The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  ‘Cheers,’ said Luo, raising his glass to Hou. ‘So, when do you plan to visit the mainland?’ he asked provocatively.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Hou replied. ‘It’s just, well, it’s just not terribly convenient at the moment.’ Everyone laughed, and the talk moved on to other things.

  Winnie was friends with Lingzi (Ye Xiangzhen), a mainland film director in town to promote her debut feature Savage Land. Hou and I saw the film together. In the context of Chinese cinema at the time, it was a brave and stunning film, tackling the taboo subjects of love, lust and revenge. It had been banned in China. The reason Lingzi could have it screened in Hong Kong had to do with the fact that she was the daughter of one of China’s most powerful men. Daddy was none other than Red Army Marshal Ye Jianying, a member of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s highest ruling body, and a staunch ally of Deng Xiaoping.

  Because of her connections, Lingzi was avoiding the foreign press, but Winnie persuaded her to let me interview her for Asiaweek. Lingzi, in turn, asked her friend, the Australian China scholar Geremie Barmé, who happened to be in Hong Kong working with the promoters of Savage Land, to sit in on the interview so he could help her fend off any awkward questions.

  The bird-like Lingzi perched warily on her chair in the hotel room, looking like she would flap her wings and fly away any minute, answering my questions in guarded tones. Geremie, seated on the bed, stared at me from under his dark eyebrows, a sardonic smile curling his lips. Every so often Geremie mumbled something to Lingzi in the most astoundingly flawless colloquial Chinese I’d ever heard out of the mouth of a foreigner. My own Chinese skills went walkabout hand in hand with my wits. Sweating profusely despite the air-conditioning, I stuttered my questions, so intimidated was I by the pair of them. I could never have imagined that five years later, Geremie and I would be married, with Lingzi and Winnie both claiming to have played matchmaker.

  When later, I introduced Hou to Lingzi, they formed an instant friendship. I watched, entranced, as they made grand and secret plans to produce a short documentary film together. Hou would shoot half in Taiwan, she’d film the other half in the mainland, and they’d edit it together in Hong Kong. Hou would write the musical score.

  His enthusiasm was genuine enough, even if the hands-across-the-strait doco was no sooner proposed than forgotten. What remained for Hou was the excitement of having met people like Li Zhun, Winnie, Luo Fu and Lingzi. He returned to Taiwan with a pile of press clippings for his scrapbook, brushes for his grandfather and a sense of expanded possibilities.

  Back in Taiwan, Hou wrote to the Government Information Office. He told them that everyone he met in Hong Kong knew much more about what was happening on the mainland than on Taiwan. He suggested ways of improving Taiwan’s image abroad. He never received a reply.

  In September 1981, Lingzi’s father, Ye Jianying, announced a nine-point plan for reunification with Taiwan. He proposed, among other things, that the Communists and the Nationalists negotiate on an equal, party-to-party basis, for direct mail, trade, air and shipping links to be opened across the Taiwan Strait, and that people be permitted to travel freely from one side to the other. If the Nationalists accepted the plan, he promised, Taiwan could retain its armed forces and capitalist lifestyle. On the other hand, should Taiwan resist peaceful reunification, the Communist Party would not rule out the use of force. If Taiwan went so far as to declare itself independent, that meant war. There could only ever be one China.

  President Chiang Chingkuo scorned the Communists’ overture. ‘Our call for the unification of China under the [official Nationalist ideology] Three Principles of the People,’ he countered, ‘has set off endless echoes in the hearts of all the Chinese people and aroused fervent hope in the breasts of our mainland compatriots who are struggling against slavery and for freedom. The strong shockwave generated to unify China under the Three Principles of the People will destroy the Chinese Communist regime and quicken our endeavours to turn the 1980s into the era of mainland recovery.’ He was living on another planet.

  Was the Nationalist Party really so simplistic in its thinking and blind in its analysis? Might Deng Xiaoping get his wish and see ‘peaceful reunification’ in his lifetime? My editor at Asiaweek handed me a ticket to Taiwan and told me to find out how things looked from over there.

