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Mao's Last Dancer Essay examples

Decent Essays

“Despite our hardships, there were also joys in our childhood”. Explore the ways in which Li’s childhood was both one of great deprivations and one of great riches.

The novel, “Mao’s Last Dancer”, was written by Li Cunxin. It tells his riveting tale of growing up in a poor family of six boys, living in a village in China under Mao’s reign. It goes on to share his eventual defection to the United States as an artistic dancer. His childhood was filled with both hardships and joys. But both helped him to grow as a resilient person to achieve once-thought impossible goals.

In Li’s commune, the housing was not up to today’s standard. They lived in abject poverty. There was barely any available space in the house to accommodate everyone. …show more content…

They wouldn’t get to eat as much food. They wouldn’t be enjoying their precious time with their family. Instead they would be working hard in the fields to earn a sufficient living wage. But Chinese New Year was a time when they felt they were on top. They thought that they were living the high life. They “all looked forward to, the one time when we would be guaranteed wonderful food, was the Chinese New Year.” It was one joyous occasion that helped them to endure their destitute lives.

Every year, Li’s family struggled to survive with the limited amount of food that was accessible. Poverty surrounded them. They couldn’t get away from it. Li remarked, “There was never enough food to feed the people, let alone the pigs.” They may have owned pigs and chickens but they could never provide them with enough food to fatten them up to eat or for them to produce eggs. Eggs were a rarity. Meats in their diets were uncommon. They mainly “ate a lot of dried yams. They were the easiest things to grow.” They lived off yams. They relied on yams as their food source. Everything they could “grow and earn from the land depended on the weather and luck.” Every family received basic foods that the government controlled. They were “allocated a very small quantity of meat, seafood and eggs, along with oil, soy sauce, sugar, salt, wheat, and cornflour, rice and also coal each month.” The Li family tried their best to preserve as

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