That year, I heard China was sending its first-ever delegation to compete in the International Ballet Competition in Japan. I asked Ben if I could go to the competition and represent China. Ben refused. Our performance schedule was too busy.
Later I asked Ben if I could enter the American International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi, the equivalent of the Olympics for ballet dancers. I wanted to get a sense of how my dancing stood up to international standards. And I told Ben I wanted to represent China. I owed China my loyalty as a Chinese dancer, or at least I owed my ballet teachers in China that loyalty.
Ben felt it would be good exposure for the Houston Ballet, so he entered four of his dancers, including me, into the competition. I proudly registered as a Chinese citizen: it would be my way of returning something to all my teachers, especially Teacher Xiao and Zhang Shu for all they had given me in dance. This time, I wanted to make both Ben and China proud.
Over seventy competitors from all over the world would compete. As a soloist I would have to perform six solos, and we only had three weeks to prepare. I was inspired. To work with Ben so closely was a pleasure, and I didn’t really care whether I won anything or not.
But at the registration desk on the first day of the competition, the Chinese delegation rejected me. I was a Chinese defector. They no longer recognized me as a Chinese citizen, whether I held a Chinese passport or not. Even worse, my former teachers and classmates from China were told by the Chinese government not to communicate with me. I had been so excited to see them, but now I was considered their enemy.
I was devastated. I wanted to go back to Houston at once, but the president of the organizing committee told Ben that he would be happy for me to represent America even though I wasn’t an American citizen. I gratefully accepted, but I had to hold back my tears as my former teachers, classmates and friends, including Zhang Weiqiang, all avoided me during the course of the competition. I knew that they would have no choice but to follow orders from their government. Still, it didn’t help my agony of sadness. Sometimes I would hear people call me “that bastard defector” or “that heartless turtle.” I pretended not to hear, but privately I sobbed. I wished I hadn’t come to the competition. How naïve had I been, wanting to represent China? I would wake up at night with tears in my eyes.
During the first round of the competition I simply couldn’t concentrate. I fell on my hands in my final solo, the Bluebird from Sleeping Beauty, and I only barely qualified through to the second round. I knew I had danced terribly. “Did you see him fall on his ass?” I heard some of the Chinese teachers say, and they laughed.
The second round of the competition required two contemporary solos. But by now I had a swollen right knee, a cricked neck, an injured left hamstring and the derision of my Chinese colleagues to cope with. I only had two days to recoup my mental and physical strength. I shrank into sorrow and suffered the pain alone. The rehearsals didn’t go well at all, and Ben and my Houston Ballet colleagues noticed. I desperately searched for some strength from within. I kept asking myself, Do you want to swap places with your classmates from China? I thought of the fable of the frog, deep in the well, longing to get out. I began to realize that only one person could determine the result of the competition, and that was me.
The second round went much better, and I started to get my confidence back. But then, just before the third and final round, one of the Chinese competitors, Lin Jianwei from Shanghai, suddenly disappeared from the competition. Nobody could find him. Rumors began—perhaps I had helped him defect. My situation with the Chinese turned from bad to worse. Then some FBI agents approached me. They said the situation had become extremely serious. Five Chinese officials from the embassy in Washington were on their way to the competition. They recommended I leave as soon as possible.
“No, I won’t leave,” I said to Ben. “If I leave they will have more reason to think that I have helped in the defection.”
“Li, this is serious!” Ben said.
“No, I will not leave. I will finish the competition!”
So, for the rest of the competition, either Ben or one of my Houston Ballet colleagues stayed with me the whole time. We moved out of the university complex and into a hotel. We used secret codes when opening our hotel room doors, and it was very intense.
In the middle of the third round of the competition one of the five officials from the Chinese embassy in Washington requested a meeting with me. It was Wang Zicheng, the former head of the Educational Bureau from the Ministry of Culture in China. He asked me if I’d helped Lin to defect. I said I had nothing to do with Lin’s defection, and I felt he believed me.
To my great surprise, and despite the defection drama, I finished the competition with a silver medal. No gold was awarded to the male dancers because the judges could not agree on who should receive it. The best prize China received was Zhang Weiqiang’s bronze, Ben received the gold for best choreography and Janie also received a gold medal.
I was happy, not just for myself but for Chinese ballet too, because deep down in my heart, I knew that without people like Teacher Xiao and Zhang Shu I would never have achieved this award. I dedicated my medal to Teacher Xiao. He was the one who had borne the brunt of the blame for my defection, who I learned much later had seen intense political attacks on the Beijing Dance Academy after I’d left. Yet Teacher Xiao had never lost faith in me. He had told me: the strength of your parents’ character is in you. You can help your parents by becoming the best dancer you can.
I knew Teacher Xiao would have been happy and excited about my medal, but he’d also have to hide his pride. I was a defector and an enemy.
A few days after the end of the competition, the suspense surrounding Lin Jianwei’s disappearance ended. Lin had sought political asylum with the help of a ballet teacher in Fort Worth. I was clean. And, secretly, I was pleased that this star from the Shanghai Ballet had followed in my footsteps. Part of me did feel sad for China, losing two of its dancers in just over a year, but the pursuit of our artistic dreams was paramount. When would the time come when we wouldn’t need to defect to be able to work in the West? How long would this political and artistic suppression last? I had no answers. I wouldn’t live long enough to see such freedom for China, I thought.
