The Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Tse-tung's attempt to enlist the entire Chinese population in a centrally controlled popular revolt, came at just the right time to produce a deluge of memoirs. Those who were young during its height in the '50s were mature and vigorous when a thawing of Chinese-American relations under Deng Xiaopeng allowed them to seek international publishing deals. And their experience, either as Red Guards (the teenagers who persecuted their elders, with the encouragement of Mao's government) or as the children of "class enemies" (anyone with money or property), remains an electrifying example of totalitarian leaders' power to get their subjects to voluntarily turn their own lives upside down.
Li Cunxin's memoir Mao's Last Dancer trails that initial upswell by a generation; he was a young child at the height of the Cultural Revolution, and was drawn into its orbit only at the very end. Growing up in poverty near Quingdao (home of Tsingtao beer) with six brothers, in the same house with his father's parents, eight siblings, and their spouses and children, he subsisted mostly on dried yams and didn't enter school until age 8. But just a few years later, when Madame Mao's representatives came to the school seeking students for a new dance academy, Cunxin's life changed: He was transported to Beijing, given plenty to eat, and drilled relentlessly on ballet, Chinese folk dance, Beijing Opera movement, and political propaganda.
As if to give the lie to Western theories about talent, that indefinable "it" without which no one becomes a great artist, Cunxin was chosen primarily for his class background rather than any signs of ballet prowess. Yet his determination to make the most of a miraculous opportunity to leave peasant life behind forever led, in just seven years, to an invitation to join the Houston Ballet for a year as a visiting artist.
Li's detailed and nostalgic yet unflinching descriptions of his childhood make up the heart of Mao's Last Dancer. While he gladly, gratefully, and unquestioningly accepted the Maoist party line during his school years, the seeds of dissent had already been sown in his family. His mother and father knew that ideology doesn't fill the belly, and when the rules of the political game shifted in the dance academy, Li noticed. When he saw firsthand evidence of the party's lies about the West, he was able to make the difficult decision to defect at age 18.
Mao's Last Dancer feels a bit attenuated at the end; Li's years with the Houston and Australian Ballets are passed over much more quickly than his Chinese upbringing. But most of this story is new, startling, and gracefully told, a fitting invitation to a new season of memories from a generation reared in Chinese Communism's last show of strength.