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Chapter 7: Leaving Home
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
Although Cunxin feels homesick, the thrill of being in Beijing buoys his emotions for a while. Beijing is the home of Chairman Mao and the seat of the Communist Party, and now he—a little country boy—is there too! The sheer size and scale of the city impresses him: there are more people, vehicles, and bicycles thronging the streets than he could have imagined in one place. The bus takes the students to Tiananmen Square, where Mao declared the birth of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. They step out, and at a word from their “political head”—a Party official in military uniform—guards usher them into the protected space in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace to pose for a photograph.
Cunxin has always depended on his family’s ingenuity to make up for the deficiencies of the Party’s governance. Yet, he retains an almost wholly positive view of the Party and Chairman Mao, thanks to their indoctrination and brainwashing. Still, he starts to notice evidence of social inequity, for example, the fact that city residents live more comfortable lives, on average, than rural peasants. And the closer a person gets to Chairman and Madame Mao—for instance, by attending her dance academy—the less the normal rules—or difficulties—apply to them.
Themes
But after Cunxin gets back on the bus, he begins to feel insecure. Although he’s dreamed of this magnificent city his whole life, he feels like an unworthy, out-of-place peasant boy. On the 120-mile trip to the Beijing Dance Academy, located in a rural village called Zhuxingzhuang, the children sing propaganda songs. Finally, the bus pulls through the gate of the Central 5-7 Performing and Arts University. The political heads explain that “5-7” refers to a speech Madame Mao gave on May 7, 1970, encouraging artists and intellectuals to engage with the peasant, working, and soldering classes. Afterward, the Party put her in charge of a new University designed to achieve her vision.
The fact that Cunxin worries more about his unworthiness to be in Beijing than why Beijing is so much nicer than Qingdao points to the indoctrination that has taught him never to entertain a single doubt about the Party or its motives and decisions. It seems obvious that disparities exist in this socialist society, but Cunxin either cannot or will not see them as such—at least not yet. He himself is about to become another tool in the Party’s hands as he joins an academy premised on Madame Mao’s idea that controlling the arts is another key step toward ensuring the conformity of the populace to Party ideals.
Themes
The teachers assign the students to dorms with the luxuries of running water and individual beds, things Cunxin has never had before. He unpacks his belongings into a little chest and places his niang’s handmade quilt on the bed and then joins the rest of the students for orientation. The head of the 5-7 University, Director Wang, greets the new students and congratulates them on their luck, explaining that their chances of being selected were one in one billion. He says they’ll study ballet and other traditional Chinese arts as well as national and international history and geography. They’ll also study Madame Mao’s Art Philosophy. This curriculum will prepare the students to be revolutionary guards who wield their dance like a weapon in the service of Chairman Mao and the Party. Cunxin finds Director Wang’s speech about the relationship of art and politics inspiring but confusing.
As Cunxin settles in at the academy, he notices all sorts of things that highlight the extreme poverty and privation of his childhood and suggest that things in China are neither so fair nor so glorious as Party propaganda claims they are. The reason is the indoctrination Chinese citizens receive at all levels of society, but especially in the schools. Even in this arts academy, Cunxin quickly learns, propaganda remains a crucial component of the curriculum. Director Wang’s speech implies that the point of this is to turn the students into tools of the Party—a goal he makes explicit when he tells them that they differ from soldiers only in the fact that they are armed with their art rather than guns.
Themes
Next, the teachers lead the students into the canteen, where hundreds of students from the opera and music tracks already sit at dinner. The dance students get the best food because of the physical demands of their training. The other students at Cunxin’s table mostly come from Shanghai. He cannot understand their accents, nor they his. Although the food looks and smells delicious, his rising homesickness prevents him from eating much. He quickly rinses his bowl and leaves the canteen. Unable to find the light switches in the unfamiliar dormitory, he creeps up the stairs in the dark and climbs into his bed, clinging to his niang’s quilt like a drowning person clings to a lifeline. He wishes he could turn into a bird and fly away home.
Dinner offers yet another clue that the Party fails to live up to its socialist ideology in many ways: wanting to create a class of worthy and impressive dancers, the school ensures that they get the choicest foods. On the one hand, their decision makes sense, given the extreme physical demands of dance, as the book points out. But, on the other hand, it privileges one class of students over the other—precisely the kind of inequality socialism is supposed to correct. In any case, Cunxin can’t enjoy the privilege, at least not yet; separated from his family, he struggles to control his emotions of loneliness and loss.