  Hou picked me up at Taipei’s airport. He was keen to show me the six-room flat he was renting on Chaozhou Street—the same street I’d lived on a few years before with the beguiling Alex. I loved the scene I found there. At all hours, the flat was filled with music, laughter, the clatter of mah-jongg tiles and the smells of impromptu meals cooked up for a dozen people by half a dozen. There was a cache of smoky oolong tea and miniature ‘kungfu’ tea sets to drink it in. Hou had switched from cigarettes to pipes, and the men in his circle followed suit. A great collection of pipes and pouches of Captain Black tobacco sat on one of the tables.

  In the room set aside as an office, actors, singers, scriptwriters and movie producers made plans. One was to tour a group of singer-songwriters to the States; I readily agreed to the suggestion that I join them as translator.

  Musical scores, books, dishes, teacups and albums made for a ground cover on the tatami matting that covered the living-room floor. The only time the mah-jongg set was put away was when one of Hou’s closest friends, Yu Weiyan, who as his manager was forever trying to impose some discipline, threatened to appear. We’d often be clattering away at the mah-jongg table when the phone rang. Everyone would freeze until whoever answered the phone gave the signal that it wasn’t Yu on the other end. Another friend of Hou’s was a po-faced television producer called Yan Zhuang whose favourite insult was ‘What are you, a foreigner!!?’

  ‘Well, actually, yes,’ I’d say and everyone would laugh.

  It turned out that some of Hou’s friends had been part of the old crowd from Fang’s place. Shu Kuo-chih was an essayist who on occasion had been so dismissive—with good reason, no doubt—of my views on Chinese literature and culture that I’d cried and, embarrassing as it is to admit, once even hid in my room when I knew he was coming over. We had a good laugh about all that when we met up again at Chaozhou Street.

  Though half a dozen people had keys to Hou’s pad, there was never any doubt who was its master. The little boy who used to perch in a tree to regale his classmates with his stories now sat swami-like on the tatami, embroidering tales from the threads of his encounters with officialdom and high society, his adventures in the Thai camps and even, from time to time, my experiences on the mainland. I loved listening to Hou Dejian. He had a metaphor or a theory for everything under the sun. The confidence with which he expressed his opinions was at once breathtaking, admirable and outrageous.

  One of Hou’s pet themes was how the Chinese people had a penchant for creating emperors to whom they could become enslaved. Yet he had no qualms about acting like a little emperor himself, albeit one who’d won the loyalty of his court through charm and generosity. I don’t think I ever saw him so much as fill the kettle in his flat. His myriad followers, friends, ‘managers’ and girlfriends attended to his needs like members of an imperial entourage. Or, as Hou would have it, a collective waipo-substitute.

  When other people took the floor, he sat with his head cocked slightly to one side, the warm bowl of his pipe pressed to his cheek, his eyes narrowed in concentration. If genuinely excited about something, his enthusiasm was contagious. If bored, he wore a politely attentive mask, but even I could tell he was far, far away. He usually had a guitar in his lap and strummed it incessantly, picking out melodies that would eventually find their way onto an album.

  Royalties had begun to trickle in for some of his songs. ‘Basin of Fire’, about watching his grandfather burn paper offerings to the gods, was climbing the charts in Taiwan, and ‘Return’ (‘Guiqu laixi’) had made the top ten for both 1980 and 1981. Hou told me he considered the greatest advantage of fame to be fortune. ‘If I have money, I feel free and in co
ntrol,’ he told me. Yet he spent his money as fast as he earned it.

  Hou rarely smoked dope and never drank alcohol. His lack of interest in dope had less to do with the severe penalties for drug-taking under Taiwan’s martial law—many musicians smoked—than the fact that it made his brain go dull and the belief, as he put it to me, using the English phrase, that he was ‘on a natural high’. Alcohol made him ill.

  Hou seemed almost as excited by my Asiaweek assignment as I was. He offered to drive me to my interviews and tagged along for much of the research. It may not have been very professional, but his presence usually interested my interviewees enough to send the conversation spinning off onto another level. I’d end up as though eavesdropping, tape recorder in hand, while Hou and some Nationalist official debated the issues with a degree of frankness that I, as a foreigner and a reporter, couldn’t have elicited in a million years.

