The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  Taiwan had its own National Day celebrations ten days later. President Chiang Ching-kuo used the occasion to denounce the Sino-British agreement on Hong Kong as a ‘fraud’. He restated his determination ‘never to compromise with the Chinese Communists…under any circumstances’. Despite its diplomatic isolation, the Republic of China was doing just fine, thank you very much. With its average annual per capita income roughly ten times that of the mainland, Taiwan didn’t need to mount floats of giant wristwatches or electric fans. They weren’t such a big deal.

  ON 20 October 1984, the Communist Party announced that economic reforms would be extended from the countryside to urban areas. Market forces and the profit motive were no longer bad words in the official lexicon. Hou, who was getting savvy to the rhetoric, recognised that this was his chance to get the recording studio project off the ground.

  For six months, the proposal had sat on the desks of the cultocrats. When he visited Hong Kong in early December to guest conduct the Hong Kong Symphony Orchestra performing ‘Heirs of the Dragon’, ‘Song of the Junkman’ and ‘New Shoes, Old Shoes’ at Hung Hom Stadium, Hou told the press he hoped that the studio would be up and running by mid-1985.

  To me, he confided that he’d heard that the project was the subject of a tug-of-war between the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Broadcasting and Television, which managed all the other recording studios in China. ‘It’s going to make a profit,’ he told me confidently. ‘So they’re tussling over which one gets it.’

  When Hou flew back to Beijing, an employee of the Oriental Song and Dance Company greeted him with the good news: ‘The studio’s been approved.’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  ‘Uh, there’s something you should know.’ His expression told Hou that he wouldn’t like the next bit. ‘Wang Kun will be chairman of the board. She’ll appoint a general manager.’

  ‘What’s my role, then?’ Hou asked testily. ‘I was supposed to be the manager, it’s my thing.’

  ‘Artistic adviser.’

  Hou made an appointment to see the responsible cadre at the Ministry of Culture.

  ‘Wang Kun said that’s what you wanted,’ the cadre claimed.

  Hou confronted Wang Kun.

  ‘Oh, look, it had nothing to do with me,’ she said. ‘The ministry’s Department of Taiwan Affairs made all the arrangements.’

  Hou says she then informed him that he couldn’t manage the studio because he wasn’t a member of the Communist Party. Years later, when I asked her about this episode, Wang Kun told me that Hou made that up. ‘I wouldn’t have said such a thing,’ she asserted. She told me that her concern was that Hou, who slept till noon and had an ‘undisciplined’ lifestyle, couldn’t be trusted with such a major responsibility. He annoyed her with his habit of not sticking to the agreed script during performances, making up his stage patter as he went and singing songs not on the program. ‘We never asked him to shout “Long live the Communist Party!”’ she griped, ‘but you think he could co-operate in other little ways.’ As for the studio, Wang insisted, ‘There was no funny business about it. He was never going to be manager.’

  Hou Dejian, still reeling from the news, then heard that someone had complained about him to Politburo member Yang Shangkun, saying that he was guilty of tax evasion, evasion of customs duties, driving without a licence, and having an ‘unclear’ relationship with Cheng Lin.

  When I mentioned this to her, Wang Kun confirmed that she had no idea who had spoken to Yang Shangkun about Hou. ‘He really does flatter me.’ She laughed harshly. ‘To think I could get the ear of Yang Shangkun just like that! I knew he was evading taxes, but I never tried to interfere in his affairs.’

  Yet someone had told Yang a few tales. Hou heard from reliable sources that Yang had stated, ‘If this sort of person from Taiwan, this Hou Dejian, wants to leave, we certainly won’t hold him back.’ Dejected and angry, Hou phoned the secretary to the Minister of Culture, Zhu Muzhi, to say that if he’d outlived his welcome on the mainland, that was fine. He’d go.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mr Hou,’ the nervous secretary replied. ‘No one wants you to leave.’ Soon after they hung up, Zhu got on the blower to the office of the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, who assigned a work team to investigate.