With the prize money from that ballet competition I put a down payment on my very first house. It was in a cheap and historic Houston suburb called the Heights, five minutes away from the theater district and ten minutes from the Houston Ballet studios.
I didn’t know anything about termites then.
The house hadn’t been renovated since the 1940s, and it still had cheap wood-veneer paneling and old smelly, worn-out lime-green carpeting. There was one small air conditioner in the living room, which had leaked and caused severe water damage to the supporting wooden beams. The roof shingles needed replacing, the foundation blocks were damaged by termites and the house leaned noticeably to one side. The wiring was exposed, the water pipes were rusted, there were leaking sewer pipes, cockroaches, mice . . . it was a disaster.
But I didn’t care. I had purchased my first house. I had realized the capitalist dream. Suddenly a Chinese peasant boy and a former communist Red Guard had become a landowner in the Western world! I was amazed at how easily I had done it.
My fellow dancers at the Houston Ballet helped me with my renovations, and my house soon became a sort of dancers’ meeting place during their free times. The whole house was turned upside down with renovations.
In hindsight it would have been easier and cheaper for me to have torn down the whole building and started all over again. I hadn’t the slightest idea about wooden houses—my parents’ house in China was built of stone and brick. But still I was very proud of my own house, and I loved entertaining my friends in it. Ben jokingly remarked to other people, “Communists make the best capitalists.” I even got my driver’s license and bought my first car that year, a secondhand Toyota. I felt a great sense of achievement abo
ut it all, but still I kept thinking about my family, the commune, the primitive house they were living in. What would my parents think about my own house? My own car? My Western wealth? I felt guilty for having so much.
After one year of being a soloist, Ben promoted me into the principal ranks. Gradually my reputation as a dancer spread both in America and internationally. My dancing career had gone beyond my wildest dreams, but still I was not satisfied. I knew I could improve even more—with the freedom I now had, anything was possible. I was the luckiest person in the world. Except of course for my only sadness, the one dark shadow that remained in my heart: that I could never see my parents again.
But then, in the middle of 1983, I met Mary McKendry.
I was performing with the Houston Ballet on a six-week tour through Europe. In London we performed at the Sadler’s Wells Theater, and this time we were there for nearly two weeks. On one of our few free nights before the performance, Ben urged us all to see this Australian-born ballerina he’d seen perform with the London Festival Ballet. Ben rarely praised dancers from other companies: he always put his own dancers on a higher pedestal, but he had worked with Mary on several of his ballets and knew she was quite extraordinary. Out of curiosity I went to see her dance the lead in Ben’s Four Last Songs. I was so impressed. I went back again the next night to see her in Cinderella. She was different from other dancers. There was a distinctive quality there, rare, lyrical and beautiful, with an intensity and commitment that transfixed me. I fell in love with her artistry immediately.
“Is there any chance of inviting Mary to join the Houston Ballet?” I asked Ben the next day. “She is such a wonderful dancer.”
“I don’t think she would leave London for Houston,” Ben replied.
The following day, when we were rehearsing Etude on stage, I saw Mary rush into the theater, her dark hair flying wildly around her face. She found a seat and sat quietly in the audience to watch our rehearsals.
I sneaked over to her during the first available break. “Hello, I’m Li,” I said. “You must be Mary McKendry.”
She nodded.
“I really enjoyed your performances!” I said enthusiastically.
“Thanks,” she said briefly, then quickly turned her attention to the dancing.
I felt disappointed. I had wanted a longer conversation than that, but she didn’t seem interested in talking to me.
I crept back onto the stage with my pride hurt. I had always been shy with girls and had problems communicating with them. But I didn’t get another opportunity to talk to Mary again before we left to go back to Houston. I often thought of Mary and her dancing after that, but I wouldn’t meet her again for another eighteen months.
After we got back to Houston, we began working on our major ballet for the year, Sleeping Beauty. Through Ben’s Royal Ballet connections he had established a very special friendship with Margot Fonteyn. She had danced in some of Ben’s earlier ballets and had tremendous respect for him, and Ben had periodically invited her to Houston for special coaching sessions or for special opening-night performances. Now she was coming to Houston again. I had loved and respected Margot so much ever since I had seen her in those videos in my Beijing Dance Academy days. I couldn’t believe I would actually meet her.
Margot was an elegant lady. Her every mannerism represented grace. At Ben’s place for dinner one night, she asked me about my family back in China. She was fond of the Chinese people and told me she had lived in Shanghai for quite a few years while she was a young girl.
“Did you like Shanghai?” I asked.
“Very much. I have a lot of fond memories. It was called the Paris of Asia then, and it was a place full of energy. But it’s so different now,” she said sadly.
