Mao's Last Dancer - Li Cunxin

Summary                                    

From Goodreads:  

From a desperately poor village in northeast China, at age eleven, Li Cunxin was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural delegates to be taken from his rural home and brought to Beijing, where he would study ballet. In 1979, the young dancer arrived in Texas as part of a cultural exchange, only to fall in love with America-and with an American woman. Two years later, through a series of events worthy of the most exciting cloak-and-dagger fiction, he defected to the United States, where he quickly became known as one of the greatest ballet dancers in the world. This is his story, told in his own inimitable voice.

Thoughts 

I had originally seen the movie based on this book when it came out a couple years ago (watch it - it will be well worth your while.  Not only is the story great - which we'll get to here - but the script and acting were very good and the dancing was phenomenal) and have been waiting anxiously to get my hands on the book, which I was FINALLY able to do a couple months ago.  Let me preface this by saying I don't read nonfiction normally.  I avoid it at all costs - I will read the occasional memoir or biography, but I can count the number of both genres combined on one hand.

Cunxin's insight into communist China as well as into the art of dance makes for an absolutely compelling read.  You start with a little background about his family before he was born and the opening bit of the book is devoted to his childhood before he was introduced into dance at the age of eleven.  The poverty he describes is beyond imagination.  Most first-world citizens will not be able to even come close to picturing the poverty that much of China (and much of the world even today) lived in.  Cunxin grows up in a small village.  He shared a tiny house with seven brothers, his parents, and grandmother.  There is no heat, and China reaches frigid temperatures much of the year.  School is devoted to teaching Mao's ideals (this is set a few years before Mao dies), meat is a luxury.  Even reading his descriptions and seeing some of the photos, it is literally beyond the realms of my imagination to dream up a situation as poor as his family was for generations.  At age 11 he is chosen to attend the Beijing Dance Academy, where he endured grueling 16-hour days.  Imagine everything you've heard about how challenging the dancers' lives are in New York or England or Australia.  Now imagine being 11 years-old, being physically stretched beyond your body's capabilities so that some student's are forever disabled.  These students are sent home in disgrace. Imagine being in an environment when one day your teacher is a renowned professor, then the next moment he is branded a traitor against Chairman Mao and forced into physical labor or prison.

Cunxin is finally able to escape this environment when he invited to work with the Houston Ballet Company.  When he comes to America he discovers that everything he has been taught in China about the outside world is a lie.  The rest of the book is devoted to his escape from China, dealing with the aftermath of a huge culture change as well as consequences for himself and for his family.  For almost a decade Cunxin didn't even know if his family had been murdered because of his defection.

I thought this story was amazing - to read how hard a person can push themselves to succeed and to see how far a human can come - it's really just mind boggling.  This isn't a work of fiction.  These things actually happened to real people, many of whom are still alive.  This story is only set a little over 30 years ago.  The writing is so descriptive, and the way everything is described is so foreign to everything I have experienced in life.  It is an absolute delight to read how Cunxin describes the world.  Even if you are not into nonfiction (like me) I highly recommend you read this book just so you can understand even a little of what goes on in some countries.   I would also recommend you watch the movie, which is a beautiful work of art.  It doesn't even matter which order you do either - they are both amazing stories.

Recommended

                           
Red Scarf Girl Review                     I Was A Dancer Review

The Salt Letters - Christine Balint

Rated: B-




Synopsis
(from Barnes & Noble)

Christine Balint's vivid first novel is the story of one woman's dramatic and agonizing journey from her home in genteel England to the then-unknown New World of Australia in 1854. Traveling in steerage aboard The Maiden Tide, Sarah is thrown into claustrophobic, filthy, and often flooded quarters with other "unmarried women," who stoically endure one horrific hardship after another: illness, infection, heat stroke, and lice, for starters. To pass the time, the women tell stories about the lives they've left behind, revealing tightly held secrets to the strangers who have become their traveling companions. But it's Sarah's memories of life at home in Shropshire, thoughts of her family and her cousin Richard, that keep her sane. She attempts to write to her mother, explaining the reasons for her departure and begging for forgiveness, but she is unable to finish the letters she begins. And she longs to see her cousin Richard, for whom she has left England for a more welcoming New World where she has heard that hard work is well rewarded and the soil is "moist and thick with nuggets of gold." Lush with sensuous prose and authentic detail, The Salt Letters is the tale of a woman whose physical and emotional limits are stretched to the breaking point -- all in the name of love. It is a compelling read by a truly "great" new writer.

Thoughts

I thought the prose was very fluid, very like an impressionist painting - the picture is vivid, but it's never ugly.  It definitely mirrors the thematic references to water.  Although I loved the way the words connected - more often than not, the thoughts do not connect nearly as well.  The book is full of water metaphors - but there are so many of them and there are so many insinuations that it becomes very unclear about what is actually going on, what she is remembering, and what she is imagining.  Is she pregnant?  Is Richard her half brother?  I believe the answer to these two are yes, but they are never really answered.  Is he on the ship with her?  Is he still alive?  Is he?  Those answers are much more ambiguous.  And the most vague of all - what is the meaning and importance of all the water metaphors?  The ending left me very confused with a distinct feeling of dissatisfaction to all of the questions I still had left.

Overall

I loved the prose, but I feel like the rest of the story was sacrificed to the superiority of the prose.  I like fluidity in my prose, but not in differentiating between memory and present, reality and imagination.  I feel like the author got lost in her writing - in such a way that it was to her own detriment.  I would not feel inclined to recommend this novel, but I do not regret reading it.  Despite my confusion towards the plot, the writing was exquisite.  And I know this makes me a hypocrite for not rating it even lower (I've even revised it so it's not as high as I originally rated it - a 6) since I always say plot above all things...but I am such a sucker for beautiful prose.

Recommended

Historical fiction and poetry lovers

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