Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [29]
Back on our bus, a sense of insecurity began to overwhelm me. I sank down into my seat and looked out of the window. The buildings around the Square seemed to stare at me. Why are you, peasant boy, here in this magnificent city? Here among fifteen million people, I felt like a feather swept up in a whirlwind.
We traveled through the city streets and gradually the tall buildings of Beijing were left far behind. We drove on, heading toward a village called Zhuxingzhuang, about 118 miles away, which was to be our new home.
The wide, open fields of the countryside seemed flat compared to the terraced fields surrounding my home town, but there were enough similarities in the countryside to relieve my anxiety a little. We sang propaganda songs as we went along and this helped me too. Eventually, just as our bus turned into a drive, the political head proudly announced, “We are here!”
I could see tall, bare trees on each side of a driveway that led to a metal-barred gate, which had bright red letters over the top: CENTRAL 5-7 PERFORMING AND ARTS UNIVERSITY. The numbers, our political heads explained, referred to May 7, 1970, when Madame Mao delivered a famous speech encouraging all intellectuals to engage, both physically and mentally, with the three classes: peasants, workers, and soldiers. The Ministry of Culture then proposed that Madame Mao should be the artistic director of this new university, and that it should be located in the heart of the communes, where future artists could learn and work among the peasants every day. In this isolated site, students would be protected from any negative city influences. The project quickly received the central government’s backing.
Our bus came to a stop inside a compound and we were all taken inside a new three-story building with an overpowering smell of fresh paint. Before we climbed upstairs, one teacher divided us into groups according to age and gender. I was put in the younger boys’ class.
There were two bathrooms, one for each sex. We were told we had to collect our hot water from the boiler-room near our canteen. Water coming through pipes, instead of having to carry buckets from the well. Amazing!
There were four rooms, two for boys and two for girls, with about ten of us to a room. The beds were crammed close together. It would be a luxury to have a bed all to myself, but I knew I’d still miss my brothers’ smelly feet and long for the security of my parents’ presence.
I put my snakeskin and the smelly dried shrimp and other items in a little bedside chest, got out my niang’s precious handmade quilt and carefully folded it on top of the bed. Then we were all taken to the field near the canteen and organized into four straight lines according to height, the smaller ones at the front. I was the second smallest boy in my line.
A broad, strong man in a green army uniform addressed us. “Students, I am Director Wang,” he said in a rusty, deep voice. He looked around. I could see his scary little eyes. “On behalf of our beloved Madame Mao, I welcome you to the Central 5-7 Performing and Arts University. You are privileged to be chosen. Do you know what your chances of being chosen were?” He paused. “One in a billion! That’s right, one in a billion! You are the lucky, proud children of the workers, peasants, and soldiers of China! You will carry Chairman Mao’s artistic flag into the bright future. Not only will you receive six years of ballet training, but you will also study Chinese folk dance, Beijing Opera Movement, martial arts, acrobatics, politics, Chinese and international history and geography, poetry, mathematics, and Madame Mao’s Art Philosophy.”
He paused again. “It is Madame Mao’s wish that you don’t just grow up being