by Linda Jaivin
At her first meeting with Hou Guobang, she joked about what she considered her worst feature—a flat nose—and he was smitten. ‘Such a clever girl!’ he thought. ‘Not a great beauty, but loads of personality.’
She liked him too. Her father was less entranced. He’d asked around. He’d heard that Hou Guobang had a quick temper, and he’d had TB. And besides, he was a Sichuanese.
Hearing this from the Chens, Hou Guobang was furious. What was wrong with being Sichuanese? So what if Sichuan was so infamous for banditry that other Chinese called it ‘the devil’s cave’? It was still China’s richest and most populous province, the site of ancient kingdoms, and the home of the great Tang poet Li Po. As for his temper, he wasn’t the calmest person in the world but, as the saying had it, ‘It’s easier to move rivers and mountains than change the character of a man.’ And his TB was no longer infectious. The doctor said so.
‘It’s not fair,’ Hou Guobang groused.
Mrs Chen clucked sympathetically. When Mr Chen was out of the room, she whispered, ‘Luo Yingwen says to meet her tomorrow night on the air force school basketball court.’
After that, whenever Luo Yingwen’s parents went to church, which was at least four times a week, the young lovers met in secret, usually perching on a big oil pipe on the side of the road just outside the village to chat. When Luo Yingwen’s parents found out and forbade her to see him, she went on a hunger strike.
The Luos agreed to a compromise. If fresh X-rays proved that he was indeed clear of TB, and if he began attending church, Hou Guobang could marry their daughter. Having X-rays done didn’t bother him, but he resented the other condition. ‘Aren’t Chinese gods good enough for us Chinese?’ he grumbled. But he agreed, and the date was set.
It was a collective wedding. All eight grooms were in the armed forces. Except for Luo Yingwen, all the brides were native Taiwanese. After the ceremony, Hou Guobang and Luo Yingwen’s friends crowded into their new home, a tiny room with little more than a bed and a rattan chair, to carry out the ancient custom of naofang, ‘teasing the bride’. In the raunchy, raucous carryings-on that followed, a young Hunanese who’d been Luo Bingqian’s preferred choice for son-in-law managed to destroy the chair. This upset Luo Yingwen—it didn’t feel like a good omen.
Nine months later, on 1 October 1956, the year of the monkey, Luo gave birth to a baby boy. The year of the monkey was propitious for having children—they would turn out wise, sociable and witty and have a talent for making money. Hou Dejian had a sweet disposition, his mother’s large black eyes and a great big head that inspired the neighbours to nickname him ‘Xiao Shouxing’, or Little God of Longevity.
The Luos doted on their first grandchild and spoiled him rotten. When Dejian was two, Luo Yingwen and Hou Guobang had a second son, Dewei, but Dejian remained his grandparents’ favourite. Once, Luo Yingwen told me, Dewei reached for a treat in their kitchen, only to be scolded by his grandmother—she was saving it for Dejian.
When Hou Dejian, who often slept at his grandparents’ house, couldn’t get up in the morning for school, waipo, grandma, would gently pull him out of bed, dress him, wash his face, coax some breakfast into him and shove him out the door. She’d put an NT$10 note into his pocket (though only about US25¢ at the time, it was a lot for a child to be carrying). At night, she’d remove any unspent money and replace it with a fresh note the following day. If it was a cold night, and he was snuggled up under his doona reading, the book propped up on his knees, waipo would come in and turn the pages so he didn’t have to pull his hands out from under the bedclothes where they were nice and warm. When he had calligraphy homework, he’d write out the character a few times and she’d do the rest.
His brother Dewei once told me that Dejian never had so much as to pour a single glass of water for himself at their grandparents’ house.
Walking through the fields to church at night with waipo, her big warm hand enveloping his little one, Hou Dejian would ask her what was behind the stars and what was behind what was behind the stars, and was a stream bigger than a rivulet or vice versa, all the while tugging hard on her hand to make her walk more quickly past the cemetery and never paying much attention to her answers. ‘I still don’t listen to the answers people give,’ Hou admitted to me years later. ‘I’ve always been much more interested in my own questions.’