  We’d just left one such interview—this one, if I remember correctly, with James Soong—when we had our little accident. We were on our way to the home of the woman Hou referred to as his ‘main girlfriend’, Yuanzhen. He wanted to introduce us. She greeted me coolly and clung to Hou, it seemed to me, as though terrified that if she let go for a moment, I’d whisk him away, never to be seen again.

  The fact was, while both Hou and I were rampant flirts and proficient seducers, we never tried it on each other, even on the handful of occasions, including that night, when we shared a bed.

  I’m quite sure the thought passed my mind. It would’ve been odd if it hadn’t, despite the fact he was too skinny for my taste. There’s a mysterious, blacked-out entry in my diary from the time that’s mostly illegible but seems to refer to Hou. On the other hand, I was aware that the only sensible way to have a relationship with a man like him was across a Platonic divide. For his part, he went for younger, more compliant women, and they were always Chinese. I wasn’t his type any more than he was mine, despite our connection. Recently, I asked him if he’d ever been attracted to me. ‘Nup,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought of you as one of the boys.’

  Yuanzhen was definitely his type. Two years younger than Hou, she had a degree in Chinese literature, and she was completely infatuated with him.

  We told her about our little accident. When he explained how it ended up with a dinner invitation, Hou grew insufferably smug. ‘Look at you,’ I teased. ‘The day you assume you can get away with anything just because you’re Hou-bloody-Heirs-of-the-Dragon-Dejian is the day you’re in big trouble.’

  ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ Yuanzhen sighed.

  I had to file my story that evening. Hou asked if he could hang out in my hotel room. I said he could, but he wasn’t allowed to say anything to me until I was done. I tapped away on a hotel typewriter while he sifted through magazines and smoked his pipe. The second I finished, Hou put down the magazine he’d been looking through, raised the bowl of his pipe to his cheek, and demanded, ‘What do you think of Yuanzhen?’

  Cautiously, I remarked that she was pretty. Lovely hair.

  ‘That’s it? “Lovely hair”?’

  I grimaced. ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Okay. I hardly know her, right? But I suppose one thing that struck me was how great she thought it was that you could get away with hitting that guy’s car just because you’re a star. Personally, I think you need someone who’ll help keep that big head of yours from getting so swollen that it explodes.’

  Hou nodded, silent, thoughtful.

  ‘Have I just overstepped some line?’ I groaned. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘No. You’re right. I’m glad you told me.’

  It was late. We crawled into the big double bed. Hou fell asleep immediately. I lay there thinking what an arse I was—it was such a bad idea to criticise people’s girlfriends or boyfriends. I comforted myself with the thought that, if it helped him avoid getting deeply entangled with someone who might not be good for him in the long run, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

  The next time I visited Hou in Taiwan, he told me he and Yuanzhen were getting married.

  I NEEDED to make an effort to get to know Yuanzhen. That’s when I asked her what she wanted to do with her life and, pointing at Hou, she replied, ‘Ask him.’ If I had misgivings, I wasn’t alone. Both Hou’s male and female friends complained to me about her possessiveness. ‘We can’t even get together to plan a new album without her constantly calling to ask when he’s coming home,’ one griped.

  Hou never said a bad word about Yuanzhen to me or anyone else. The fact was, she was pregnant. Hou would do the honourable thing, and that was that.

  I’m not sure why I didn’t attend the wedding, which was held at Idea House on 5 February 1982, and to which I’m sure I was invited. My diary for that weekend listed nothing that would prevent me from hopping on a plane and flying from Hong Kong to Taipei: a yum cha here, a dinner there. For 5 February itself, I’d scribbled, ‘buy new cups & glasses, clean apartment, food shopping’. Maybe I just didn’t want to go.

  At the banquet, the guests toasted the ‘early appearance of the next generation of heirs of the dragon’. Another singer-songwriter, Luo Dayou (Lo Ta-yu), performed his hit ‘Love Song 1980’, which began with the lines, ‘Girl, you once said to me that you’ll love me forever. Love I can understand, but what’s this thing called forever?’ Hou told me he thought this very cute of Dayou. Yuanzhen was not so amused.

