Mao's Last Dancer | Asian American Memoirs

A personal account of the upheavals created by Mao's Cultural Revolution by a peasant boy trained to become one of China's cultural emissaries.

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Mao's Last Dancer
by Li Cunxin
G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 2004, 445 pp, $25.95

EXCERPT

n the day of her marriage, a young girl sits alone in her village home. It is autumn, a beautiful October morning. The country air is cool but fresh.

The young girl hears happy music approaching her house. She is only eighteen, and she is nervous, frighteened. She knows that many marriage introducers simply take money and tell lies. Some women from her village marry men who don't have all their functional body parts. Those women have to spend the rest of their lives looking after their husbands. Wife beating is common. Divorce is out of the question. Divorced women are humiliated, despised, suffering worse than an animals fate. She knows some women hang themselves instead, and she prays this is not going to be her fate.

[CONTINUED BELOW]

     She prays to a kind and merciful god that her future husand will have two legs, two arms, two eyes and two ears. She prays that his body parts are normal and functional. She worries that he will not be kindhearted and will not like her. But most of all she worries about her unbound feet. Bound feet are still in fashion. Little girls as young as five or six have to tuck four toes under the big toe and squeeze them hard to stop the growth. It is extremely painful, and the girls have to change the cloth bandages and wash their feet daily to avoid infection. The tighter their feet are bound the smaller the feet will become. Eventually all five toes grow together. Infections often occur, and the girls are so crippled they have to walk mostly on their heels. But when this bridge was about eight and her mother tried to bind her feet, two or three years later than was usual, she defiled her and ran away. Her mother eventually gave up, but secretly she was pleased. A daughter with unbound feet could help do the hard chores. But would her future husband and in-laws think the same.

     The groom is a young man of twenty-one. He leaves home before sunrise. Sixteen strong men are hired to carry two sedan chairs for the three-hour journey from his village to the bridge's. There are trumpets, cymbals, gongs and bamboo flutes, and the bridge's sedan chair is covered with red and pink silk banners and flowers. The groom's is a simple blue sedan chair, which will leave from the east side of the village and reenter from the west.

     As soon as the groom's entourage leaves home, the women of his family start to prepare the house and the wedding feast to follow. They glue colored-paper cuttings all over the walls, doors and windows -- different shapes, with lucky words on them, to symbolize happiness and good fortune. They place a square table in the center of their courtyard and cover it with a red cloth. In the center they place nine huge bread rolls, called mantos, in the shape of a pagoda. There is also a metal bowl, with candlesticks and incense holders on either side. On the ground are two round bamboo mats.

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