Li Cunxin - Mao's Last Dancer

The final rehearsals for Nutcracker would usually have taken an enormous physical toll, but not this time. I had so much energy.

My feet were light. I was filled with music and colour, and my heart blossomed like a lotus flower. Just thinking about my parents would bring tears to my eyes, but now they were tears of happiness and joy.

I wanted this opening night performance to be magic, not only for the general public, but also for my parents. This would be the first time they would see me dance, the first time they would see a live performance, and I would be dancing the prince. The anticipation was agonising. And, at the back of my mind, I was still afraid that the Chinese government might change its mind at the last minute and prevent my parents' coming.

For several nights I lay in bed, eyes wide open, thinking about my dia and my niang. I wasn't sure what they would think. Would they like America? Would they handle the culture shock and be able to enjoy their time here? And how would they cope while I was working?

18 December, 1984. The day my parents were due to arrive. I spent the entire day in the studio and theatre. I had to concentrate on the performance. It was the only thing that helped my anxiety. Eventually I ran out of things to practise, so I started my makeup early that afternoon. My makeup brush was very unsteady, my hands trembled and I could hear my heart thumping loudly. Everything felt strange and new. I tried to concentrate but it was impossible to chase away the images of my parents, brothers and all the people I loved back home.

The last thing I had to do to finish my makeup was to spray some silver glitter into my hair, to suggest snowflakes. As my dresser helped me put my jacket on, I glanced at myself in the mirror and wondered what my parents would think of all of this. They were coming from another world.

I went on stage and felt the intense heat of the spotlights. How would my parents react to these bright lights, to the thousands of people clapping in the audience? I wondered, would they be proud of me?

It was time for the performance to begin. My lips felt dry and I was breathing fast. As the time ticked away, my anxiety and nervousness rose. "Why aren't we starting? What's wrong?" I asked the stage manager.

"Nothing. We're just delaying the performance by a few minutes- people are stuck in traffic," the stage manager replied.

The truth was, however, that my parents' plane was an hour late. By the time they arrived it was about twenty minutes past curtain-up and I was a nervous wreck. They'd been met at the airport by my friend Betty Lou and escorted by police car through the rush-hour traffic.

Word spread quickly through the audience about my parents' arrival. Houstonians were well aware of my story, so when my parents were finally ushered into the theatre the whole audience burst into applause.

My poor niang! My poor dia! They had never been away from Qingdao before. They had just had their first car ride, train ride and airplane experience all in one day, and now here they were, suddenly faced with the blinding lights of a grand theatre and a sea of people applauding them.

"Six years! Six long years!" my niang kept saying. "Finally I'm going to see my son. My heart is so hot, it burns with joy and pride!"

I was told of my parents' arrival only moments before the applause erupted from the audience. My whole being burst with happiness. I wanted to soar into the air. I wanted to cry. I wanted to see them then, at that very moment, but the performance was about to start and I knew I would have to wait.

The audience was ecstatic. People applauded even when I just came on stage. They too wanted me to dance well, to dance for my parents.

My partners were Janie Parker and Suzanne Longley that night and they shared my excitement. Ben's pas de deux were challenging, some of the lifts were difficult and often created problems for us in rehearsals. But not that night. Everything was seamless. The lifts felt light, the partnering effortless: I felt my partners' every subtle movement and they felt mine. My nerves were there, yet under control, and they became my endless source of energy. My leaps were high: I was flying like a bird, gliding through the open sky. If the music had allowed it, I would have leapt into the air all night. There was no hard work, only sheer joy.

The audience seemed totally captivated. I could taste the excitement. All the hopping up and down stairs, the pirouetting in the candlelight, the torn hamstrings and the painful injuries of the past twelve years-it all felt worthwhile that night. When the curtain came down at the end of Act One, I knew I had completed one of my best performances-and I had done it in front of my parents. The dream I had once been too afraid to dream had come true.

During intermission, Ben brought my niang and my dia backstage.

It was six years since I had set eyes on them. They wore Mao's suits buttoned all the way up to their necks, my niang in grey and my dia in dark blue. They looked so proper, so stiff. My memories of them didn't match. They looked older too, especially my niang. Her black hair had turned to grey and the many years of harsh living had obviously taken their toll. Her face was more wrinkled and now she wore a pair of black-rimmed oversized glasses.

The three of us, in tears, simply hugged each other tight. Nobody spoke for a long time. My niang took her handkerchief out and it was already soaked with tears. "Don't cry! Don't cry! It's all right now!" she kept saying.

I wanted that moment to linger on and on and on. I had longed for her comfort for so many years.

By the time I went back to my dressing-room to change for the second act, nearly all my makeup had been wiped off by my niang's handkerchief. I didn't care. I had felt my niang's adoring love and tender touch once more.

After the performance, my niang and my dia came backstage again. They watched people congratulate me and I could see the pride in my parents' eyes.

Finally, my dia, the man of few words, could contain himself no longer. "Why didn't you wear any pants?" he said. He had never seen anyone wearing tights before.

Ben and some of my other friends had wanted to arrange a big party in honour of my parents that night but I wanted to spend that first night alone with them, in my own house.

My parents felt on top of the world as we drove back to my own place, in my own car. They couldn't believe their eyes when they saw where I lived.

"Is this your house?" my niang asked in utter disbelief.

I nodded.

"This is a palace!" my dia gasped.

I cooked a couple of my niang's favourite recipes for dinner that night, and afterwards we sat around the dining table with a pot of their favourite jasmine tea. We talked and talked. Sadly, I discovered that my niang had developed diabetes and a weak heart condition. Her incredible eyesight had also deserted her. My dia, however, was still as strong as an ox, despite being hard of hearing.

So many years of missed events to catch up on, so many beloved memories. I wanted to know it all, everything about each one of my brothers, their families, their lives. All my brothers except Jing Tring were married by now. I was an uncle: I had nieces and a nephew. My parents told me Deng Xiaoping had done wonders for the Chinese economy. "If it weren't for Deng

Xiaoping's open-door policy, our lives would still be in ruins," my niang said. She told me how their living standards had improved, how my brothers were each allowed to buy a small piece of land, cheaply, from the commune, to build their own houses on.

My parents told me how scared they had been when someone in the commune had heard about my defection. They'd heard it on the Voice of America on a short-wave radio. China has really changed, I thought. No one had a radio, let alone a short-wave one, in the village when I grew up, not even while I was in Beijing.