Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [85]
I knew the only chance for recovery was to be as disciplined with my rehabilitation as I had been with my dancing. I would need all the perseverance and determination I had. It greatly tested my self-belief, and I fought with self-doubt on a daily basis.
Luckily, by then, I had met Mary McKendry, a new principal dancer of the Houston Ballet, an exceptional dancer in her own right. She brought me books and led me along the road toward discovering the literary world.
After months of intense rehabilitation and hard work, I finally made it back onstage. I went on to dance for another thirteen years.
Despite the success of my dancing career, I constantly thought of my beloved parents and brothers. I missed them. I worried about them. Soon after my defection, I wrote to them, but received no reply, and this added even more fear to my already heavy heart. The guilt I felt was immense. I secretly prayed for their well-being and safety. The thought of never being able to see my niang, my dia, and my six brothers again made my heart bleed over and over. I tried hard to suppress my guilt, my worries, and the sadness deep in my heart. I had to keep going forward.
In 1984, I was dancing the role of the prince on the opening night of Ben’s Swan Lake at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Vice President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, were present. Ben had made them aware of my situation with China. During the intermission, the Bushes invited the Chinese ambassador and the cultural attaché to their private box and asked them to help me. I discovered then that the Chinese cultural attaché was Wang Zicheng, the man who had briefed Zhang Weiqiang and me at the Ministry of Culture in China before we’d left China for America that first time in 1979. The Chinese embassy officials agreed to help, to my great surprise, and a letter arrived a few months later from Wang Zicheng. The Chinese government had given my parents permission to leave China to visit me in America.
I held that letter tight in my hand as that night, trembling with joy, I dialed my old village phone number.
First I heard my brothers’ excited voices, all fighting to speak to me first. They had run to the commune phone ahead of my parents. In the middle of my conversation with my youngest brother, Jing Tring, another voice spoke urgently into the receiver.
It was my niang. At last!
“Is it really you, my sixth son … ?” Her voice choked up, and she started to sob. “Oh, my son … !”
I told her that they had permission to come and visit me in America. She didn’t believe me at first. Then, just before we ended our conversation, I said, “Niang … before you go, I just want to tell you … I love you!”
This was the first time I’d ever told her that. How many times I’d wished I’d said it to her before I went to America!
There was silence.
Then all I heard was my niang sobbing.
Charles Foster helped with my parents’ visa applications. My parents were scheduled to arrive in Houston on the opening night of Nutcracker. It was December 18, 1984. I spent the entire day in the studio and theater practicing. Concentrating on the performance was the only thing that helped my anxiety about my parents. Everything felt strange and new that day. Even my makeup brush felt unsteady. My hands trembled and I could hear my heart thumping loudly.
I went onstage and felt the intense heat of the spotlights. How would my parents react to these bright lights, to the thousands of people clapping in the audience? They had never seen me perform. They had never even been in a theater before. I wondered, would they be proud of me?
It was time to start, but the curtain didn’t rise. I was told that people were stuck in heavy traffic and the performance would be delayed.
The truth was, however, that my parents’ plane was late. By the time they arrived it was twenty minutes past curtain time and I was a nervous wreck.
Word spread quickly through the audience about