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Chapter 26: Russia
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
Cunxin and Mary begin dancing with each other again, and they quickly become good friends. Soon, Mary invites Cunxin to dinner at her house. She tries to prepare spaghetti carbonara, but she’s not a very good cook. Her attempt to impress Cunxin fails, but he enjoys spending time with her. By the time Niang and Dia come for their next visit, in February 1986, he and Mary have already become lovers. They frequently sleep at each other’s homes, even though traditional Chinese values don’t allow sex before marriage. Still, Cunxin’s parents quickly realize that something special is happening between the two. They like Mary, and they encourage Cunxin’s love.
Perhaps tellingly, Cunxin describes falling in love with Mary over food. In contrast, the biggest argument he described between himself and Elizabeth involved her failure to make him dinner. Although Mary doesn’t seem to be a very good cook, her effort with the spaghetti suggests to Cunxin—and to readers—that she will nurture and support Cunxin in their relationship. The fact that his parents love her suggests that she’s a good match for him and will fit as seamlessly as possible into their tightly knit family.
Themes
Cunxin loves spending time with Mary and her positive influence on him. Her curiosity and love of literature inspire him, and her strength of character matches his own stubbornness. Once, while they are shopping, she talks him into buying a brightly colored shirt. He likes it, but it feels very daring compared to the plain clothes he grew up wearing in China, and to the simple American styles he has adopted. But soon, he’s wearing it to dinner parties. Eventually, he even wears it to the White House. Still, despite their chemistry, Cunxin and Mary take their relationship slowly. Cunxin worries about trying to mix love with his successful dancing career. Even so, a mysterious force seems to continually draw him and Mary together.
Mary comes into Cunxin’s life after he’s already gained his freedom by defecting from China and by becoming an American citizen. But she still pushes him into freer and deeper expressions of his individuality. Her affection makes him feel safe enough to explore and expand his comfort zones—just as his family’s love gave him the supportive foundation to launch into the unknown of Beijing and the dance academy. Although Cunxin tries to take things slowly, it seems evident from the narrative that Mary’s the right person for him.
Themes
When Ben casts Mary and Cunxin opposite each other as lovers in a production of Peer Gynt, Cunxin realizes the depth of his feelings for Mary. His destiny lies with her in real life as inevitably as their characters’ destinies in the ballet. He wants to ask her to marry him but cannot summon the courage for many weeks. Finally, when Mary stays in Houston with his parents while he flies to Pittsburgh for a guest performance, he can stand it no longer. He calls home and asks her if she wants to spend her life with him. She agrees immediately.
Throughout his life, Cunxin has believed in the power of stories to help him understand the world and his place in it. Appropriately, then, it’s the conjunction of his and Mary’s story in real life with the love story of their characters in the ballet that finally pushes him to take the leap and propose.
Themes
Marrying Mary presents one complication: she and her family are Roman Catholics. One of Cunxin’s other Catholic friends arranges for him to meet a priest who asks Cunxin about his religious upbringing. Cunxin says he never followed any religion other than the Chinese version of communism. When the priest asks if Cunxin believes in God, he thinks back over his life. He remembers sending prayers into the heavens on his kite strings when he was a small boy, and he thinks about how often in his life it seems like a higher power has been looking out for him. He says that he does believe in God and agrees to convert to Catholicism before his marriage. Soon afterward, despite some lingering theological questions, he is baptized at the age of 26.
Cunxin’s willingness to adopt a new religion to marry Mary suggests the depth of his feelings for her. But it also provides yet more evidence of the freedom of thought and action that he so values in American society. In China, he was only allowed to believe what the Party wanted him to believe. In America, he can choose what he wants to believe and even formally change his allegiance without social consequences.
Themes
Get the entire Mao’s Last Dancer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Two nights before his wedding, in October of 1987, Cunxin’s friends throw him a wild and drunken bachelor party. He realizes it’s something like the chaos-making friends and family do during a traditional Chinese wedding. They take him to a bar, a party at Ben’s house, and a men’s club. Cunxin becomes drunk and exhausted. Mary’s brother finds the whole ordeal horrifying. He’s sober enough to drive Cunxin home, but because he’s Australian, he keeps driving on the wrong side of the road anyway.
The bachelor party is perhaps the ultimate example of freedom and license, and it almost goes too far. Freedom is wonderful but must still be contained within the bounds of reason. Cunxin and his soon-to-be brother-in-law find the whole thing rather excessive, but Cunxin understands that it comes from a place of happiness and celebration.
Themes
With Charles Foster serving as best man, Cunxin and Mary get married in the small Catholic chapel where Cunxin was baptized. They host a reception on the lawn of the new house they’ve just bought together, and then they honeymoon in Acapulco, Mexico. When they return to Houston, they throw themselves back into dancing, and their reputations grow by leaps and bounds. Ben and other choreographers design ballets specifically to highlight their talents. Cunxin gets to work with a famous, exacting choreographer, who pushes him to new heights of excellence. The performance that moves Cunxin the most, however, is playing Romeo in Ben’s newly designed Romeo and Juliet. At this stage of his career, Cunxin doesn’t just want to be a technically proficient dancer—he wants to be creative, emotionally powerful, and artistically mature, as well. He wants to reach the level of his heroes.
In his childhood, in the context of poverty and oppression, family love helped Cunxin to survive. Love remains an incredibly powerful force in his life, and now that he has freedom and security, it propels him farther than he could have imagined. Although Cunxin’s stature as an internationally renowned dancer was secure long before he and Mary became involved, their mutual love gives him a foundation from which to launch himself into even greater achievements. Throughout it all, he works just as hard as ever, earning each accolade through his own persistence. Importantly, his recollection of this period emphasizes that high standards and freedom aren’t mutually exclusive—an idea contrary to his early training.
Themes
But, despite his new marriage and his professional success, Cunxin harbors one unfulfilled dream. So, early in 1988, he and Mary go to the Chinese consulate in Houston. Cunxin feels nervous, unable to stop thinking about his disastrous visit many years earlier. The current consul, Mr. Tang, invites them in for tea. He believes that Cunxin’s achievements have added to China’s reputation, but many officials in the country still resent Cunxin for defecting. Still, Mr. Tang says he will do what he can to secure permission for Cunxin to visit home. It takes so long—more than two months—that Cunxin relinquishes all hope. But then, one day, the consulate calls with good news. The Chinese government has granted permission for a visit. Cunxin can go home.
Throughout the long years of his childhood and his education at the Beijing Dance Academy, Cunxin yearned for freedom, even when he didn’t always have the words to express it. He longed—and eventually learned to work hard for—professional success. Now, he has both, and he has laid the foundation of his own family with Mary. Yet, despite his personal and professional successes, he retains a profound sense of loneliness and emptiness in the part of his life that his family used to fill. No matter how successful he becomes, it won’t feel complete until he’s able to reunite with his brothers and begin to repay the debt of gratitude he owes for their love and support.
Themes
