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Chapter 30: Another Wedding: Qingdao, 1988
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
After that first visit, Mary and Cunxin return to China many times. Their dance careers flourish, even as they grow their own family. Niang and Dia come to Houston to help after Cunxin and Mary’s daughter Sophie is born in 1989 so that Mary can get back to dancing as quickly as possible. But then, when Sophie is just 18 months old, Cunxin and Mary realize that she doesn’t react to loud noises. Auditory testing reveals a diagnosis of profound deafness. Mary immediately quits dancing to dedicate herself to teaching Sophie to speak. While Cunxin supports this decision, it still takes him a long time to get over losing Mary as his dancing partner. Then, when Sophie is four, the family learns about a brand-new invention: the cochlear implant. Receiving one allows Sophie to hear.
In their personal and professional lives, Cunxin and Mary continue to prove the value of hard work to achieving success. And they demonstrate their values when they adjust their lives to support their daughter Sophie after she receives a life-changing diagnosis. Just like the trials Niang and Dia faced brought them closer together, so too do Mary’s and Cunxin’s trials bring them closer together emotionally—even if they stop dancing together. A strong family helps a person to face whatever life throws at them.
Themes
Between the births of Cunxin’s and Mary’s second child, Thomas, and third child, Birdie, Cunxin accepts an offer to join the Australian Ballet and the family moves to Melbourne. It’s hard for him to leave Ben, his long-term mentor and supporter. It’s also hard for him to leave America, the country where he first tasted freedom. But the idea of a new start is exciting, too. His final tour with the Houston Ballet brings him to back to China, where he performs on the same stage where he once danced Swan Lake with his class from the Beijing Dance Academy. For the first time in his professional career, he dances with Teacher Xiao, the Bandit, and over thirty of his relatives in the audience.
The move to Australia represents one of many fresh starts for Cunxin, but this time, he goes with the love and support of his own family rather than being alone. It’s an emotionally satisfying conclusion of his career with the Houston Ballet to return to China, and this also allows him to share his art with the country that made him—but which he had to escape to reach his full potential.
Themes
As Cunxin’s dance career winds down—most ballet dancers retire in their mid-30s—he studies to become a stockbroker. His final performance, at the age of 38, is Basilio in Don Quixote. As he prepares, he remembers dancing this role at 18, when he focused only on the technical elements and his desire to outperform Baryshnikov and his other ballet idols. Now, he knows he has achieved mastery. He has tasted the mango in all its glory, just like Teacher Xiao encouraged him to do.
Cunxin recreates himself in the second half of his life partly out of necessity. But one interpretation of his shift toward finance is that it allows him to continue to express the focus, drive, and determination that allowed him to become such a great dancer. The last time he performed the role of Don Quixote, he did so in China, where his lack of freedom expressed itself in his focus on technical conformity and perfection. Only now, in combining artistic expression with technical excellence, does he feel that he has achieve the level of mastery to which he always aspired.
Themes
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When he sits down to write his memoir in 2003, Mary is still the love of Cunxin’s life. Ben has retired as the artistic director of the Houston Ballet. Elizabeth has remarried. Charles Foster remains a close friend to Cunxin and is the godfather of Cunxin’s children. Delworth died in a car accident during the mid-1980s, after which Lori remarried. Consul Zhang returned to China and became the mayor of a large town. Zhang Weiqiang left China for the West, too, although thanks to Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy he didn’t have to defect to move to Canada and join the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Teacher Xiao has retired from the Beijing Dance Academy but remains involved in the ballet world, especially in judging international competitions. The Bandit and Fengtian have both left their artistic careers to become businessmen. Cunxin’s brothers’ living standards continue to improve, although they still envy Cunxin’s large family. And Niang is still in China, cooking and caring for her family.
As Cunxin wraps up the stories of some of the most important figures in his life, he makes it clear how important his relationships have always been. He even honors those to whom he is no longer connected, like Elizabeth and Delworth, whose untimely passing left a hole in Cunxin’s life unexplored in the earlier narrative. The fates of his Chinese acquaintance track a growing sense of freedom and opportunity in the country, yet the fact that the Bandit and Fengtian have abandoned the arts for the business world still suggests that the improvements are economic rather than social or political.
Themes
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