Previous
Chapter 8: Feather in a Whirlwind
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
Near the end of Cunxin’s first week at the Beijing Dance Academy, he has his first Chinese folk-dance lesson with Teacher Chen Yuen. Cunxin loves folk-dancing; it is freer than ballet, and it involves beautiful music played on traditional Chinese instruments. The same day the students start folk-dancing, they attend their first politics class, in which their teacher puts a saying of Confucius on the board and then explains why his utopian vision is evil. This befuddles Cunxin at first, because Confucius’s “perfect order” initially sounds a lot like the ideal communist society. But by the end, after the teacher explains how Confucius’s words reflect the hidden, poisoned agendas of a capitalist system, Cunxin feels amazed to have missed such supposedly obvious signs of trouble.
More evidence for Cunxin’s growing (if yet mostly subconscious) yearning for freedom surfaces in his preference for folk dancing’s expressive movements over the rigid strictures of ballet and Chinese Opera Movement. Ironically—or perhaps intentionally, given the Party’s investment in turning these dancers into tools of the ongoing revolution—politics classes begin the same day. It’s a mark of the Party’s sway over the beliefs of its subjects that Cunxin can so radically change his perception on the passage over the course of the lesson. He willingly, even gratefully, exchanges his own interpretation for the “correct” one his teachers explain. At least for now—his desire for more freedom of expression in dance and in through suggests that he will not remain content with the Party line forever.
Themes
During politics class, Cunxin hears some baby birds screeching from a nest on the roof, and afterwards he convinces Zhu Yaoping to climb up with him to check it out. Cunxin plans to take the baby birds, play with them for a bit and feed them at lunchtime, then return them to the nest. But when the birds start screeching loudly, his teacher discovers them and sends Cunxin to Director Wang’s office. Director Wang orders Cunxin to write a self-criticism using quotations from Chairman Mao’s Red Book, something Cunxin has never had to do before. He writes that he was wrong to take the baby birds because they distracted him from his studies and from serving Mao’s revolution. The self-criticism passes the test, but it doesn’t teach Cunxin about serving Mao. Instead, it embarrasses him and reminds him of his lost freedom.
The birds—symbolic of freedom—interrupt Cunxin’s force-fed political education. Metaphorically, they highlight the distinct lack of freedom he has at the academy and in China generally, especially when he gets in trouble for bringing them into the classroom. Self-criticism performs two roles in ensuring conformity with Party ideology and the school’s expectations: witnessing public punishments serves as in incentive for the other students to monitor their own actions. And asking the student to criticize their insufficiently revolutionary actions forces them to measure their choices against ideology. Cunxin lies in his self-criticism, but he still learns the lesson that he must outwardly appear to conform, even when he feels otherwise.
Themes
Cunxin often gets in trouble for daydreaming during his academic and artistic classes. The dance teachers push the students very hard to perform difficult physical feats—it’s only by luck that more of them aren’t injured permanently. But Cunxin gradually becomes friendly with fellow students like Zhu Yaoping. The students take a field trip to the Ming Tombs, where Cunxin marvels at the Chinese riches and glory that the emperors’ rich clothing and costly artifacts exemplify. He does wonder, though, why peasant families like his go hungry if the country is so rich. But he concludes that it would be poorer and that everyone would be worse off it weren’t for Chairman Mao’s strenuous efforts to lead everyone to greater prosperity and happiness.
By juxtaposing Cunxin’s daydreams with the teachers’ hard pushing, the book suggests how badly he longs to escape the academy and its expectations. It’s like when he lost his early childhood freedoms by starting school, but even worse this time. Still, his natural optimism and curiosity buoy him as he begins to make friends. It’s a further sign both of his yearning for freedom and his ability to look critically at the world around him that he begins to question the status quo as early as his first months at the academy. For the moment, he can still quiet his questions with official ideology. But the fact that he has questions now hints that the answers will one day become insufficient.
Themes
Because he continues to suffer from acute motion sickness on these trips, Cunxin begs off the next one. He uses the quiet hours to explore the school’s grounds, discovering a stand of weeping willow trees where he pours out his stored-up heartache and loneliness. When he goes to the canteen for lunch, he discovers another boy who stayed behind; after lunch they play badminton in the yard, easing Cunxin’s homesickness at least a little. At the academy, Cunxin frequently misses his home and his family, he cannot afford to call them, or even to send them mail as frequently as he would like. He carefully conceals his homesickness in his letters, trying to keep from causing his niang more pain. But his brothers write back and tell Cunxin how much she misses him.
Far removed from his family’s love and support, Cunxin must gradually learn to make his way in the world on his own efforts. Finding solace in nature and making new friends ease his sadness enough to make life tolerable. Although neither nature nor friends fully replace his beloved parents or brothers, finding opportunities to express—and feel—love and care still give him strength. And the letters between Cunxin and home keep him connected to that source of support, however distantly.
Themes
Get the entire Mao’s Last Dancer LitChart as a printable PDF.
Cunxin loves visiting the university’s library and reading its books, mostly heart wrenching stories about the struggle between good and evil or how difficult life is for children outside of China’s communist utopia. The political heads and teachers get newspapers—the People’s Daily, the Workers’ Daily, and the Soldiers’ Daily, and the Reference Paper, which is meant for Party officials. It has more news and less propaganda; Cunxin knows because he reads a contraband copy of it, once. When the teachers find out, they round up the culprits and demand they write self-criticism about endangering their communist faith, dishonestly taking and spreading Party secrets, and breaking academy rules. Cunxin’s self-criticism passes on the first attempt, but he doesn’t believe a word of it.
Away from his family, Cunxin looks to the library to replace the oral tales he used to hear from his dia and other elders in the village. But while the old, oral tales gave him insight into the world, the way it works, and his own role within it, the library books feel disappointingly flat. They move his emotions, but their exaggerated and lopsided view of the world serves the Party rather than Cunxin’s soul. It’s a mark of how unhelpful these books are in the long run that Cunxin doesn’t retell any of them within the book, in contrast to the multiple oral tales he quotes from his childhood, like the cricket Brave Hero and the frog in the well.
Themes