‘Now I understand,’ I once teased Hou. ‘It’s your grandmother who trained you to be a pop star. She made you the constant centre of attention, looked after all your needs, poured your drinks, cleaned up after you and ensured you’d have no real sense of the value of money or where it came from.’
Hou chuckled. ‘And don’t forget,’ he added, ‘she helped me develop into a male chauvinist pig as well. Now I expect all my women to do that for me.’
I recall one evening at Hou’s place in Taipei in 1981, not long after that car accident. At one point, Hou patted his pockets, and looked up. ‘Yuanzhen!’ he called to his girlfriend, who was sitting across the room in conversation with someone else. He raised two fingers to his lips as though smoking. ‘Cigarette!’
Yuanzhen leaped to her feet, searched out some smokes, and rushed to hand them to him. ‘You little pig,’ I scolded him after she’d disappeared into the kitchen to make some tea.
‘She’s happy enough,’ he replied.
Later that evening, I sat with Yuanzhen. ‘So, what do you want to do with your life?’ I asked.
She smiled sweetly and, pointing at Hou, replied, ‘Ask him.’
‘Yuanzhen,’ I gasped, shocked, ‘have you ever heard of feminism?’
‘Linda!’ Hou called me back over to his side, where he could keep an eye on me. ‘Cut it out, will you?’
Physically, Hou wasn’t very strong, having suffered from pneumonia when he was five. He had a vivid imagination, however, and even as a kid was a great talker. He’d perch in a tree and regale his friends with stories concocted from fragments of the Bible stories his grandparents told him, Chinese myths and parables that he’d learned from his mother, his father’s tales of Dragon Village and his own fertile imagination. He was also a practical joker. Once, he and some classmates packed homemade explosives in the hollow of a dead coconut tree standing just outside their first-floor classroom window. The exploding tree gave the teacher the fright of her life. Called to account by the school authorities, Hou denied he had anything to do with it—until they pointed to the burn mark the fuse had left on the floor. It led straight to his desk.
His mischievousness, the year of his birth and the fact that his surname was pronounced exactly the same as the word for monkey earned him his nickname. Though his father and grandparents would scold anyone who called him Monkey, Hou didn’t mind the name at all, especially since his favourite character in all the books he’d read was the naughty Sun Wukong, or ‘Monkey’, from Wu Cheng’en’s picaresque Journey to the West (better known in the west in Arthur Waley’s translation as Monkey, the basis for the television series ‘Monkey Magic’). A born rebel, Monkey was capable of magically transforming himself into whatever he wished, and could travel huge distances in a single somersault, aided by clouds. Monkey was king.
Though his father and grandparents would scold anyone who called him Monkey, Hou didn’t mind the nickname. He dreamed of somersaulting through clouds, just like Monkey did in Journey to the West.
While Hou Dejian dreamt of somersaulting through clouds, his father struggled through the days. He’d got a job as an administrator at an army school, but clashed with his superiors. Bitterly, he watched his colleagues rise in the ranks while he remained a captain. He was tortured by thoughts of his family, now living under communism and to whom he couldn’t even send a letter. His relationship with his in-laws remained fraught. To make things worse, his TB flared up, and for a while, he couldn’t work. Luo Yingwen was forced to borrow money at a devastating 30 per cent interest rate. Her brother helped her pay it off, but when her mother brought this up with Hou Guobang he snapped,
‘That’s your family’s problem.’
‘Before we’d been married even five years,’ Luo Yingwen told me, ‘I realised why my father had been so opposed to the marriage in the first place.’ She told her parents she wanted a divorce, but her father told her that divorce was a disgrace, and he wasn’t having any disgraces in his family.
One day, Hou Dejian went looking for his mother only to find she’d run away. The scandal spread quickly through the village. A neighbour scolded Hou Guobang. ‘If you weren’t such an ill-tempered bastard,’ he tut-tutted, ‘your wife would never have run off.’ Hou Guobang went him. In the course of the scuffle, he bit the neighbour’s nose and the neighbour hit him on the head. Hou, who was only four, saw the blood streaming down his father’s face. He ran to his grandparents’ place and, crying, asked them to take his father to hospital. Hou Guobang had seven stitches and was so miserable he contemplated suicide.
