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Chapter 2: My Niang and Dia
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
Extreme poverty characterizes Cunxin’s childhood. Once, after he and his friends unsuccessfully search a nearby beach for clams and oysters, he convinces them to make a detour to a nearby airport the Japanese built when they occupied the area during the Second World War. It’s abandoned now except for a few Liberation Army guards. The boys dig for the half-burned coal the Japanese used as filler under the runway. They work until they’ve filled all their baskets. But as they try to sneak away, the guards catch sight of them and start shooting into the air. The boys drop their baskets and shovels, running for their lives. At home, Cunxin tells Cunfar what happened. Cunfar drags Cunxin back to the airport to find his shovel and basket—which the family cannot afford to replace—only to realize that the guards confiscated them.
The coal-digging episode illustrates how hard Cunxin, his family, and his peers must work to survive. Often, this means trying to fill in the gaps in what the government provides with any resources they can find on their own, including unideal materials like half-burned coal. Despite the children’s ingenuity, hard work, and perseverance, the government—in the form of the soldiers—nevertheless denies them the fruit of their own labors. In a system that denies individual freedom, even survival depends on the permission of the government.
Themes
During the bitterly cold winters, the Li family suffers lice infestations. Although the boys bathe frequently, their quilted winter clothes cannot be easily washed, making a cozy home for pests. When they’re sick, the family relies on folk medicine because they cannot afford a real doctor. For severe coughs, they eat a snakeskin wrapped around a green onion. Once, to treat Cunxin’s swollen glands, a neighbor draws calligraphic characters all over his face and says an incantation.
Despite their limited resources, Niang works hard to keep her family looking respectable and healthy. The Communist takeover in 1949 promised to raise up the common people, who had been previously oppressed by vicious landlords, capitalists, and a rigidly hierarchal aristocratic system. Yet, Cunxin’s experiences suggest that it couldn’t follow through on its own promises. Despite the change in government, his family’s living standards remain low.
Themes
The boys also get warts. An elderly neighbor, the Wuho Man, tells Niang that the best way to treat warts is to wet them on the grain grinder on a rainy day—but for the treatment to work, the children must remain completely silent on their walk there and back. One rainy day, Niang sends Cunxin and Jing Tring to the grinder to treat their warts. Cunxin wants to play with his friends and he’s afraid his chatterbox brother will ruin the treatment. But when they run into his friend Sien Yu’s mother, it’s Cunxin who forgets to hold his tongue. The boys return home and start again; the second time, Jing Tring breaks the silence. On their third attempt, they finally make it to the grinder and back without uttering a word. A month later, their warts are gone.
Yet again, the wart story points toward the Lis’ extremely limited resources—they cannot afford medical care beyond superstition and folk remedies. And it suggests how people clung to the old ways of thinking long after the Communist takeover despite the Party’s efforts to ensure conformity of thought and action among all citizens. The story also illustrates Cunxin’s perseverance; despite his rising frustration, he and Jing Tring keep trying until they successfully complete the task Niang has assigned them. And their vanished warts show that their efforts have been rewarded.
Themes
But there are moments of joy in Cunxin’s childhood, especially at Chinese New Year. Dia, Fourth Uncle and the brothers take symbolic gifts to the cemetery for their ancestors. They light firecrackers to wake the spirits, then light the way home with paper lanterns. The family saves money all year to afford a proper New Year’s Eve feast. Each dish has meat or eggs in it. Cunxin feels lucky and privileged to share this feast with his family. But he does wonder why they can’t spread the rich food throughout the year a little more. The meal ends with pork-and-cabbage dumplings. The family dedicates one bowl of dumplings to the gods and another to their ancestors, even though these old traditions are considered threats to communist beliefs. After the meal, the family visits friends, relatives, and neighbors. And everyone lights homemade firecrackers in the streets.
