Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin [88]
With Mary’s total dedication and the help of an Australian invention called the cochlear implant, Sophie made rapid improvements. She is now fifteen years old and studying in a mainstream school, learning piano, ballet, tap, and jazz. It’s impossible to adequately describe how we lived through this difficult ordeal. Sophie is our miracle child.
Our second child, Thomas, was born in 1992, and our third child, Bridie, arrived in 1997. Both of them were born with normal hearing.
In 1995, after dancing with the Houston Ballet for nearly sixteen years, I decided to join the Australian Ballet as a principal artist and so we moved to Melbourne. This was a very difficult decision. It was emotionally hard to leave the Houston Ballet, which had been like a family to me for over fifteen years. Professionally, it was going to be a new challenge in a new country, but for Mary it meant returning to her homeland for the first time since she’d left Australia to study ballet in London at the age of seventeen.
My farewell performance with the Houston Ballet actually took place in China. It was the first time I had been allowed to perform in China, the place where it had all begun for me. I danced Romeo in Ben’s Romeo and Juliet, and the Central TV of China broadcast the opening night live—to five hundred million people throughout the country. I watched tears of pride running down Teacher Xiao’s face. I saw the pride in the Bandit’s eyes, and I heard Fengtian and my teachers, classmates, and the entire audience cheer. My only sadness was that Zhang Shu wasn’t there—he had died from a heart attack a few years before.
The Australian Ballet was a new challenge for me. I danced in Australia for three more years, and these were some of the most satisfying years of my whole career. The Australian audience embraced me warmly from the beginning.
During my last few years of dancing I began to study finance on the weekend and in the evening to prepare myself for a career transition. Now I am a manager at one of the largest stock brokerage firms in Australia.
And what of the others in my story?
Ben came to my last performance in Sydney in April 1999, and I went to his farewell gala in Houston—he had especially choreographed a solo for me to perform. Mary is still the love of my life and is currently teaching and coaching at the Australian Ballet. Elizabeth remarried and has a son. Charles Foster remains a close friend: we are godfathers to each other’s children.
Zhang Weiqiang also left China for the West and danced in both Japan and Canada for some years. Teacher Xiao has become one of the most respected teachers and choreographers in China. The Bandit and Fengtian have left their artistic professions and become businessmen in China, like over a billion others there. All of my brothers are doing well in their own businesses and their living standards continue to improve.
In 2003, I made a surprise visit to my family in China and showed up at my parents’ doorstep quite unannounced. My niang was cooking in the kitchen. Upon seeing me, she dropped her wok flipper and could only manage to utter, “Ah! Ah! You! It’s you!” She threw her arms around me and hugged me tight.
A Short Note on the Long History of China
China represents the oldest surviving civilization in the world. The country’s written records date back 4,000–5,000 years. China is renowned for scholarship (the world’s first university