{"id":922490,"date":"2026-10-10T01:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T01:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/922490\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T01:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T01:42:08","slug":"maos-last-dancer-li-cunxin-on-his-long-awaited-follow-up-i-dont-think-my-publisher-expected-it-to-take-14-years-australian-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/922490\/","title":{"rendered":"Mao\u2019s Last Dancer Li Cunxin on his long-awaited follow-up: \u2018I don\u2019t think my publisher expected it to take 14 years!\u2019 | Australian books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some people live such extraordinary lives that a single autobiography simply won\u2019t suffice. Li Cunxin has now written two. The renowned ballet dancer and former artistic director of Queensland<\/a> Ballet had hoped he was finished writing his story after the phenomenal international success of his 2003 memoir, Mao\u2019s Last Dancer. But life had other plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cActually, I had signed a contract with Penguin Random House for a follow-up,\u201d Cunxin says, from his home in Brisbane. \u201cIt was going to be about the lives of my brothers and friends in China, and the ways the country has changed over time. But then I was offered the job at Queensland Ballet<\/a> and I had to dedicate all my time to that. I don\u2019t think they were expecting [the sequel] to take 14 years!\u201d<\/p>\n

double quotation markOne of the things my mother taught me was to keep moving forward at all times Li Cunxin<\/p>\n

His second memoir, The Lucky Son, takes up precisely where Mao\u2019s Last Dancer left off: as Cunxin and his ballet dancer wife Mary fly to their new lives at Houston Ballet under the directorship of Ben Stevenson. That outline of the proposed book on China<\/a> can be glimpsed under the surface of this one, like a palimpsest; Cunxin\u2019s six brothers\u2019 lives are sketched, and a fascinating portrait of a country lifting itself from abject poverty to world superpower emerges.<\/p>\n

Li Cunxin and Mary McKendry in Ben Stevenson\u2019s Sleeping Beauty in 1988. Photograph: Houston Ballet<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things my mother taught me was to keep moving forward at all times,\u201d Cunxin says. \u201cDon\u2019t think about the past, just concentrate on what is ahead.\u201d That grit kept her children alive and was instrumental in shaping Cunxin\u2019s dogged, highly ambitious personality.<\/p>\n

Determination runs in the family. Mary was a deeply respected dancer herself, a career she sacrificed when she and Cunxin discovered their daughter Sophie was born profoundly deaf. \u201cWe were so fearful that Sophie would miss out on so much,\u201d Cunxin says. \u201cMusic and dance and all the magical things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mary immediately left the world of ballet (she would return years later as ballet mistress at Queensland Ballet) to teach Sophie to talk. \u201cMary was incredible,\u201d Cunxin recalls. \u201cShe gave everything to the task.\u201d<\/p>\n

One one hand, it was a complete success. Sophie was fitted with a bionic ear (then known as a cochlear implant) and thrived; she embraced dance, had a successful education and excelled in the workplace. Cunxin and Mary assumed they\u2019d done all that was needed.<\/p>\n

\u2018To be a leader of any kind takes vision. I had a very strong vision for Queensland Ballet.\u2019 Photograph: David Kelly\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

But then in 2015, Sophie sent an email to her parents that shocked and devastated them. Sophie expressed frustration at her parents for wanting their daughter to hear; she felt she\u2019d come halfway to meet their world, but they had not met hers. They had not even bothered to learn sign language. Her \u201cdeafness was her birthright\u201d, Cunxin writes in the book. Now, he says, Sophie \u201cis a kind of ambassador between the hearing and deaf communities\u201d. And he and Mary have begun learning Auslan.<\/p>\n

Cunxin\u2019s dance career was so exemplary \u2013 moving from the Beijing Dance<\/a> Academy to Houston Ballet, and then to principal artist at Australian Ballet \u2013 he could have been forgiven for hanging up his pointe shoes and walking into a lucrative position in a stockbroking firm. Indeed, that\u2019s exactly what he did. An unsuccessful tilt at the artistic directorship of Australian Ballet (the role eventually went to David McAllister) utterly crushed him, and it seemed for a few years he would never return to the world of professional ballet.<\/p>\n

Of course, that wasn\u2019t how it panned out: despite being burned by that failure, Cunxin reluctantly put his name in the hat when Queensland Ballet were looking for their next artistic director. That tenacity and resolve was once more poured into the theatre.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be a leader of any kind takes vision,\u201d Cunxin says. \u201cI had a very strong vision for Queensland Ballet. But you also have to be a good communicator, because you need to inspire others to join in your vision.\u201d And you need to apply yourself, which wasn\u2019t such an issue for someone trained at Beijing Dance Academy, with its brutal rehearsal regime and exacting standards.<\/p>\n

One of the delights of The Lucky Son is the way it tracks some of our favourite characters from Mao\u2019s Last Dancer, including The Bandit, Cunxin\u2019s bestie at the Beijing Dance Academy; his gorgeous instructor Teacher Xiao; and his astonishing mum and dad, Niang and Dia. There are echoes in the events too: Stevenson\u2019s trip to Queensland to watch his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 mount Cinderella recalls the unforgettable moment in Mao\u2019s Last Dancer when his parents leave China for the first time to see their son dance and the audience gives them a standing ovation.<\/p>\n

Cunxin at the Thomas Dixon Centre, home of the Queensland Ballet. Photograph: David Kelly\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Central to Cunxin\u2019s success at Queensland Ballet \u2013 where he oversaw a massive improvement in standards and built a stunning new home for the company, the Thomas Dixon Centre \u2013 were the lessons he learned from his time away from ballet, when he was a stockbroker: \u201cI learned so much from the business world \u2013 when we had to approach donors for money, I could speak their language.\u201d Relationships with Elisabeth Murdoch and the Ian Potter Foundation came in handy, and he and Mary also contributed some money of their own. It\u2019s now a world-class organisation.<\/p>\n

Looking back on his life now, Cunxin feels an overwhelming sense of \u201cgratitude, for the opportunities I was given and the people and artists who shaped me\u201d. The Lucky Son concludes on stage \u2013 hardly surprising, given so many of the key moments in Cunxin\u2019s life have been there \u2013 but this time it is in Switzerland, where he was awarded ballet\u2019s most prestigious award, the Prix de Lausanne, in 2025.<\/p>\n

After a few years of serious health issues (Mary is a cancer survivor and Cunxin has a major heart condition), the couple are increasingly happy to chill. \u201cOur health has forced us to slow down,\u201d he says with the emphasis on forced, as if there were no way they would slow down on purpose. \u201cI worked very hard for two years on this book \u2013 it\u2019s been all-consuming. So yes, I am enjoying taking things a little slower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is he confident that ballet will survive the coming AI tsunami, given how hard the art form is to perfect and how much time and effort is required? \u201cI am worried, but I do think ballet is special,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen people come to see ballet, they are blown away by the artistry, the physicality and the music. I think it\u2019s more important than ever to connect people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some people live such extraordinary lives that a single autobiography simply won\u2019t suffice. Li Cunxin has now written…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":922491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":["post-922490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/922491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}