I took a deep breath. My spirit felt free.
I was to stay for twelve months but even then I knew that America the second time around would be a totally different experience. My beliefs were now completely altered after my experience with the Ministry of Culture and after having the time to think about what I'd seen in the West. Now I knew, with absolute certainty, that I had been manipulated by Chairman Mao's communist propaganda for many years. My personal contribution to communism had never been important. I was just one of over one billion other Chinese people used as a political puppet and I felt deeply betrayed.
My first month back at the Houston Ballet Academy was a trial- and-error time-I kept discovering and experimenting with new things. Ben continued to let me stay with him and I continued my relentless pursuit of both English and dancing. I carried my list of new English words with me everywhere. But there were also the classes and rehearsals during the day and keeping up with Ben's busy social schedule in the evenings too. So soaking in the bath or sitting on the toilet remained the best times for me to memorise new English words. I tried to record something in my diary at least every other day, first in Chinese, but then as I increased my English vocabulary, my diary became fifty per cent Chinese, thirty per cent English and the rest was French ballet terminology.
Ben started rehearsals for Nutcracker soon after I arrived back in Houston. Ben's Nutcracker was completely different from the Baryshnikov version I'd seen on the video back in China but I immediately fell in love with it. It had the freedom of expression I'd been longing for. I did two solo roles, both requiring only straightforward dancing and no acting but I was so thankful to be in it: it was my first ballet with the company dancers.
It was through Nutcracker that I first noticed Lori Langlinais. She was in her early twenties, a talented dancer and a beautiful girl, full of life. Her contagious laugh reminded me of my niang's. We quickly became good friends, she treating me like a little brother and I regarding her as a big sister even though we had huge difficulties communicating with each other in those early weeks. We used to call each other "Big Ballerina" and "Big Ballerino".
Within those first few weeks I made many new friends, including Keith Lelliott, another dancer who was staying at Ben's place, and principal dancer Suzanne Longley. With Christmas now approaching, one of Ben's friends who had become my friend too, Preston Frazier, bought me a children's book about Christmas. With the help of my dictionary and some of the pictures I worked out that on Christmas Eve this long silverbearded man called Santa Claus would ride on a sled pulled by nine reindeer, all with very strange names. I remembered the one called Rudolph, because of Rudolf Nureyev, but what was even stranger was that Santa Claus went down people's chimneys and put presents in children's stockings! Sounds like a capitalist version of Lei Feng, I thought, the humble soldier Mao had promoted in China as one of his model communists. This must surely be Western propaganda. And what was even more amusing was that Jesus was born to a virgin. How bizarre!
Most of what I learnt about Christmas, however, was to do with shopping. With my limited scholarship money I bought a few presents for my American friends when Ben took me to the famous Galleria shopping mall just three days before Christmas. There was a mass of people there, all gone mad over shopping. Everyone carried enormous numbers of bags and pushed their way around the crowded mall. Christmas trees were everywhere-bells, ribbons, wreaths and all. It was incredible! But most incredible of all was the money. Ben spent nearly five thousand dollars on presents in only a couple of hours. My father's salary for sixty- five years! My father's entire lifetime of back-breaking work. My family could live on this amount for over half a century. Ben had spent it on presents in one day alone. It was incomprehensible. It was shocking. I thought of my family and felt sick. How could there be such disparity in the world?
The Christmas Day party at Ben's house was a mega-event as well, with over forty friends, dancers and students. Ben had at least one present for every person there. I even received presents from Santa Claus, left in my very own Christmas stocking hanging by the mirror in Ben's living room. Ben didn't have a fireplace though, so I wondered how on earth Santa had got in. But secretly, deep in my heart, I wished I could exchange even just a few of those presents for cash and give the money to my family instead. So many years of my father's earnings seemed tied up in those presents.
Ben's Christmas food was a feast too. A huge sizzling turkey, a big shining ham, trays and trays of roasted potatoes, cakes and puddings. I refused to guess how much he would have spent-it was simply too agonising. I kept telling myself to enjoy it but all I could think of was dried yams and my family's survival.
So many things like this in America shocked me. One day as I was being driven home by Ben's friend Richard I noticed that he was wearing a sports jacket which looked very smart. But it had patched elbows-and yet he drove a Mercedes. Only the poor wear patched clothes, I said to him. He thought this was very funny. Then he asked me what I would like to do most in America. I told him I would like to be able to drive a car, so he pulled over.
"Come on, you drive," he said.
"I don't know how!"
"Just push on the pedal and watch the road. Easy," he said. I got into the driver's seat, nervously pushed on the pedal and the car immediately accelerated. The speed took me by complete surprise, so I pushed my foot down harder. I froze. Richard made a desperate grab for the steering wheel and slid one of his legs over to the brake. We were inches away from what appeared to be a very large ditch. "Oh, dear me, my heart is hot!" was all I could say.
My second driving experience was at Disneyland, this time in a golf cart. Dorio, another principal dancer, asked me to give it a try. Easier than driving a Mercedes, I thought. But I was wrong. I pressed the accelerator and the cart started to move very slowly because we were going uphill. Dorio kept telling me to push my foot all the way down, so I did, but once we got over the top of the hill we quickly gathered speed and before I knew it, this time we really were stuck in a ditch, right between two huge trees. Perhaps, said Dorio politely, he would teach me how to drive properly another time.
After Christmas, when we'd finished the Nutcracker performances, Ben took me and some other dancers to a beach house in LaPorte, about an hour and a half from Houston, to celebrate the new year of 1980. It was a wonderful party. Ben made a delicious roast beef. Champagne flowed all night and we wished each other xin nian kuai le, Happy New Year. People made New Year resolutions, such as losing weight and so on.
But after much celebration, much food, champagne and wonderful company, I just wanted to escape for a little while. So with champagne glass in hand I quietly left my American friends, slipped out of the house unnoticed and strode along the beach, thinking only of my niang, my dia, my brothers and my friends back home. I wondered what they were doing just then. I wondered if they were thinking of me. I wondered what their next year would bring. I hoped, for all of them, that it would at least bring more food to eat.
The summer school that year attracted even more students than the one I'd attended the previous year. My friend Zhang Weiqiang received permission from the Ministry of Culture to come back for that summer school too, plus three more students from the Beijing Dance Academy. I was so happy to see some of my friends again and thrilled that they'd also had the opportunity to come to the West.