Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [47]
After the final vote of all the Youth Party members, five new members, including me, found ourselves standing under the flag of China with the Little Red Book raised by our faces, pledging our allegiance: “I willingly and proudly join the Communist Youth Party. I swear to love Chairman Mao, love the Communist Party, love my country, love my people, and love my colleagues. I will respond to the party’s calling and strictly observe all party rules. The party’s interests come before mine. I’m ready to give my all, including my life, to its glorious cause. We are dedicated to the principle of bearing hardship and letting others enjoy the fruit of our work …”
From that moment on my life had true purpose—to serve glorious communism. Once again I felt a powerful sense of belonging. I took my role as a party member very seriously. I was one step closer to becoming a full Communist Party member, my ultimate political dream. Now I could contribute to Mao’s political cause more effectively, and try my hardest to make a difference whenever I could.
But the political situation was constantly changing. Mao knew the Gang of Four, his closest advisers, was incapable of managing China’s economic affairs, and by 1974 he felt increasingly threatened by Deng Xiaoping’s popularity. Deng Xiaoping’s reputation was spreading fast. Within the walls of our academy, however, Madame Mao was still in control.
Madame Mao might have been pleased with our political development but she still wasn’t happy, apparently, with the standard of our dancing. The Vice-Minister of Culture sent Zhang Ce, retired principal dancer from the Central Ballet of China, to be the new vice-director of our academy. And Zhang Ce brought back one of his former teachers, Zhang Shu, to be head of the ballet department.
Zhang Shu was one of the founders of Chinese ballet. He had been released from detention as a former rightist—a person suspected of being anti-Mao. He was a small man with an even temperament, and he often watched our classes and occasionally taught us. From the very beginning he seemed to notice me, and I found out that he’d even told Teacher Xiao that I was one to watch.
One day, soon after Zhang Shu’s arrival, as I lay on my bed reading, I felt something hard under my thin cotton mat. When I put my hand under it I found a little book. It looked very old and when I flicked through it I saw that it was in a foreign language. I couldn’t understand any of the words, but there were quite a few pictures—all of different ballet poses. The young teenagers’ ballet positions were beautiful, their figures exceptional. I was especially impressed by a boy posing in arabesques. His placement was perfect. He seemed no older than me. I wished that one day I would be good enough to demonstrate in a book like this, for the next generation of dancers.
I didn’t know for certain who had put that book under my mat, but I had a rough idea and I knew it would be far too dangerous to show the book around. Whoever put it there would have wanted me to keep it to myself.
Zhang Ce’s and Zhang Shu’s arrival at the academy marked the beginning of our new focus on technique. Extra time was devoted to dancing and some of our academic classes were dropped. Like Zhang Shu, other experienced teachers who had previously been accused of being rightists were now “rehabilitated” and allowed to return. One was a Russian ballet expert who spoke very good English and had translated several Russian ballet books into Chinese. He’d had to do the lowest and filthiest jobs in the countryside; his only crime had been his knowledge of Western arts.
Around the same time, another “antirevolutionary” also came to our academy from the brain-cleansing camps. He was a piano tuner, about fifty years old. He’d been recalled because all the pianists had complained about the out-of-tune pianos. He tuned and banged on the piano keyboards all day long. He took