eleventyone

Today is the 60th anniversary of Chairman Mao Zedong’s unification of China under the red flag of Communism. It’s also my birthday. What better birthday present could I have than seeing Mao’s Last Dancer on opening night and hearing Li Cunxin talk about the movie based on his life, at Cinema Nova in Carlton.

Me and Li Cunxin

Li Cunxin finished writing his biography Mao’s Last Dancer, in 2003. (These are spoilers, if you intend to watch the movie.) His story is of a Chinese peasant boy, living in poverty, who is chosen to join Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy to learn ballet. Through hard work he becomes one of the best in China and is invited to study ballet in America. After six weeks in Houston, he learns what ballet really means and also discovers freedom, but has to return to China. Li really wants to return, so after campaigning many politicians he’s able to go back to America. He falls in love with a girl called Elizabeth and after a year must again return to China. After some legal advice he decided to marry Elizabeth and remain in America. The Chinese Consular General wants to talk to Li about his decision and is held hostage in the Consulate. His lawyer eventual gets a judge’s mandate to allow Li to stay. After his defection he can no longer go back to China and see his family, which takes its toll emotionally and breaks down his marriage. While visiting Barbara Bush, he mentions that he can’t see his family and during a performance they are brought from China to see him. Some years later he is able to go back to his villiage and see the rest of his family. The recent release of his book adds three more chapters to his story.

The film adaptation puts this 500 page novel into two hours, so some things are lost and some events changed, but it stays very, very close to the truth of the story. For example, in the movie Li only makes one trip to America and some of his dancer instructors at the academy are merged into the one character, otherwise the audience would be confused. Some small events are moved to other places in the story.

What I thought should have been emphasised more was the absolute poverty that his family lived in. There’s a scene where the family are eating dried yams. These are what the family ate most of the year, because they were the easiest things to grow and after being dried and stored are tasteless mush. It was a luxury for them to eat rice and might maybe once a month get a piece of meat in their food, or eat dumplings. Any piece of meat and drop of oil was precious. In one of the movie scenes Li, talking to his Houston sponsor Ben, says ‘My father works hard and earns $50 in one year and you spend $500 in one day’. These stark differences were apparent to me when I lived and studied in Shanghai a few years ago. My Austudy income from Centrelink was twice the money that a professional graduate worker in Shanghai would earn in a month. I asked Li Cunxin, ‘Are you still shocked when you see Westerners throwing their money away?’ Li responded with, ‘Yes… Looking back and seeing how we lived on absolutely nothing is just mind-boggling’.

It was wonderful to see his movie come to life. It gave me a solid image of the China that he grew up in. The Chinese people of the 1960s through to the 1980s wore the blue and grey Mao-era style tunics with red Mao pins. When I first visited China in 1994, it was the cusp of a fashion change where people were starting to wear colourful Western clothes, but still half wore the depressing Communist blue/grey.

The politics of the nation at the time was an important part of Li’s story. Li talks to a friend about their president and upon hearing that the American hates his president, Li tells him to be quiet. In the book Li goes further to say they would be killed for saying something like that. One of Li’s teachers is shown to be taken away by police as a counter-revolutionary. In the book he tells the reason for this was the man’s homosexuality. Americans were seen as dirty Capitalists living in poverty (who all carried guns, killed people for no reason and treated coloured people as slaves. Hmmm… ), but in comparison were quite wealthy. Li talks about the Chinese people’s faith in Mao and Communism after the cultural revolution that stripped all old traditions, and the economic changes that Deng Xiaoping brought in to move away from the state-managed market, that gave the people a better standard of living. The oppression under Communism in China and the Freedom of Capitalist America were clearly spelled out in both.

It is not story just about his ballet, the real focus is his journey and Li being separated from his family and being reunited again. His love for his family is incredibly important and choosing ballet and freedom in America over going back to his family in China was a big decision that he regretted and took an emotional toll.

It’s a great movie. It’s set out in such a way that there’s Chinese language and subtitles through only half the movie, so you don’t have to read all the way through. Chi Cao, who plays Li Cunxin in the movie is very cute. He was the son of one of Li’s teachers mentioned in the book. Li says he had to choose an actor very proficient in ballet who could match his style and having someone so handsome to play himself was also a great advantage.

Mao’s Last Dancer is a must see. Five stars!