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Chapter 22: Defection
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
A relieved Cunxin embraces Elizabeth and Charles. He doesn’t want to talk to the reporters, but Charles encourages him to make a brief statement. Cunxin faces a sea of microphones and flashing cameras and says how happy he is to be able to stay in America with his wife and how he hopes to do nice things for American and Chinese art. As he leaves the consulate, he refuses the FBI’s offer of a safe house. The whole point of staying in America, he insists, was to escape surveillance and control. In subsequent days, media requests and invitations to join ballet companies the world over flood in. Cunxin gives only one interview, hoping to keep his defection from overshadowing his reputation as a dancer.
Cunxin chooses his words carefully at the press conference and doesn’t spend much time feeding the media frenzy his defection has created. In part, this seems to reflect his concern for his family in China—remember that Consul Zhang warned him that their fates depended, at least in part, on him avoiding criticism of China or the Party. And the fact that the FBI respects his choice to decline its protective surveillance confirms that he’s in a new world, one which respects his personal autonomy.
Themes
Initially, Cunxin and Elizabeth plan to return to her family in Florida, but just before they go, Ben calls. He tells Cunxin that he’s received permission from the Houston Ballet and the Chinese consulate to offer him a contract with the company. Joyfully, Cunxin and Elizabeth decide to stay in Houston. Eventually, they move from Elizabeth’s tiny rental to a nicer apartment. Lori and Delworth take the young couple under their wings. Delworth treats Cunxin like a little brother. Slowly, Ben comes to trust Cunxin again, and he gives him bigger and bigger roles.
Ben offering Cunxin a job despite the damage Cunxin’s defection likely did to his international dance exchange program gestures toward Cunxin’s stature as a dancer. His dancing first earned him recognition in his motherland, and now it makes his continuing life in America possible. And Ben’s eventual forgiveness demonstrates love and respect for Cunxin—he may not have agreed with Cunxin’s decision at first, but he always respected Cunxin’s right to make it.
Themes
But as much as Cunxin appreciates Elizabeth’s love, his freedom, and his job with Houston Ballet, he struggles during the months after his defection. He has flashbacks of the public execution he witnessed when he was a child. He misses and worries about his family. In his homesickness and grief, he throws himself into dancing, and this drives a wedge between himself and Elizabeth. She’s a good dancer, but as it becomes clear that Ben will never offer her a position with the Houston Ballet, she becomes frustrated, torn between her career and Cunxin’s. As he throws himself more and more into dancing to avoid his sadness and worry, they begin to argue.
Safe in the knowledge that he won’t have to return to China, Cunxin has the space to reflect on the horrors he left behind. His mental anguish suggests that the Party and its abuses still affect him, even if they no longer have direct control over his actions. And the degree to which his trauma creates distance in his marriage suggests just how strong a hold the Party still has on him. In this context, Cunxin fights his feelings of powerlessness against the Party by turning to the only thing he could ever meaningfully control: the personal effort and practice he put into improving his dancing.
Themes
One particularly bad fight happens after Cunxin comes home from a long day of rehearsal. Elizabeth isn’t home, she hasn’t made dinner, and she’s left a kitchen full of dirty dishes. Cunxin vacillates between self-pity over her abandonment and worry over her safety until she walks in the door a few hours later, refreshed after spending some time out with her friends. He attacks her for leaving without a note and for her poor housekeeping. She strikes back at his selfishness, reminding him that she wants to be a dancer, not his cook and a housekeeper. She doesn’t think he supports her dreams. Their anger at each other simmers for days after this fight, and after months of growing tensions, it becomes clear that their marriage is doomed. Finally, Elizabeth secures a job with a small contemporary dance company in Oklahoma. Soon after she starts her position there, she and Cunxin divorce.
When he defected, Cunxin traded the rigid, traditional, and hierarchal culture of his childhood for a life of freedom and self-determination in America. Yet, his anger with Elizabeth seems to grow, at least in part, from her failure to tend to him the way Niang tended to Dia during Cunxin’s childhood. Without Cunxin’s openly acknowledging it, this section suggests his subconscious expectation on his part that Elizabeth will hew more closely to the role of a Chinese wife and have the limitless devotion Niang described in her story about Wang Shileong and the Great Wall.
Themes
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In the wake of his failed marriage, guilt and sadness nearly overwhelm Cunxin. To survive, he throws himself more and more into his dancing career. And by May of 1982, he’s deep in preparations to go to London with the Houston Ballet, where he will dance a pas de deux that Ben choreographed him and one of the Ballet’s principal ballerinas. Cunxin loves London. As his first trip to America, he finds that everything the Party told him about England was a lie. Even though he has little time to play the tourist, he sees enough to know that the country is prosperous and beautiful.
As ever in his life, Cunxin faces uncontrollable fate by throwing himself more and more into the things he can control, like his dancing. Predictably, this brings him ever greater attention and appreciation. This suggests that Cunxin’s efforts bring him success, in part, because he turns to hard work to carry him through hard times rather than allowing his circumstances to overwhelm him.
Themes
As the months pass and put Cunxin’s defection farther and farther in the past, Ben repairs his relationship with the Chinese government. Cunxin is happy that his defection has no long-lasting consequences for Ben, but he still worries that it might affect his family. He longs to but chooses not to contact them. Cunxin goes with the Houston Ballet on a tour of Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, Luxembourg, and Monaco. Everywhere he goes, he eats delicious food and drinks fine wine; he visits artistic masterpieces and architectural treasures in cities and museums across the continent. He sees decay and beauty, and both remind him of China, and all that it lost during the Cultural Revolution. And no matter where he is, Cunxin never forgets his family or ever stops wishing he could share this wide world and its riches with them.
The fact that Ben, an outsider, can repair his relationship with China more easily than Cunxin suggests yet again the degree of control which the Party wishes to wield over its citizens. Because Cunxin defied them, they have no wish to deal with him any longer—and they seem to fear that he might poison others against them. The more Cunxin travels the world, the more he realizes just how limited his life in China really was. And although he misses his family, the joy he takes in his new experiences suggests that he would not have survived a return to the cage of China.
Themes