Eventually, Hou Guobang tracked Luo Yingwen down to the city of Tainan, where she’d found work as a cook for a wealthy family. With Dejian and Dewei at his side, he begged her to come back. Sullenly, she agreed, but soon fled once more, coming back only after Hou Guobang, on his knees and in front of witnesses, swore that he’d control his temper. A kind of truce took hold and two more children were born, a girl, Xiaoling, and Dejun. But the peace didn’t last. Hou remembers his father was always running out the door to scream at Luo Yingwen, who was still inside, ‘just so the neighbours would hear his complaints about her’. If humiliating, it was also frightening. Once, the pair even threatened each other with knives. Hou remembers screaming and crying and beating his little fists against his father’s legs.
Hou recalls the smashing of plates as the ‘soundtrack’ of his childhood. ‘Sometimes,’ he told me, laughing at the absurdity of it, ‘we didn’t even have a single bowl left to eat out of.’
Hou had just begun university in 1974 in the north of the island when his father phoned. Almost paralytic with fury, shame and self-pity, he begged his son to come home. Luo Yingwen, who’d left home once more under mysterious circumstances, had returned in love with another man, pregnant with his child and demanding a divorce.
‘I felt like the father in the family,’ Hou Dejian recalls. From the time he was ten, he’d had to speak to his brothers’ and sister’s teachers when they were having problems at school, and even, on one occasion, to one of his father’s colleagues when Hou Guobang thought he was being persecuted at work. Now, he was being asked to decide whether his parents should stay together. Sympathetic to his father’s plight, yet understanding of his mother as well, Hou Dejian urged Hou Guobang to accede to the divorce. When his parents finally separated, Hou Dejian says all he felt was ‘great relief ’.
A rare moment of family unity. From left, Dewei, Luo Yingwen with Junjun in her lap, Hou Guobang with Xiaoling in his, and Hou Dejian. The smashing of plates was the soundtrack of Hou’s childhood.
‘I felt like I’d grown up between heaven and hell,’ Hou recalled. ‘On the one hand, there was waipo’s home, so warm, secure and comfortable. Then there was my parents’ home, where there was quarrelling and poverty. Sometimes we had so little money that my mother couldn’t even find a shred of cabbage to put on top of the rice in my lunchbox and I was too embarrassed to eat in front of the other kids. We’d occasionally steal sweet potatoes from the farmers’ fields just to have something to eat. I got my self-confidence from my grandparents and my inferiority complex from my parents.’
The autobiography that Hou Guobang wrote for me in the early 1990s was rich, fabulous, and soaked in a heady mix of self-righteousness and self-pity. I was glad I had the chance to speak to Luo Yingwen and get her side of the story as well. In 1992, she lived just down the road from Dewei and Junjun, and popped round frequently to cook them meals or just say hello. But with Hou Guobang in town, she deemed it a good time to take Dewei’s wife Fengying on a shopping trip to Hong Kong.
‘You can cook, can’t you?’ Fengying asked me as she was walking out the door. It wasn’t a question so much as a statement. ‘You’ll have to look after the boys.’
I thought western cuisine a safe option. I went to a supermarket in Taipei full of ideas. All of my grander plans dashed by the difficulty of obtaining the right ingredients, I returned home with spaghetti, tomatoes, dried basil, pork mince and the makings for a big salad. It was over 30 degrees Celsius and muggy as hell. I was soaked with sweat even before I fired up the wok. There were no western-style pans. I’d forgotten to buy olive oil, and had to settle for peanut. With the hybrid sauce bubbling on the stove, I turned my attention to the salad.
Finally, drenched in perspiration, I laid the table with chopsticks and bowls and called the men to the table. Hou Guobang appeared alarmed at the sight of this meal. He picked at the spaghetti, made a face, and demanded some chilli. The salad was the final straw. ‘It’s raw!’ he bellowed. ‘I can’t eat uncooked vegetables!’ I scuttled back into the kitchen and threw the lettuce into the wok while in the living room, all the frustration, hardship and injustice in the world was summed up in explosive Sichuanese, none of which, thankfully, I understood.
I emerged with a plate of stir-fried salad just in time to see Hou Guobang, suitcase in hand, storm off to the train station.
‘Is my cooking that bad?’ I asked guiltily.
‘I liked it,’ Junjun said encouragingly.
