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Chapter 5: Na-na
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 starts school one year after Na-na’s death—a year later than usual because the school doesn’t have enough room for all the students. He doesn’t want his carefree childhood days to end, but Niang dresses him in clean clothes, hands him a handmade schoolbag, and sends him off with a reminder to work hard and maintain the Li family reputation. He starts school in an abandoned house which the village has set aside as an overflow classroom. Under the direction of Teacher Song Ciayang, the students spend their first day of school cleaning out the filthy, drafty, and run-down building. They fashion rustic desks and hang portraits of Communist Party Chairman Mao and Vice Chairman Lin Biao on the walls.
Throughout the earliest chapters of the book, Cunxin has demonstrated an awareness of the way personal circumstances like poverty and Party restrictions limit his and others’ opportunities. Going to school represents both his first formal encounter with the Party apparatus and, concurrently, his first major loss of freedom. He can no longer explore the world around him—now, he must sit still in the classroom and absorb his lessons quietly. He resists this, a detail that reinforces his yearning for freedom as an essential part of his nature.
Themes
The second day begins with Teacher Song’s effusive praise for Chairman Mao. Each student must have a copy of Mao’s Red Book and bring it to school every day. When the students open their language textbooks, they find a colorful portrait of Chairman Mao on the first page. Beneath, a line of characters spells out “Long, long live Chairman Mao.” Teacher Song copies this onto the board, but she goes so fast Cunxin can’t follow the sequence of strokes. When she tells the children to copy the characters into their notebooks, he realizes he doesn’t even know how to hold his pencil. To his great embarrassment, Teacher Song must help him draw the characters.
Teacher Song’s approach to lessons emphasizes conformity and acceptance rather than intellectual curiosity or personal development; she writes the characters on the board for the children to copy rather than showing them how to form them by themselves. This suggests a belief that how one develops is less important than one’s ultimate ability to conform to the social expectations of the Party. Additionally, the lesson—ostensibly about the Chinese language—sounds more like propaganda that education, reinforcing the Party’s desire to control the thoughts and lives of its citizens.
Themes
Cunxin and his friends long to be outside. The hours pass at an excruciatingly slow pace punctuated by brief and infrequent breaks. Cunxin cannot pay attention. When he hears a bird chirping on the windowsill, his attention flies outside to join it. Cunxin has always loved birds, envying their freedom and grace. He remembers one of his dia’s stories, in which a hunter who understands the birds’ language befriends a bird. They work together to find food, but when the hunter gets greedy and stops giving the bird its share, the bird frames him for murder. A local judge sentences the hunter to death. He saves himself when he proves he can understand the birds’ language, but he learns his lesson about keeping his promises. When Teacher Song leads the students in propaganda songs, Cunxin focuses again; it’s the only part of the day he likes.
The classroom represents Cunxin’s first real loss of freedom—not just because he’s not roaming around the village and playing with his friends, but also because of the curriculum’s emphasis on Party ideology. It's fitting, then, that the book introduces the symbol of birds when Cunxin is sitting in his classroom. Birds are Cunxin’s favorite animals, and they are also an important symbol of freedom in the book. The story about the hunter doesn’t seem to connect to Cunxin’s experiences at school. But does provide readers with important insights into what he values: hard work and behaving honorably in relationships.
Themes
After school, Cunxin and his friends head for the stream, where they find another group of boys, led by Yang Ping. Yang Ping’s father once kicked Cuncia from behind in a fight. Although Yang Ping’s grandmother apologized and tried to make up with the Lis, Cunxin holds a familial grudge—at least at first. By the end of their first afternoon of roughhousing on the banks of the stream with their gangs, he and Yang Ping have become fast friends. One afternoon as they wrestle, Yang Ping falls and breaks his arm. Cunxin doesn’t tell Niang and Dia, afraid that they will be bankrupt if Yang Ping’s parents ask them to pay the hospital bills. When they find out, they chide him for his secrecy. They remind him that their dignity is more important than money and that they will borrow any money necessary to maintain it.
In this moment, Cunxin finds himself caught between competing impulses: on the one hand, his naturally gregarious character encourages him to make friends wherever he goes. On the other, his loyalty to his family and his brothers suggests that he should avoid anyone he perceives as an enemy. In befriending Yang Ping he makes the important discovery that he can have both family loyalty and the freedom to make his own choices. The lecture he receives from his parents reinforces the moral of the bird legend he recalled at school: honor and respect depend on honesty, among other things.
Themes
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In the spring of his first year of school, Cunxin acquires his one and only pet, a bird he traps by the stream. He names her Beautiful River Treasure, and he keeps her at home in a cage. He tells everyone—but mostly himself—that her constant singing means she’s happy, not that she longs to escape and return to the wild. He brings her nice fat worms to eat. But she wastes away and dies. At first, he blames his family for killing her, but deep down he knows it’s his fault for taking her from the wild and imprisoning her. He fashions a beautiful coffin and buries her near the stream bank, full of tearful apologies.
The fate of the bird Cunxin traps recalls the story of the frog in the well. Caught and imprisoned in a cage from which she cannot escape, forced to conform to Cunxin’s ideal of the perfect pet, Beautiful River Treasure eventually succumbs to her despair. Cunxin’s tears reflect his guilt over the bird’s death as well as his dawning awareness that he, too, is trapped in a cage—only his cage is made of poverty and the oppressive regime of the Chinese Communist Party.
