Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [54]
There was no doubt this role was technically very demanding. I worked hard but three choreographers had choreographed different sections of the ballet. I had to listen to three people’s instructions at once! It was so confusing. The ballet underwent changes right up to the last minute and on the opening night, in front of thousands of eyes, my nerves turned my muscles numb. My whole body trembled. My legs felt weak. On my grand entrance I was supposed to perform this explosive series of giant leaps but my legs felt like noodles dangling in the air. The second half of the ballet went better, but the difficult dancing parts were mostly in the first half.
I was disappointed with myself beyond description. I had let the whole academy down. I had let Chairman Mao and Madame Mao down. I went to all three choreographers and apologized. I went to Zhang Shu the next day and asked him what I could do for my nerves. “Only experience will help you,” he said.
At the end of this year we spent time with the army stationed outside Beijing. The daily schedule was strict. At five o’clock we were outside in line on the parade ground. We were used to our Beijing Dance Academy’s strict schedule, but still, waking up even earlier was hard. We jogged and practiced our morning routine before breakfast. For the rest of the day we joined some of the soldiers’ training activities. We learned how to walk, turn, stop, and run the military way. We even learned how to fall and crawl under imaginary tanks and enemy gunfire. Many of us had bruises all over. We learned how to hold guns—important for our political ballets, we were told. We spent days at target practice and my eyes grew tired.
Grenade throwing was one activity I wasn’t good at, no matter how hard I tried. We practiced with fake grenades at first. On the day we were scheduled to throw the real grenades we first had to throw a fake one so our throw could be measured. I imagined a group of enemies standing in front of me, gathered my strength, and threw out the fake grenade with all my might. It fell way short of the target. I wasn’t the only one—many of my classmates also failed to reach the required distance. The academy officials wisely canceled our real grenade-throwing event.
I didn’t enjoy my military experience at all. I spent the whole time longing to get back to my leaps and pirouettes.
This same year I was elected one of the three Communist Youth Party committee members and vice-captain of my class. One day a Communist Party official at the academy called me into his office. “Cunxin, you have done a good job at the Communist Youth Party. Although you are still too young to join the main party, we would like you to start thinking about it now. Communist Party members are the purest and strongest communist believers. The party would like to educate you to become a true Communist Party member, to carry the party’s torch. Communist Party members are a glorious breed of human being.”
I nodded dutifully and left his office confused. To join the Communist Party was every young person’s dream. But when I heard his words about a glorious breed of human being I began to wonder. I thought of the Communist Party members I knew: some were special people like Teacher Xiao and Zhang Shu. But there were others I didn’t want to be in the same company with. Besides, with my increased interest in ballet, I had little time for long meetings. Lately I’d started speeding up the meetings I chaired at the Communist Youth Party and I’d been considering relinquishing some of those responsibilities. When I talked to Teacher Xiao and Zhang Shu about this conflict between the endless meetings and my dance practice, both of them advised me not to give up my political position. It was important for my artistic future, they said.
Soon after Zhou Enlai’s death, there was a massive earthquake in the coal-mining city of Tangshan, about a hundred miles east of Beijing. Officially,