Some people live such extraordinary lives that a single autobiography simply won’t suffice. Li Cunxin has now written two. The renowned ballet dancer and former artistic director of Queensland Ballet had hoped he was finished writing his story after the phenomenal international success of his 2003 memoir, Mao’s Last Dancer.
But life had other plans. But then I was offered the job at Queensland Ballet and I had to dedicate all my time to that. I don’t think they were expecting [the sequel] to take 14 years!” His second memoir, The Lucky Son, takes up precisely where Mao’s Last Dancer left off: as Cunxin and his ballet dancer wife Mary fly to their new lives at Houston Ballet under the directorship of Ben Stevenson.
That outline of the proposed book on China can be glimpsed under the surface of this one, like a palimpsest; Cunxin’s six brothers’ lives are sketched, and a fascinating portrait of a country lifting itself from abject poverty to world superpower emerges. Determination runs in the family. Mary was a deeply respected dancer herself, a career she sacrificed when she and Cunxin discovered their daughter Sophie was born profoundly deaf.
Sophie was fitted with a bionic ear (then known as a cochlear implant) and thrived; she embraced dance, had a successful education and excelled in the workplace. Cunxin and Mary assumed they’d done all that was needed. But then in 2015, Sophie sent an email to her parents that shocked and devastated them.
Sophie expressed frustration at her parents for wanting their daughter to hear; she felt she’d come halfway to meet their world, but they had not met hers. They had not even bothered to learn sign language. Her “deafness was her birthright”, Cunxin writes in the book.
Now, he says, Sophie “is a kind of ambassador between the hearing and deaf communities”. And he and Mary have begun learning Auslan. Cunxin’s dance career was so exemplary – moving from the Beijing Dance Academy to Houston Ballet, and then to principal artist at Australian Ballet – he could have been forgiven for hanging up his pointe shoes and walking into a lucrative position in a stockbroking firm.
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