That night, after my brief conversation with Margot about China, I lay in bed and tossed and turned. What Margot had said about China had stirred huge waves of emotion within me. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about my family and friends back in China. Special memories pushed their way back into my mind, and overwhelmed me once more with an ocean of sadness. I had made my career a success. I should be happy, but I wasn’t. I wanted my niang, I wanted to hear her voice, I wanted to feel her love. This dream had slipped further and further away over the years. Now I felt despair beyond description. The hope of ever seeing my beloved ones again seemed gone. But how could I give up hope! I could never forget my niang’s love, her strength of character. And my dia—the hardworking man with few words. My six brothers, my aunts and uncles. I could never forget my home.
The following year we took Swan Lake to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Two days before our opening-night performance, Barbara Bush invited Ben and me to the White House before our busy schedule began at the theater that morning. We met Barbara in one of the smaller White House reception rooms. Pastries, tea and coffee were already waiting.
“Hello, Ben, so nice to see you! Li, how nice it is to see you again.” She opened her arms and gave us both a hug. She was still the happy, warm person that I remembered from my first meeting with her five years before. Nothing had changed, except that she now treated me like an old friend.
“Li, I keep hearing all about your wonderful achievements with your dancing, and I’m so happy that things have worked out for you,” she said.
“Thank you, thank you and George for all you have done for me,” I said.
“Oh, Li, we did nothing, really.” She turned to Ben. “Tell me, Ben, how are all your China adventures going?”
“It’s great, I love China. The Chinese people are so sincere. They pay me tremendous respect. I always feel reenergized when I go there,” Ben replied. “It has changed a lot. Since Deng Xiaoping came along people seem to be happier. They have more freedom now. He has done an amazing job.”
Then Barbara asked me what I thought of China’s new direction. She caught me by surprise. I hesitated, and looked at Ben.
“Li hasn’t been allowed back,” Ben said, coming to my rescue. “I know he misses his family. I hope that one day he will be allowed to see them.”
Barbara frowned and looked thoughtful. “Which city in China do you come from, Li?”
“Qingdao, where the beer is from.”
“Nice beer and nice city.” She smiled, and then turned the conversation to other things.
Before we left, Barbara showed us around the White House, and I felt honored and privileged to be given such a tour. I was surprised, though, to see how simple the interior decorations were. This was the center of American power, the center of world power. Where was the grandeur? The lavish palace of political might? Compared to Chairman Mao’s monument in Tiananmen Square, the White House seemed very simple indeed.
Forty-five minutes later, Ben and I hugged Barbara good-bye and raced back to the theater for our rehearsals. But I was deeply touched by my visit to the White House and by this elegant, kindhearted, approachable lady. I thought of the minister for Culture in China—the comparison was ridiculous.
Two days later, at our Swan Lake performance, Vice President George Bush and Barbara Bush invited the Chinese ambassador and the cultural attaché, Wang Zicheng, to be their guests. I was performing the prince, the same role that had so eluded me back in China. I felt like a prince and danced like a prince now. I approached the role from within. Gone were my peasant inhibitions and inadequacies. I didn’t need to perm my hair to make me feel more princely, and I felt a wonderful rapport from the audience.
After the performance, the Bushes came on stage to congratulate us. Mr. Bush stopped in front of me. “Ni hao, Li. Congratulations. You were wonderful tonight,” and he introduced the Chinese ambassador and Wang Zicheng, who had briefed Zhang Weiqiang and me at the Ministry of Culture in Beijing before our first trip to the U.S., and again at the Jackson Ballet Competition.
“We’re old friends. Hello, Cunxin!” he shook my hands excitedly. “Congratulations, you have made us proud tonight! Would you have time to come to the embassy tomorrow, for t
ea in the morning?” he asked.
I was so surprised by his praise. I was even more surprised at the invitation. “Yes, I would love to come,” I said.
Ben accompanied me to the Chinese embassy the next morning because I was too scared to go there by myself, given my last experience at the consulate in Houston. We were welcomed and congratulated by Wang Zicheng, and he proudly showed us the reviews of our performance in the Washington Post. He congratulated me for my contribution to the ballet profession and for adding glory to the Chinese people. Then he told me something else. He told me that he had favorably reviewed my situation, and that Vice President Bush had intervened on my behalf with regard to my parents. He said that the possibility of my going back to China was still remote, but that he would instead try to obtain the Chinese government’s approval for my parents to come to America for a brief visit. He made no promises.
I knew Barbara Bush would have been the one who had told her husband of my homesickness and longing to see my family. I was deeply touched. I could never repay her for such generosity and kindness.
Knowing China, though, the process of trying to get my parents here could take many years. I held little hope. Wang Zicheng was simply trying to pay Mr. Bush some lip service and trying to shut me up. I thanked him, but didn’t think he could ever deliver. So as time went on, the hope of seeing my parents after five long years gradually faded from my heart.
But I was wrong. A few months later I received a letter from Wang Zicheng. He had indeed obtained the Chinese government’s permission for my parents to leave China for a visit to the United States.
I held the letter in my hand, and tears streamed down my face. I was shaking with joy.
25
NO MORE NIGHTMARES
I stayed home and cried. I didn’t know how long I cried for, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to be alone to enjoy this overwhelming happiness.