‘I’m so sorry I upset him.’ I was mortified.
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ Dewei reassured me. ‘He’s just like that.
All his visits end like this.’ The next day, Hou Dewei opened a big picture book on the subject of dogs and pointed out a photo of a sharpei, whose comical, wrinkled expression of exaggerated misery made us all laugh. ‘Who,’ Dewei asked, ‘does that remind you of?’
Yet Hou Guobang gave Hou Dejian one indelible and precious legacy—his stories of life on the Chinese mainland. As a child, Hou Dejian couldn’t get enough of his father’s tales of Spirit Warriors and opium smokers and trembling Buddhas. ‘They made my ears glow,’ he told me. Hou Dejian thought it unfair that his grandparents called his father ‘godless’. ‘The God in his heart,’ Hou told me, ‘was our clan, his ancestry, the mainland.’
‘WE used to say that if you dig a hole in the sand and keep on digging, you’ll get to China,’ I told Hou.
‘That’s funny. We said you’d get to America.’
I laughed. I thought of a Chinese friend who once explained that he didn’t like eating western food because half an hour later, you’re hungry again. ‘When you were growing up,’ I asked Hou, ‘what did you know about America—or the rest of the world, for that matter?’
‘I remember when I was little having this discussion with a friend about who America’s “President Chiang” was. A grown-up told us that the American president wasn’t called Chiang at all. I was shocked. The other thing I knew about America was that it was where butter and missionaries came from. But, in a funny kind of way, America seemed closer to Taiwan than mainland China.’
This is what Hou Dejian knew about mainland China when he was growing up: it was a nation of slaves, run by bandits. Commie bandits. Commie bandits—gongfei—were murderers. The leader of the Commie bandits, Chairman Mao, was the most evil person in the world. Even Commie children used guns, wore ugly caps, and said things like, ‘We don’t love our mothers or fathers, only Chairman Mao.’ Those people who weren’t Communists were victims of Communism. The victims of Communism dressed in rags, ate bark, and yearned daily for the Nationalists to free them from Communism.
Hou wondered what the people of mainland China looked like. The only photographs he’d seen of China were of the scenery. When Mao or other Communist Party leaders popped up in Time or other foreign magazines, the censors obscured their faces with a stamp that said ‘Commie bandit’.
As for all the great things about China, the Tang poets, Song painting, Ming ceramics, Confucianism, Daoism, the soaring pagodas and magnificent temples, o
peras about scholars falling in love with beautiful women in paintings, tea leaves picked by the hands of virgins for the delectation of emperors, sacred mountains and silk embroideries, the whole, sumptuous kit and caboodle of five thousand years of continuous civilisation—that was dead and gone on the mainland, trampled under the jackboot of Communism. The Nationalists were the guardians of all that was glorious in Chinese culture, and only when they recovered the mainland, would Chinese culture be restored to China.
And so for Hou Dejian and his generation, China existed less in terms of space than of time. It was the past. It was history.
Beyond Taiwan, it was as if there were only Japan and America, and then a bit further away, Europe, Africa, Australia and other places. These existed as destinations for study, travel and emigration. They were places to which people went and from which they returned. No one went to mainland China. Those who did—the occasional oddball defecting pilot or homesick, elderly politician—were instant pariahs who’d never come back. The mainland was a black hole.
Hou Dejian felt the pull of that black hole from the time he was a child. In the otherwise fucked-up world of his parents’ life, China— the China of their youth—was the good bit, the beautiful bit. Hou and his family lived in Taiwan, but home, he was forever reminded by his father, government propaganda and his teachers, was China, a place both terrifying and entrancing.
Hou remembers learning only two things about Taiwan’s history at school. One was how Koxinga, the son of a Japanese woman and Chinese pirate, first drove the Spanish and Dutch from the island in 1662, returning it to Chinese rule, and then used it as his base in an attempt to restore the Ming Dynasty on the Chinese mainland after it was toppled by the ‘barbarian’ Qing two years later. ‘They’d crap on and on about Koxinga’s plans for “recovering the mainland”,’ Hou recalls, ‘and hurry through the bit about how he failed.’ Koxinga’s followers, unable to return to China, settled on the island alongside earlier arrivals and the native Aborigines; their descendants are the Taiwanese of today.