  Their son, whom they nicknamed Little Bean, was born in July. Hou’s in-laws, wealthy and conservative Shanghainese, made it clear that they expected Hou Dejian to get a ‘real’ job. His bohemian lifestyle and easy-come, easy-go attitude towards money was not good enough for their daughter or their grandson. Hou later told me he felt Yuanzhen wanted to turn him into a ‘proper husband’. ‘I felt like I’d died,’ he said. ‘I tried to get used to being dead, but couldn’t manage it.’

  Unlike his irascible father, Hou normally repressed his anger. That could be why he developed a variety of nervous ailments; even in his mid-twenties he kept around him a pharmacopoeia of medicines, both western and Chinese. But now his temper began to fray. Junjun told me that the only time he ever saw Hou Dejian blow his top was during this period. One day, Hou wanted to work on a song. Yuanzhen was in the kitchen. Hou Dejian ordered his sister Xiaoling, then a university student and living with them, to look after the baby. Xiaoling refused. She had her own work to do. Hou exploded.

  I continued making regular visits to Taiwan in 1982. On one trip, I even made it to the frontline island of Jinmen, the first foreign reporter to be granted permission to stay the night in one of the military’s camouflaged, cave-like shelters. The alternate-day bombing had stopped in 1978, but Jinmen still had an air of danger—for my hosts in particular when I jumped inside a tank and swung the big guns around.

  Hou Dejian and I remained good friends—he even asked me to be Little Bean’s godmother. But, due to his domestic situation, we naturally saw each other less than before. That’s when I began hanging out with Luo Dayou.

  Luo Dayou was a member of the Hakka ethnic minority. His family had been in Taiwan for generations. Hou and I had met him in 1981 through mutual friends from Hong Kong, the filmmaker Tsui Hark and singer-filmmaker Teddy Robin Kwan. When Dayou played us a demo of his first solo album, Hou turned to me and said with unabashed admiration, ‘Those are songs I’d like to have written myself.’

  Dayou, who was two years older than Hou, wore white in his daytime job as a radiologist and black the rest of the time. He donned sunglasses at night and cultivated a mane of frizzy, shoulder-length hair, a radical look in conservative Taiwan. His songs melded catchy pop-rock tunes with lyrics that were witty and literate, rasped out in a sexy, cigarette-ravaged voice that was to provide a model for first-generation Chinese rockers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

  Some of the Chaozhou Street gang at the Fragrant Pine Bar in 1982: filmmaker Edward Yang stands top right next to rock star
Luo Dayou. Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark is the other one in sunglasses. I am in the lower left corner.

  His dry humour and sharp intelligence appealed to me; I found the whole rock star shtick amusing as well. I’d accompany him to a bar called Fragrant Pine to drink with the young, emerging filmmakers Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien and other friends, and play endless rounds of the new video game, Pacman. Afterwards, I’d sometimes go back to Dayou’s place and we’d share a joint. I’d fade out on the sofa as he sat down at his piano to compose new songs; it was a delicious way to end a long night.

  The Taiwan censors once banned Luo Dayou from TV for fear that he’d have a bad influence on the country’s youth. No one could have imagined that of the two, it would be Hou Dejian, with his neat polo shirts and patriotic image, who’d cause the Taiwan authorities far more grief. Nor could anyone have predicted that when their friendship fell apart, with great rancour, it wouldn’t be on account of professional rivalry, but politics—even though they were both on the same side.

  Around that time, I was interviewing a young oppositionist politician, Lin Zhengjie, at his home in Taipei, when he put Dayou’s album on the player. I told him I was a friend of Dayou’s. ‘So are we!’ Lin exclaimed, indicating his wife and himself. His wife, introduced to me simply, but alas, in Chinese society, typically, as ‘my wife’, had sat in on the interview, chiming in occasionally with her own, passionately held and articulate political views. There was something familiar about her. I asked her name. It was Yang Zujun, the velvet jumpsuit-clad singer of ‘Beautiful Island’. Taiwan, with its 20 million people, was a very small world.

  Sometimes, it almost felt too small. I relished my sense of connection with the place, which I was now visiting regularly for work. At the same time, I jumped at every chance to go to the mainland, where the pace of economic, social and cultural change was dizzying.