Right Book, Right Time by Right Book Right Time- 500 Great Reads for Teenagers (epub)

Author:Right Book, Right Time- 500 Great Reads for Teenagers (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781741148831
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

Mao’s Last Dancer LI CUNXIN

A/YA/Y AUSTRALIA 2004

I was nearly eleven years old when . . . the headmaster came in with four dignified-looking people . . . They were here to select talented students to study ballet and to serve in Chairman Mao’s revolution . . . just as they were walking out of our classroom, teacher Song . . . pointed at me.

‘What about that one?’ she said.

The gentleman from Beijing glanced in my direction. ‘Okay, he can come too . . .’

A runaway bestseller, Mao’s Last Dancer is an exhilarating, heart-wrenching evocation of the way a young person can create a new life against all odds. Living in a poverty-stricken Chinese village during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the small boy Li (actually his family name), is chosen at random by his teacher to train in faraway Beijing as a ballet dancer in Madam Mao’s ballet school. He has no training or apparent aptitude and is frightened and homesick. But he has extraordinary stamina and determination and gains a couple of mentors. After years of gruelling training and intensely hard work, Li wins a scholarship to the Houston Ballet in the USA, where he defects. (The details of this defection make another dramatic story.) Li needs to learn English and to function in a very different society. He marries, his fame grows and he meets the Australian dancer who becomes his second wife. Li becomes a star in the Australian Ballet, but as he gets older and considers the needs of his growing family, he starts a new life as a stockbroker – and a writer.

Mao’s Last Dancer is fascinating on several levels: for its depiction of life in China during a period of intense turmoil and hardship, for its insight into what it takes to become an internationally renowned dancer, but above all for its portrait of a uniquely talented, steely – yet modest and approachable – dancer, husband, father, devoted son, and communicator. This book, and a version for younger readers, has also made Li a sought-after inspirational speaker.

more about the cultural revolution

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