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Chapter 9: The Caged Bird
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
Life at the academy offers Cunxin new discomforts, like the disgusting, frequently backed-up toilets. But it also offers him luxuries. The warm water of the school showers feels magical, especially compared to the filthy, cold-water washing-basin Cunxin grew up with. He also loves the food: meaty and oily dishes, glorious daily allotments of rice, and weekly servings of fruit. Once a week, the students get to watch a movie. One, a North Korean film about a man who rediscovers his communist faith through the love of a beautiful and revolution-minded girl, particularly affects Cunxin. He daydreams that if he performs badly enough in dance classes, the pretty, big-eyed captain of the girls’ class might fall in love with and encourage him. But in reality, she just sends him dirty looks.
Despite the difficulties he encounters at the academy, there are enough reminders by contrast of the life Cunxin left behind to keep him going. No matter how hard life is now, he at least has enough of everything: water to wash in, food to eat, and movies to watch—remember that films were a once-a-year treat in the village. The movie which Cunxin describes here captures his imagination in part because it’s a piece of propaganda designed to play on viewers’ emotions. But also, it’s a love story. The deep affection between Niang and Dia has influenced Cunxin’s life, and he longs to have that kind of connection himself one day.
Themes
During the first half of the school year, the students receive two pieces of exciting news. First, the newspapers report that American President Richard Nixon plans to visit the country, proving capitalism’s willingness to bow before communism. Second, Madame Mao plans to visit the academy in person. Unfortunately, Cunxin’s dancing fails to secure him a spot in the performance to be held in her honor. She likes the exhibition but complains to the political heads that the dancing is too classical and not political enough. She envisions a new form of dance that fuses ballet with Beijing Opera movements. As the dance curriculum immediately changes to suit her whims, the students, teachers, and artform become mere political puppets.
Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 marks a major turning point the Chinese Communist Party’s relationship to the outside world—it was the first step toward normalizing relations between the China and the United States, and it ended a 25-year diplomatic and cultural silence. The Party explains this shift in ways that serve its own narratives of cultural superiority but do not fully reflect the Party’s real motivation for the visit, which was that China needed to open to other countries after ideological debates about the future of communism caused a rift between it and the Soviet Union. But, in the context of Cunxin’s life, the reasons for the shift matter less than its effect: the improved relations between China and the U.S. now lay the foundation for his later opportunities in the world outside of his homeland. And opening in a small way to the wider world doesn’t mean that the fundamental nature of the Party or its aims have changed—Madame Mao’s insistence on ever more overt levels of political statement in artistic works indicates that it still desires absolute control over every aspect of Chinese society and culture.
Themes
Politics dominates the students’ lives. They spend more time studying Chairman Mao’s words and theories than ballet and all other subjects combined. The political heads encourage self-criticism and tattling for anti-communist behavior or thinking. Three weeks of each year, the students live and work among one the peasants, workers, or soldiers for class education—continuing their dance education, of course, under nearly impossible conditions there. The first year, they’re sent to a farming village. Watching his urban classmates struggle with the fieldwork, Cunxin agrees with Mao that city kids must be taught where their food comes from. So many students suffer from intestinal illnesses that the academy sends its own cook to the village. When male students are assigned to guard their supplies, Cunxin feels confused. Why would the peasants, their noble role models, steal the academy’s food?
Almost as if in response to Nixon’s visit and China’s first steps toward normalizing relationships with the wider world, the school doubles down on political education—in other words, propaganda and indoctrination. Self-criticism and ratting one another out, both powerful forms of social control, work to ensure that students conform to Party and school leaders’ expectations. When the students live among the peasants, Cunxin yet again notices a disconnect between what the Party says and wants him to believe and the way the world works. As these moments accumulate, his distrust of the Party and his desire for freedom grow. In this case, the Party fails to honor the peasants it elevates in the public imagination by failing to ensure that they have the resources they need to survive—unlike the dance students who have Madame Mao’s lieutenants looking out for their interests. Cunxin says he can’t understand why the peasants would steal, but the grinding poverty of his own childhood suggests the reason: desperation.
Themes
Time passes. In the hot weather of summer, the academy makes the students swim for exercise. Cunxin eventually learns to swim but never loses his fear of the water. In the fall, the students begin Madame Mao’s Art Philosophy classes. Cunxin likes the teacher, a talkative man who encourages the students to think deeply about things. But he disappears 18 months later, after the political heads reassign him.
Cunxin fears water since his childhood near-drowning near the dam. In forcing him to swim, the academy again sends the message that Cunxin himself—including his likes, dislikes, and personal history—doesn’t matter. All they want is for students to conform to the standard, universal expectations they have. The mysterious disappearance of the Art Philosophy teacher, who encourages the students to think for themselves rather than just spoon-feeding them ideology, also points to a social drive for conformity and obedience and a devaluation of freedom and individuality.
Themes
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Despite his fear of motion sickness, Cunxin joins the school’s field trip to the Great Wall in the autumn of his first year. Standing on the massive, impressive edifice, he remembers a story Niang told him about a man named Wang Shileong and his bride. Imperial soldiers murdered Wang Shileong as a sacrifice to bury beneath one of the wall’s sections. His bride stabbed herself in the heart and was buried with him. Niang told Cunxin and his brothers that the story portrays a Chinese woman’s determination to remain faithful to her man—and it reminds Chinese men to honor and treasure their pure, sincere, faithful wives.
Standing on the Great Wall makes Cunxin think about his family, the stories they told him, and the importance of love in his life and in the world more generally. He continues to use his parents’ stories as tools to understand the world, and the main lessons he takes from them involve hard work and relationships. Cunxin, as earlier episodes—with the foreign book, with the North Korean propaganda film—have shown, enjoys a good love story. This story also echoes the kind of self-sacrificial devotion that the Party demands, and it subtly suggests that, in the China Cunxin knows at least, one person’s individual life doesn’t matter as much as building the grand edifice of Chinese communism.
Themes
Without ambition, self-confidence, or encouragement from his teachers, Cunxin lags behind the other students during his first year at the academy. He dreads his exams at the end of the year, especially in ballet and Beijing Opera Movement. When he walks into the studio for the Beijing Opera Movement exam, he panics and forgets all his steps. Watching Gao Dakun getting angrier and angrier makes his performance even worse. Afterward, he runs to the willow trees and cries for hours. He remembers more during the next day’s ballet exam, but his tense and cramping muscles make him stiff and awkward, not light and graceful. Although his marks are low, Cunxin escapes being the worst student in the class. But he still feels ashamed when the teachers read everyone’s grades out publicly, and he worries that Director Wang will send him home
Cunxin’s dislike of the authoritarian and severe teaching methods the school employs means that he struggles to meet expectations. He flourishes best in the context of loving relationships like the ones he shared with his family. And, the book strongly implies, so do most people, even though that’s not how the Party-sponsored academy does things. But readers can see the other component of Cunxin’s success growing here, too: his hard work and determination. He feels ashamed of his low scores and takes this as a message that he must figure out how to work harder.
Themes
