After the final vote of all the Communist Party members, five new members, including me, found ourselves standing under the flag of China with Mao's Red Book raised by our faces, pledging our allegiance to the Communist Youth Party: "I willingly and proudly join the Communist Youth Party. I swear to love Chairman Mao, love the Communist Party, love my country, love my people and love my fellow colleagues. I will respond to the party's calling and strictly observe all party rules. The party's interests come before mine. I'm ready to give my all, including my life, to its glorious cause. We are dedicated to the principle of bearing hardship and letting others enjoy the fruit of our work…"
From that moment on I officially became a Communist Youth Party member. My life now had true purpose-to serve glorious communism. Once again I felt a powerful sense of belonging, of being closer to our beloved Chairman and Madame Mao, of being wholeheartedly embraced by the Communist Youth Party and of feeling a new beginning from that day forward.
I took my role as a Communist Youth Party member very seriously. This had been my political destiny from birth. I was one step closer to becoming a full Communist Party member, my ultimate political dream. Now I could contribute to Mao's political cause more effectively, enthusiastically participate in all of the party's agendas and try my hardest to make a difference whenever I could.
But politics was constantly changing around us-Mao knew the Gang of Four was incapable of managing China 's economic affairs and by 1974 Mao felt increasingly threatened by Deng Xiaoping's popularity. Deng Xiaoping's reputation was spreading fast. Within the walls of our academy, however, the influence of Madame Mao was still paramount and she alone controlled our political education.
Madame Mao might have been pleased with our political development but she still wasn't happy, apparently, with the standard of our dancing. The Vice-Minister of Culture, an ex-principal dancer with the Central Ballet of China and famous for dancing the leading role in Madame Mao's model ballet The Red Detachment of Women, was asked to do something about it. So he sent another retired principal dancer from the Central Ballet, Zhang Ce, to be the new vice-director of our academy in charge of technical standards. Zhang Ce brought back one of his former teachers, Zhang Shu, to be head of the ballet department.
Zhang Shu was one of the founders of Chinese ballet, along with Chiu Ho and Chen Lueng, and was widely considered one of the most knowledgeable ballet experts in China. He was a small man with an even temperament and he often watched our classes and occasionally taught us. From the very beginning he seemed to notice me and I found out that he'd even told Teacher Xiao that I was one to watch.
One day, soon after Zhang Shu's arrival, I lay on my bed reading the Monkey King story, a Chinese classic and one of only a few stories we were still allowed to read. As I lay down I felt something hard under my thin cotton mat. When I put my hand under it I found a thin book. It looked very old and when I flicked through it I saw that it was all in a foreign language. I couldn't understand any of the words of course, but there were quite a few pictures in it too-all of different ballet poses. It seemed to be a schoolbook of some kind. The young teenagers' ballet positions were beautiful and their figures were exceptional. I was especially impressed by a boy posing in arabesques. He was wearing a light cotton vest which looked like ours, with black tights, white socks and shoes. His lines were clean and extended. His placement was perfect. He seemed no older than me. I wished that one day I would be good enough to demonstrate in a book just like this, for the next generation of dancers.
I didn't know for certain who had put that book under my mat, but I had a rough idea and I knew it would be far too dangerous to show the book around. Whoever put it there would have wanted me to keep it to myself.
Zhang Ce's and Zhang Shu's arrival at the academy marked the beginning of our new focus on technique. Extra time was devoted to dancing and some of our academic classes were dropped. Like Zhang Shu, other experienced teachers who had previously been accused of being rightists were now rehabilitated and allowed to return. One was a Russian ballet expert who spoke very good English and who had also translated several Russian ballet books into Chinese before he was labelled a rightist. He'd had to do the lowest and filthiest jobs while he was in the countryside, but his only crime had been his knowledge of Western arts.
Around the same time another "anti-revolutionary" also came back to our academy from the brain-cleansing camps. He was a piano tuner, about fifty years old, with large ears that curved forwards. He'd been recalled because all the pianists had complained so profusely about the out-of-tune pianos and because there simply wasn't anyone else the academy officials could hire who wasn't classified either as a rightist or an anti- revolutionary. That piano tuner tuned and banged on the piano keyboards all day long. He took his time and always walked with his head lowered, constantly afraid that if he ran out of pianos to tune, he would be assigned cleaning, washing or any number of other lowly jobs.
The Russian ballet expert was not as lucky. He had to sweep, clean and scrub floors, walls and toilets. One day he was assigned to push a heavy two-wheeled cart while some of us loaded it with soil mixed with horse manure. Some of my classmates began calling him "the filthy rightist" and accused him of being too slow and lazy. I couldn't stand it-I didn't know what crime he had really committed, but after a few trips of pushing the heavy cart I could tell he was exhausted and I volunteered to help.
"Thank you, young man," he said quietly.
"You're welcome," I replied.
"What is your name?"
"Li Cunxin."
"I will always remember it!" he said, profoundly grateful.
The next day, during one of our political meetings, I was accused of being weak because I'd felt sorry for the rightist.
"I wasn't feeling sorry for him," I lied. "I wanted to make the process faster so we could contribute more to the peasants."
In the second half of that same year, our academy auditioned some music students. They'd already had some music training and had come from all over China. I never understood why they didn't go to the music academy instead, but they didn't and they lived in a couple of small crowded rooms in our own studio building. One of the violinists in that group, Liu Fengtian, was also a good hairdresser. I often asked him to cut my hair because I couldn't afford to go to a professional hairdresser. He was the first person ever to use a pair of scissors on me. Before that we roommates cut each other's hair with a pair of blunt hair clippers, and our hair often got caught in the middle of the clippers. The only way to get it loose was to pull the hair out.
Needless to say it wasn't a very good look but we were thankful all the same. A haircut was always a painful experience before Liu Fengtian's arrival. He was a good violinist who played with real passion. I loved watching him practise on the sportsground. He became one of my closest friends.
It was in this third year that my attitude towards dancing finally changed. For the first time since I had come to the academy I felt confident in my ballet class. I began to do well with our two new, technically difficult steps for the year: the single tour en l'air and the triple pirouette. With Teacher Xiao's gentle nurturing I made noticeable progress. I worked hard and listened to every word he said. I tried to understand the essence of his corrections and wrote down my new discoveries in my diary every day. I practised on the side or behind the first group, even if it was not my turn, and my rapid improvement surprised many of my teachers and classmates.
My progress in ballet also helped me in other classes, especially in acrobatics. Now I was making good progress with backward somersaults, which I had been terrified of the year before. But one day, as I was doing one, I thought the teachers were waiting and ready to support me. I was wrong. They had turned their attention to another student. I took off, then suddenly panicked because I couldn't feel their hands supporting me. I crashed down from shoulder height, my back and head landing on the hard wooden floor, which was covered only by a thin threadbare carpet. I was knocked unconscious.