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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mao’s Last Dancer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Opportunity, Hard Work, and Success
Love and Family
The Power of Stories
Freedom vs. Repression
Summary
Analysis
When Cunxin’s niang and dia marry, over 20 people are already living in the Li family compound. The family grows—they have four sons in nine years—and they add more rooms to the house. As the youngest daughter-in-law, Niang initially has the lowest status, but she quickly earns the respect of her mother-in-law (Cunxin’s na-na). Her unbound feet mean that she frequently delivers meals to the men as they work the fields, an enviable job in a household where wives rarely get to see their husbands during the day.
In contrast to the Chinese Communist Party’s drive to make people conform to their ideology, the Li family adapts their surroundings to match their circumstances, as when they add more rooms to their house to accommodate their growing family. Their relational approach encourages strong bonds of affection and love. These bonds foster loyalty without coercion, thus contributing to the book’s observation that freedom, rather than conformity, allows people to flourish.
Themes
Members of the extended Li family take care of one another. Cunxin’s fourth-oldest brother, Cunsang, suffers a head injury just days after his birth and begins having seizures. Doctors at the hospital tell Niang they can do nothing. In desperation, she leaves Cunsang on a hill near the village, hoping that some magical creature will rescue him. When Na-na finds out, she rushes on her crippled, bound feet to the hill to retrieve him. After a few days, he miraculously recovers.
The episode with Cunsang suggests the prevalence of superstition and folk belief even after the Communist Party comes to power (Cunsang is born in 1955). This suggests that the human spirit naturally resists the kind of coercion and conformity the Party seeks to instill in its citizens. And the fact that Niang can’t afford medical care for her infant son points to the underlying brutality and difficulty of life in rural China even well into the twentieth century—despite the Party’s claims about valuing the peasants.
Themes
The home Cunxin grows up in is built of big stones and bricks. His family occupies four rooms: three bedrooms (one of which has an attic where his dia stores important things) and a kitchen. The packed-dirt floor turns to mud and must be replaced during rainy seasons. They have no indoor plumbing and must fetch water from a village well for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Their toilet is a hole dug under the crumbling stone wall. In the courtyard and in the tiny farm plot that the commune has allotted to the family, the family grows staple foods—beans, corn, and yams—using simple hand tools. Even the youngest children pitch in.
The rustic construction of the Li family home offers more insight into the impoverished and trying circumstances of life for Chinese peasants. Even in the early 1960s, about a dozen years after the Chinese Communist Party comes to power, the family’s living standard remains pre-industrial, uneased by conveniences like indoor plumbing or modern farming . It seems that the Party isn’t making good on its socialist promises to improve the lives of the country’s common people.
Themes
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The farming commune grows whatever crops the central government in Beijing tells them to. They send the biggest share of the harvest to Beijing, dividing what remains among commune members based on how many points they earn by their labor. A man can earn, at most, 10 points (the equivalent of about one yuan or 17 U.S. cents) a day. Women earn half that. By the time Cunxin is born in January of 1961, several years of Mao’s Great Leap Forward program and bad weather have combined to create one of the biggest humanmade disasters in history, a famine in which 30 million people died.
In some ways, in fact, the lives of Chinese peasants are worse now than they were in the past. The Party hasn’t raised their standards of living, but it also interferes in their business, telling them what to plant and when. Wages are low and the work is backbreaking. The peasants see little of the food they produce, but, the book implies, the Party has more than enough to feed its leaders at their expense.
Themes
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When he’s just 15 days old, Cunxin is badly burned by exhaust from the cooking fires. The burn quickly becomes infected. Once again, his niang takes her baby to the hospital only to be told that they cannot help him. In desperation, she tries herbal medicine, which makes the infection worse. Finally, Cunxin’s Fourth Aunt intervenes. She heard from an old healer that meat tenderizer could treat infections. She locks Niang out of the room and treats Cunxin’s wounds with it around the clock for a full day. Cunxin screams himself hoarse, but the infection eventually clears. Throughout his life, the scar will remind him of his Fourth Aunt’s determination and love.
Barely two weeks into his life, Cunxin faces death, offering yet more proof of how incredibly difficult life is in rural China, even under—or perhaps because of—Chinese Communist Party rule. Still, his family pours love and effort into Cunxin. Even though he's too young to remember this period of his life except as a story, this incident teaches Cunxin that survival requires love, hard work, and (sometimes) pain.
Themes
Three years later, Cunxin’s younger (and final) brother is born. The family calls him by his nickname, Jing Tring. With food so strictly rationed, no one in the commune has enough to eat. The Lis often make dried yams, counting themselves lucky because they’re not among the 30 million people who starved to death during the famine. But Cunxin recalls village boys searching for rat’s nests and stealing the rats’ cached grains. At meals, he and his siblings respectfully leave the nicest pieces for their niang and dia, who in turn share with each other, or their children. Cunxin recalls Dia sneaking a special morsel from a particularly nice piece of pork into Jing Tring’s mouth one night. But no one begs for more: they all know there isn’t enough to go around. All the water the family uses must be boiled, and they still suffer from worms occasionally.
Many of Cunxin’s early memories revolve around food or—more frequently—the lack thereof. Even though both his parents work in the fields and the family cultivates crops in their own garden and allotment, they can barely scrape together enough to keep everyone alive. But rather than making them bitter, this hardship brings them closer together, since the only thing they can truly rely on is their mutual love and affection. Niang and Dia’s strong relationship creates a sense of safety and security in the family, even when there isn’t enough to eat.
Themes
Despite these privations and indignities, Niang and Dia teach their sons to have dignity, honesty, and pride, and how to treat others with respect. When Cunxin is five, he steals a toy car from his friend Sien Yu. Niang drags him back to Sien Yu’s house and makes him return the toy. When they return home, however, Niang weeps and apologizes for the family’s poverty. She feels like the gods have abandoned the family. She wishes she could buy toys for Cunxin, too. Cunxin embraces her and promises that one day, he will make sure the family has enough food. That night at dinner, Dia lectures the children about the one thing they have that poverty can never take away from them: pride. He wants his sons to maintain their dignity no matter what happens to them in life.
Yet again, the incident with the toy car underlines the Li family’s abject poverty. Still, despite their limited circumstances, their dignity and pride help them create meaningful lives even when things feel hopeless, or like—to echo Niang’s words—the gods have abandoned them. Cunxin tries to make his mother feel better, showing that he’s eager to support his family, too, despite his youth age. He seems to recognize that the only way he or any of them will survive their hard lives is by supporting one another.
Themes