Despite the suffering that characterizes Cunxin’s childhood, his family still makes him feel safe and happy. His culture, with its reverence for the dead, encourages him to value his familial relationships. And the Chinese New Year festivities emphasize the family as a site for exercising generosity and kindness, whether that’s in the form of symbolic gifts for the dead or shared meals with the living. Cunxin’s question about why the family can’t spread out the bounty makes sense from a practical point of view (and the view of a half-starved child), but it misses the bigger point that the feast offers a rare moment of happiness and hope for better things.
Themes
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Throughout the festival, the Li family visits relatives, including Cunxin’s aunties. His youngest auntie and her jovial husband are his favorites; Cunxin loves looking at the photographs of his uncle, who travels around China for his work. His family is too poor to afford pictures. Niang takes her sons to visit Qingdao City, where her father and eldest brother live. Cunxin dislikes his grandparents’ apartment, which reeks from the building’s shared toilets and his grandparents’ chain-smoking habits. He and his brothers misbehave intentionally, hoping to be sent outside, where the air is cleaner. In comparison, their uncle’s house three-room apartment (for a family of four) is the height of luxury, made possible by his work for the Communist Party.
Although members of Cunxin’s extended family are better off than the Lis in terms of living standards, it’s clear from the New Year’s round of visits that no one is living an extravagant life. The general standards of living are low, even for those who work for the Party. In Cunxin’s experience, then, the Party under Chairman Mao fails utterly to follow through on its promises to elevate the needs of the common people after centuries of oppression.
Themes
Cunxin always feels sad when the last and final night of the festival, the “Night of Lights” comes around. Although this night sees firework displays in Beijing and other big cities, the best people can do in the village is light hand-made candles. Chinese New Year is one of Dia’s only breaks, and he the time to make kites for Cunxin and his brothers. Cunxin adores making and flying kites with Dia, in part because he loves hearing Dia’s stories.
The insinuation that Beijing can afford fireworks for its celebrations while the village can barely scrape together enough candles hints that the Chinese Communist Party abuses its citizens by limiting their opportunities and resources. Still, Cunxin finds happiness in the time he spends with his family, despite the struggles they face.
Themes
In one of Dia’s stories, a frog who lives in a well meets a frog from the land above. The frog in the well describes his world. Then the frog from above tells the frog in the well that the world above is much bigger than what he can see from the well’s confines. The frog in the well, disbelieving the frog from above, asks his father about this. His father says it’s true and that because their destiny traps them in the limited world of the well, it isn’t helpful to think about what they are missing. The frog in the well swears he will escape, but his father warns him that no well frog has escaped, no matter how hard they try. And although the little frog in the well spends his whole life trying to escape his cold, dark well, he never can reach the world above.
The story of the frog in the well sticks with Cunxin—and his brothers—throughout their lives; it will recur at key moments throughout the later chapters of the book. In essence, it describes a world like the one Cunxin lives in, a world where some people are limited by luck and circumstance to live difficult lives, while opportunity grants others access to a broader, brighter world. The frog father encourages his son—and by extension, Cunxin—to find happiness within the limits of his circumstances because escape is next to impossible. No matter how much effort the little frog puts into jumping and hopping, without some sort of extra help—some opportunity to propel him toward the surface—he will never escape the well.
Themes
Cunxin knows he is like the frog trapped in the well, so he uses his kite to send messages to the gods in the heavens. He threads paper loops onto his kite string, each representing a wish: one for Niang to be happy, one for Dia to stay healthy, and one for Cunxin himself to escape the village. Sometimes the paper messages get stuck on knots in the kite string and Cunxin must shake and jerk the line to get them to ascend. Often, he focuses so intently on this task that he’s the last child to leave the freezing-cold kite-flying hill. But his hopes keep him warm.
Despite understanding the moral of Dia’s story—that he should learn to live with his life as it is rather than yearning for something better—Cunxin cannot stop himself. Standing on the hill and sending prayers up his kite strings into heaven, Cunxin shows readers who he is and what he values. He loves and cares for his family, he longs to escape the well of poverty and need. and he will persevere even when doing so is difficult and uncomfortable.
Themes
