijing Dance Academy. When he was eighteen, he was chosen to perform with the Houston Ballet, leading to his dramatic defection to the United States. Li performed as a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet for 16 years, becoming one of the world's top male ballet dancers. In 1995 he moved to Melbourne Australia, where he became principal artist with the Australian Ballet, He lives in Australia with his wife, ballet dancer Mary McKendry, and their three children. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)

More
At age thirty-four, Li started to plan his next career after dancing. He enrolled in accounting and financial courses. In 1997 he began his study at the Australian Securities Institute by correspondence with a view to becoming a stockbroker. For his final two years with the Australian Ballet, he rose at 5am to start ballet training, then racing to the stock exchange by 8am to work as a stockbroker until noon. By the time he joined the rest of the Australian Ballet dancers for rehearsals, he had already put in a full day's work (Li is now a senior manager at one of the biggest stockbroking firms in Australia).

Mao's Last Dancer, published in 2003, immediately hit the top of Australia’s best sellers list—eventually taking the #1 slot for non-fiction and winning Australia's Book of the Year Award and the US's Christopher Award. It was also short-listed for the National Biography Award. With over 30 printings, Mao's Last Dancer remained on the top-10 bestseller List for over 18 months, was sold in over 20 countries, and in 2009 became the basis for a feature film. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews 
This is the heartening rags-to-riches story of Li, who achieved prominence on the international ballet stage. Born in 1961, just before the Cultural Revolution, Li was raised in extreme rural poverty and witnessed Communist brutality, yet he imbibed a reverence for Mao and his programs. In a twist of fate worthy of a fairy tale (or a ballet), Li, at age 11, was selected by delegates from Madame Mao's arts programs to join the Beijing Dance Academy. In 1979, through the largesse of choreographer and artistic director Ben Stevenson, he was selected to spend a summer with the Houston Ballet—the first official exchange of artists between China and America since 1949. Li's visit, with its taste of freedom, made an enormous impression on his perceptions of both ballet and of politics, and once back in China, Li lobbied persistently and shrewdly to be allowed to return to America. Miraculously, he prevailed in getting permission for a one-year return. In an April 1981 spectacle that received national media attention, Li defected in a showdown at the Chinese consulate in Houston. He married fellow dancer Mary McKendry and gained international renown as a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet and later with the Australian Ballet; eventually, he retired from dance to work in finance. Despite Li's tendency toward the cloying and sentimental, his story will appeal to an audience beyond Sinophiles and ballet aficionados-it provides a fascinating glimpse of the history of Chinese-U.S. relations and the dissolution of the Communist ideal in the life of one fortunate individual.
Publishers Weekly

The life of a poverty-stricken 11-year-old Chinese boy was changed forever when he was selected to attend the dance academy of Madame Mao in Beijing. One of a few youngsters chosen, based upon a suitable physique, he did not even know the meaning of the word ballet. Yet a decade later, Li Cunxin (as former principal dancer of the Houston Ballet and now a stockbroker in Melbourne) would begin his rise to international fame as a ballet star. Li endured seven years of often harsh training as well as academics grounded in Chairman Mao's Communist philosophy, gradually adapting to the regimen and setting the goal of becoming the best dancer possible. He is an expert storyteller, and his memoir-which includes his struggles to perfect his art in the tense political framework, the complex events surrounding his defection, and the heartbreaks and joys of his professional and personal lives makes for fascinating reading. The portions dealing with his childhood and loving family in Quingdao are especially poignant, and the work as a whole unfolds with honesty, humor, and a quiet dignity. This book has wide appeal, for it concerns not only a dancer's coming of age in a turbulent time but also individual strength, self-discovery, and the triumph of the human spirit. For circulating libraries. —Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ
Library Journal 

A prominent ballet dancer revisits the strange course that led him from a Chinese hamlet to the world stage. Mix Billy Elliott with Torn Curtain and you'll have some of the tale in very broad outline. Born in 1961, Li lived his early years under the shadow of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which had impoverished the already poor countryside to an almost unbelievable extent. "Dried yams were our basic food for most of the year," Li writes. "We occasionally had flour and corn bread for a treat, but those were my [mother's] special reserves for relatives or important visitors.... Dried yams were the most hated food in my family, but there were others in the commune that could not even afford dried yams. We were luckier than most." Luck came in another form when Madame Mao decided that recruiting ballet dancers from the provinces would prove to the world that Chinese Communism was truly egalitarian, whereupon Li was packed off to dance school. "The officials mentioned ballet," he writes, "but all I knew about ballet was what I'd seen in the movie The Red Detachment of Women." Willing but slow to learn ("I was considered a laggard by most of my teachers," he writes with characteristic modesty), Li eventually found his feet, at the same time finding a purpose: "to serve glorious communism." One exchange trip to Texas, though, and Li, now in his late teens, was ready for something else. Li's well-paced account of the ensuing cloak-and-dagger episodes that led to his defection to the West adds suspense to a tale already full of adventures, but there are no conventional bad guys to be found in it. Indeed, he writes with fine compassion for the Chinese consul who attempts to dissuade him from becoming an outcast; "unlike me, he had to go back and would probably never manage to get out again." Nicely written and humane: for anyone interested in modern Chinese history or for fans of dance.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Mao's Last Dancer: 

1. Discuss Li's decision to defect to the US: his motivations (falling in love, exposure to freedom). What personal price was paid, and what was gained? Also, whoever leads the book discussion might dig up information on another famous ballet defection: Rudolph Nureyev, who defected from the former Soviet Union in 1961—ironically, the same year that Li was born.

2. Did Li marry Elizabeth Mackey out of love...or out of a desire to stay in the US? Why did the marriage end?

3. An interesting discussion might consider the roles of talent vs. discipline and perseverence. What about the role of an inspiring teacher?

4. You might also talk about the vast cultural differences Li had to surmount—language, the fact that ballet is not a Chinese art form, and the values of individuality and self-fulfillment vs. collectivity.

5. In a New York Times interview (9/26/04), Li says that in returning to teach at the Beijing Academy he has found "people have a lot more opportunities. So if it gets too hard they just back off." He also says that had he grown up elsewhere and been presented with the West's "enormous opportunities," he "certainly would not volunteer to do a ballet class." I'm not sure what the question is...but it's an interesting observation.

6. If you've seen the 2009 film version, how does it compare with the book? Is the movie well casted?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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