Themes
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The next morning, Cunxin wakes to the sound of a harsh bell instead of the smells and sounds of Niang making breakfast. After a jog around the grounds and a simple breakfast, he and the other new students receive their uniforms and visit the head ballet mistress to be fitted for shoes. Warily, Cunxin asks when he will get pointe shoes. Chiu Ho explains that only girls wear those. Cunxin relaxes, believing he won't end up with broken feet like his na-na’s. Only later will he discover that the boys’ small, flat shoes can permanently damage his toes just as effectively. As the students finish their orientation, Cunxin learns that the “political heads” are Madame Mao’s military officers, sent to the academy to serve as the students’ political and ideological mentors.
Cunxin wakes early the next morning to the realization that the dance academy will require previously unimaginable work and discipline. The ever-present political heads remind him—and readers—that in the Party’s eyes, ideological conformity is at least as important as artistic mastery, if not more so. Earlier, his mother’s friends told him that they’d heard that pointe shoes ruined dancers’ feet in ways similar to the old-fashioned practice of foot binding. Although Cunxin worried about the pain and disability that he might endure, he chose to attend the academy anyway, showing just how much he’s willing to suffer and endure if it means escaping the well of rural poverty and disadvantage.
Themes
Every day, Cunxin takes ballet and other dance classes. After lunch and a midday rest, the students receive normal academic instruction. Then, after dinner, they have two hours to study or practice dancing. The ballet studio is freezing cold in the early February mornings, despite the bank of heaters along the wall. On the first day of classes, Chen Leung briefly explains the history of ballet and outlines the academy’s curriculum. He tells the students they will need to learn ballet terminology in both Chinese and French. Cunxin wilts; he can barely understand Chen Leung’s Mandarin, much less French. But he soon finds workarounds to remember the correct pronunciations and avoid embarrassing himself.
Spoken Chinese has eight main variants with differing degrees of mutual intelligibility. The efforts Cunxin must make to understand his teachers’ points to the monumental difficulty of the task the Communist Party faces in trying to ensure conformity across the massive nation—and suggests, perhaps, why it is so anxious to do so. Linguistic and cultural variability reminds readers of the number of people the Party seeks to lead and control. On a much more local level, this issue of dialects creates an extra layer of challenge for Cunxin. Yet rather than allow himself to become frustrated, he draws on his internal resources of resilience and creativity. He does the necessary work to succeed even though it’s challenging.
Themes
Everything in the first class feels unnatural and awkward. Cunxin feels more like a waddling duck than a graceful dancer worthy of Madame Mao. And the next class, Beijing Opera Movement, is even worse. Gao Dakun is a harsh, impatient man who calls the students mean names and tries to hurry his students’ flexibility with brute force. When Cunxin can’t get his leg to reach up to the barre, Gao Dakun forces it into position. On their way back to the dormitory, the students learn that the academy will be all rules and no fun. Zhu Yaoping, a small boy from Shanghai, slides down a banister. The other boys follow suit until the political heads order them to stop, lest they fail Madame Mao by injuring themselves.
Teacher Gao epitomizes the oppressive, brutal ways that the school—and, in a broader sense, the Party—tries to achieve conformity through force. The students suffer, and although they may fear Gao, they ultimately don’t love or respect him. Later in the book, other teachers will show Cunxin that it’s possible to teach (and treat) others in a different way. Tellingly, Teacher Gao’s and the political heads’ approaches are similar in their impatience with individual expression. Together, these suggest that life as a dance in China will never give Cunxin the freedom he craves, even if it puts enough food in his belly.
Themes
The rest of the day passes in a blur. Cunxin can barely understand the teachers’ Mandarin dialect. That night, the students attend a performance of one of Madame Mao’s model ballets in Beijing, but Cunxin’s exhaustion and disorientation prevent him from enjoying much of anything. When he vomits on the bus ride back to the academy, his teachers assure him it’s just motion sickness. Even so, he feels traumatized, embarrassed, and trapped in his overwhelming homesickness.
The dance academy, which initially seems like an opportunity to escape the prison of rural poverty and suffering, immediately becomes a cage of its own. If Cunxin is the little frog who has escaped the dark well, he now realizes that there was some measure of comfort and safety in knowing how the world worked—even when it was uncomfortable. He longs to return to the safety of that life, even if it is difficult.
Themes