Themes
Eventually, the new students move to the proper school. Cunxin is an indifferent student, prone to daydreaming during the long, boring, and propaganda-laden lessons. But he does well enough academically and socially to earn himself a spot as a Little Red Scarf Guard—the precursor organization to the Red Guards. And by the end of his second year, he has become vice-captain of his class. Around this time, the schools begin seriously studying the inspiring story of Lei Feng, a humble soldier in Mao’s Liberation Army who did many inspiring deeds for the glory of Communist Party. The students try to emulate Lei’s examples—or use them as excuses to avoid doing their real work. Cunxin adopts Lei’s spirit of “forgetting himself to help others” as his own. He tries to do at least one kind deed each day, which he records in his diary.
Cunxin struggles to pay attention to classes that bore him—a theme that will recur later in his life as well. But, in a testament to his innate talents, he nevertheless gains positive attention from his peers and teachers. The Lei Feng campaign yet again points to the power of stories to help people understand the world and their place in it. In this case, the Chinese Communist Party published Lei Feng’s writings as part of a propaganda campaign designed to show people how the Party expected them to behave. By Cunxin’s account, however, it had a truly positive impact on his life, anyway, making him more aware of and willing to help meet the needs of others.
Themes
The Lei Feng campaign is just one of many propaganda programs foisted on the school by Chairman Mao and the Communist Party. The students memorize Mao’s latest writings and often stage rallies and parades during which they chant political slogans. After Lin Biao, the Party’s vice-chairman, dies in a suspicious plane crash, another propaganda campaign seeks to posthumously discredit him. It claims that he planned a coup and was about to assassinate Chairman Mao. Thus, Cunxin, his classmates, and his brothers greet the news of Lin’s death with relief rather than sorrow, and the campaign reaffirms their devotion to their beloved Chairman. But although Cunxin and his brothers talk of nothing else at dinner that night, Niang and Dia remain unimpressed. Distant politics matter little when they can barely feed their family.
The various propaganda campaigns Cunxin describes all point toward the brainwashing and the control the Chinese Communist Party exerted over the populace, especially as Chairman Mao worked to reconsolidate his waning power during the Cultural Revolution. Although confusion and mystery surround the events of Lin’s death to this day, modern Western consensus suggests that he was unlikely to have planned the attempted coup and assassination of which he was accused. But Mao and the Party members loyal to him successfully used Lin’s death—and the stories they told about it—to fan the flames of the Chinese people’s devotion. Or at least, they tried to—Niang’s and Dia’s reactions suggest that some people remained unmoved by political dramas, rejecting these incidents as attempted distractions from the Party’s missteps and the misery it caused families like theirs.
Themes
In Cunxin’s second year at school, the students learn to write another slogan, “Kill, crush Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and the class enemies,” even though Liu has been dead and Deng has been in exile for two years already. The students start to add the names of their classmates to the list, and soon a lot of Zhangs, Lis, Wangs, and Zhous are mixed in with the Lius and the Dengs. But one day, an education official sees some graffiti which says “Kill, crush, Mao, Zhu, and Lai,” and this kickstarts both a full investigation and a commune-wide episode of mass hysteria. Police officers interrogate each student, and although—or perhaps because—they fail to identify any counterrevolutionaries, they frequently patrol the commune afterward.
Cunxin describes yet another propaganda campaign designed to indoctrinate the students with the version of Party ideology that Mao and his closest advisors most wanted to encourage. One of the reasons Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution was to shore up his waning power and to purge his perceived enemies and rivals within the Party, including Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping. Cunxin wonders what the point of criticizing people who have already been punished (or killed) is. The book’s critical portrayal of the Party’s propaganda and indoctrination efforts suggests that the point of such maneuvers is to keep the people’s attention away from the Party’s failures and missteps by giving them other enemies to target. The degree to which the Party feels threatened by any dissent becomes apparent in the mass hysteria that follows the revelation of the anonymous—and, the book suggests, possibly accidental—graffiti.
Themes
Around this time, Cunxin discovers half of a foreign book translated into Chinese lying in a trash heap. He picks it up with the intention of using it as toilet paper, but after reading the first page, he’s hooked on the story of a rich Chicago steel baron’s love affair with a young woman. He hides his treasure in a drawer, reading and rereading it many times without realizing the danger it poses to him and his family. The freedom the characters possess in their Western society seems impossible and intoxicating. Most of the stories available to him are propaganda pieces—plays, books, operas, ballets, and movies licensed by the Communist Party.
Cunxin’s first taste of the West arrives when he is still a child, in the unexpected form of a translated book. Crucially, this book, untouched by the Party’s ideology, gives Cunxin a taste of the sweetest thing in America: freedom. Although it will be many years before he sets foot outside of China, he already intuitively understands the limitations the Party imposes on everyone and everything.
Themes
Movies are a rare treat. Once or twice a year Qingdao Propaganda Bureau workers come to the village and set up a makeshift movie theater. People camp out overnight to secure the best seats. Every movie leaves Cunxin an emotional wreck, so deeply do they inspire him to follow Mao and to model himself on revolutionary heroes. Beijing Opera films fire Cunxin’s imagination with their acrobatics and fight scenes since they come as close as anything to the banned Kung Fu stories some of the village elders still tell the children. He nurses a secret dream of becoming an opera singer, but he knows his future lies in working the commune’s fields.
Around the same time that he first starts imagining what life in a Western country might be like, Cunxin also encounters another force that will exert a powerful influence on his life: the world of Chinese Communist Party-sponsored arts. Although these pieces are just as propagandistic as Cunxin’s textbooks, they touch his emotions much more deeply, thanks to their combination of story and artistry. And, although he instinctively yearns for freedom, he’s nevertheless touched by their celebration of Party ideology.
Themes
