Li Cunxin & his father’s stool
For Mao’s last dancer, this humble object is a treasure.
Li Tingfang was a born storyteller, like the sixth of his seven sons, Li Cunxin. Li Tingfang told his boys the frog story as a metaphor for their lives and his sons were free to read into the frog story what they wanted. Like all good storytellers, Li Tingfang let his audience decide what meaning he was attempting to convey. The boys could choose to see hopelessness in the frog story; the bitter truth of existence and the soul-suffocating fact that some are born with less than others. The boys could choose to see hope in the story; that the very point of existence is, more or less, to strive for more than less. But Li Cunxin saw neither of those things in the frog story. All Li Cunxin saw was the future.
“My father was a man of not many words,” Li says. “But when my father opened his mouth, particularly to share stories, everybody was all ears.”
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The 56-year-old stands in a boardroom in the bowels of the Museum of Brisbane on the third floor of Brisbane City Hall. It’s quiet here. He’s thinking about his late father, who made the small bamboo and wood Chinese stool he holds in his hands.
The stool is part of an exhibition the museum is hosting called Mao’s Last Dancer: A Portrait of Li Cunxin. The exhibition is using a collection of Li’s personal artefacts – the meaningful objects of his life – to tell that remarkable true story about the boy raised in extreme poverty in Chairman Mao’s Communist China. The story of the skinny and starved kid selected to attend Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy; who leaves his family at age 11 to submit himself to the academy’s brutal 16-hour daily ballet training programs and turn himself into one of China’s most revered dancers. In 1981, the kid defects to the US, dances for the Houston Ballet Company. His Chinese citizenship is revoked and he’s unable to return home to his family. Eventually he marries an Aussie girl, a brilliant dancer named Mary McKendry. They have three children, Sophie, Thomas and Bridie. He writes an extraordinary memoir of his life. The memoir is turned into a hit film. And that story, Mao’s Last Dancer, becomes mythic, like one of the fables Li Tingfang told his sons long ago from the low-to-the-ground, knees-bent comfort of one of his hand-made stools.
The wooden stool prompts the memories of his boyhood commune in the city of Qingdao, east China, and the memories prompt the story about the frog in the well.
Like any good storyteller, Li sets the scene of where his father first told the story. Seven sons gathered around a low table. A village hut with dirt floors. Walls of mud and straw decorated with black and white government newspapers and the rare splash of colour – and colour means so much to the boys – from gifted pictures found in cigarette packets. Their father, a labourer who hauls goods between trucks on his shoulders, perched on a bamboo stool in darkness – there’s no electricity in the commune. Freezing outside and inside. The boys huddled together to keep the heat in, their eyes fixed on the soft-spoken storyteller.
“Outside, looking into the courtyard [you see] every inch of the dirt is growing something,” Li says. “Beans along the rock walls; corn in the yard. You only have a tiny little pathway to walk through because every bit of food is so precious, it could save a life in the family or a life in the village because everybody’s helping each other. Each room has a little window but there is no glass, because there is no glass in my childhood, so we would use a little bamboo frame and then they plaster a thin piece of rice paper, so thin, so the sunlight can shine through but then if the wind’s too strong it will break holes in it so the wind pours in.
“No games to play. Complete darkness. No street lights. After certain hours you’re not allowed to go out, so you make conversation.” He smiles. “You tell stories,” he says.
‘Li Tingfang’s sons came to realise the young frog’s dilemma was a metaphor for life.’
There’s a family of frogs living a blissful existence at the bottom of a well. Father frog, mother frog, daughter frog, son frog. Father frog spends his days telling his family what glorious lives they lead at the bottom of the well. Father frog extols the wonders of their world, a miraculous universe only as wide and as deep as the dimensions of their stone well. Father frog raves day and night about the bounty of riches they were born into: a permanent water supply and a daily buffet of bugs that fly down into the well to provide the blessed frog family with food.
The son frog spends his days gazing up to the circle of sky above him, giddily waiting for the sun to pass through that circle of light, or the clouds that pass in different shapes and slowly make way for shimmering stars. Some nights, those stars twinkle so bright for the son frog that he has to pinch himself, so lucky he feels to be part of such a beautiful world.
Then one afternoon the son frog is gazing up to the sky when he sees a frog just like him perched at the top of the well. This frog leans its head down into the well. The excited son frog invites this strange new frog to share in the riches waiting for him down in the bottom of the well. The frog up top howls with laughter. “Why would I want to join you down there in that cramped, wet, dark, sad, deep well?” he bellows.
“Because it is paradise down here and there is no other world but this one,” the son frog says.
And the top frog laughs. “Of course there is another world, the world up here. Up here there are vast lakes with bugs so fat it takes a day to swallow them down. There are hills and mountains and streams with water so pure you can see your froggy reflection in them.”
And, with that, the top frog hops away, never to return. The son frog rushes to his father, asks him to explain the strange words of that mysterious frog. Father frog says nothing and son frog spends his days uselessly hopping as high as he can in an attempt to see for himself this supposed world of mountains and streams and fat, delicious bugs.
“The poor little frog kept hopping as high as he could but he couldn’t escape,” says Li Cunxin, his eyes resting on his father’s handmade stool. “So the frog went back to his father. ‘Please tell me there is not another world, a bigger world, a better world up there.’ The father finally confesses: ‘I’ve also heard there’s a bigger and better world up there but there’s no hope. I’ve tried. My parents have tried. My great-grandparents tried. We are born into this sad fate with no way out. So stop trying because it will only give you misery.’”
And Li Tingfang’s seven sons waited with bated breath to hear where the frog story was going next. They waited to hear the happy ending. The same question rested on their lips: “Then what happened?”
But that was the end of the story.
Li Tingfang’s sons came to realise the young frog’s dilemma was a metaphor for life: should it keep trying to escape its situation and risk the pain of failure, or should it be content with its wondrous circle of sky? “Ever since my father taught us that story,” says Li, “I kept wondering if indeed we were born into a sad, deep well.”
In the museum boardroom there is another object beside Li Tingfang’s stool. It’s a Chinese paper kite that Li has made in honour of his father. The paper kite and the stool are connected, very different objects wedded by the ending that Li Cunxin added to the frog story all by himself as a boy.
“My father was such a busy man,” Li says. “He had to work hard to provide for the family, to ensure our survival. So he very rarely had any idle moments, really. But when the fields outside were frozen, when the snow was too thick for him to work and all work ceased, that’s when he made kites with us and it’s one of my favourite times to spend with my father, next to the storytelling.”
He closes his eyes for a moment and he’s back in Qingdao. Back in the driving sleet of winter. “The wind’s so strong,” he says. “Whistling outside, as though there are millions of little sharp knives cutting into your skin, it was that cold, but yet we would be flying the kite and these kites are so strong; they’re made of bamboo.”
His favourite part was the teamwork. It would require father and son to work together to set the kite into the sky. “I would hold one end of the string and my father would be on the other end holding the kite,” Li says. “He was making sure the kite rises up properly into the air until there’s such wind current that the kite is stable in the air and then he would come to me, make sure I was OK to handle that kite.”
When the kite was in the sky, Li Tingfang would sit down on his stool outside and tell his son another story. And Li Cunxin’s ballet dancer feet would leap with excitement with every narrative turn in his father’s glorious fables. “And often I begged my father to stay a little longer, to tell me another story,” he says. “And sometimes he would oblige, he would tell me a story before he goes back to the house to start working on other things.” And that, of course, is the only thing anyone wants from their old man. Just one more story.
Li Tingfang died six years ago after a long and full life in which he got to know Li Cunxin’s children well into his old age, just as his son had wished. “When I see the kite, my time with my father, the stories, it just comes flooding back,” he says.
When Li Cunxin was alone some days as a boy, he’d scribble wishes on strips of paper that he would tie to his paper kites and send soaring into the vast east China sky. He would wish for happy and full lives for his mum and dad. He would wish for a new pair of shoes on Chinese New Year. He would wish his family could earn enough money that they could take a trip to see the wonders of Beijing, or maybe just enjoy a decent meal in winter.
“And I would tie this strip,” he says. “I would wet it on both sides with my mouth and I would loop it around the string and the wind would carry my secret wishes up, high up, to the sky and I was hoping it would get so high it would reach the god up there. The god would read it and grant my wishes.”
One day Li scribbled a wish for the son frog, but the wish was a metaphor for his own life. He tied the paper wish to the strongest kite he’d ever flown and his father, Li Tingfang, helped him launch the kite into flight, helped him catch a wind current that sent the wish so high into the sky that god had no trouble reading the boy’s rough and giddy hand: “I wish I could hop out of the well.”