  Hou did some investigating of his own. His ‘tax problem’ turned out to be a dispute between the Beijing and Guangzhou tax offices over which was entitled to tax the royalties paid to Hou from record sales in Guangdong Province. The customs issue related to a stereo Hou brought in duty-free from Hong Kong for Wang Kun’s own son. And while Hou drove a second-hand car that Wang herself had helped him purchase for about 20,000 renminbi, he’d been trying for ages to convert his Taiwan licence into a mainland one, a procedure for which the bureaucracy had no precedent.

  As for his relationship with Cheng Lin, neither Hou nor Cheng were completely ‘clear’ about what was going on between them either. Towards the end of 1984, Cheng told Hou’s Hong Kong agent Kim Wong that she was afraid that she was falling in love with Hou. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want any scandal. She was still only seventeen. Besides, a friend of Wang Kun’s, a well-to-do Chinese-American businessman, had offered to sponsor her to study in the US. ‘What do you think I should do, Ah Kim?’

  ‘Go to America. Those sort of opportunities don’t come along every day,’ he advised. ‘Your feelings for Hou might just be puppy love.’ He tried to put the next bit as kindly as possible. ‘Xiao Hou always puts his work ahead of everything else. Maybe you should too. Besides, he, uh, hasn’t always been the most reliable person in the love department.’

  Cheng Lin nodded. She said she’d consider his advice.

  Hou resigned from the Oriental Song and Dance Company. Hurt, humiliated and exhausted, he came down with pneumonia. After a stint in hospital in Beijing, he fled south to Guangzhou to ponder his options. Diagnosed there with hepatitis as well, he was committed to Guangzhou’s Zhongshan Hospital.

  Hou felt persecuted, lonely and depressed. The Chinese New Year’s festival was approaching, a time traditionally spent with family. Hou was never the sort of person to call and ask for help or even sympathy; I didn’t even know he was in hospital and I was only just across the border.

  Cheng Lin arrived in Guangzhou, strode into his hospital room and announced she was staying. He looked at her and saw an angel.

  When Cheng Lin went AWOL from Beijing, a suspicious Wang Kun phoned the hospital. Another friend of Hou’s answered the phone, but refused to comment on Cheng Lin’s whereabouts. As Cheng Lin was both Wang Kun’s employee and, being under-age, her legal charge, Wang Kun called the police. The friend who’d answered the phone came under investigation and was denied work for some time afterwards. When Hou learned about this, he shot off a rude telegram to Wang Kun, a telegram which ended up in the files of the Ministry of Culture.

  But with Cheng Lin by his side, Hou cheered up. The warm, moist air of Guangzhou was good for his damaged lungs. He felt at home in the southern city, so much like Taipei with its lush, subtropical vegetation. Occupying a hospital suite normally set aside for high-ranking cadres, and which included a small reception area as well as private bath, he received visitors, including local musicians and the handful of provincial cadres instructed to look after him. Sometimes he’d just sit strumming his guitar and listening to Cheng Lin’s cheerful chatter. Disinclined to long periods of depression, Hou recovered his spirits along with his health.

  His recuperation coincided with a rise in morale generally among China’s cultural circles. The anti-spiritual-pollution campaign had gone too far—in the provinces, zealous officials had even torn the high heels off the shoes of women—and the Party called it to a halt. At the start of 1985, the Party cautiously endorsed the right of writers and artists to ‘creative freedom’.

  Around this time, a craze for western suits and ties swept the urban areas. Disco, dying out in the west, was reincarnated in China. One da
y Chinese friends in Beijing proudly showed me their new television set. They pulled off its red velvet dust cover and turned it on. We watched a program introducing ‘disco dancing’. Rows of grim-faced middle-aged cadres in loose cotton blouses and baggy trousers pointed, John Travolta-like, at the non-revolving disco ball above their heads. My friends gazed at the TV, entranced.

  It was getting easier to associate with Chinese. I began a covert affair with a poet and artist who introduced me to another artist, a friend of his called Ah Xian. During the anti-spiritual-pollution campaign, Ah Xian told me, the Public Security Bureau had interrogated him about his nude paintings. ‘Would you like to keep this one for further examination?’ he asked. They beamed. Pin-up girl in hand, they trundled back to the cop shop. My friendship with Ah Xian outlasted my affair with the poet.

  Hou got out of hospital but stayed in Guangzhou. You could hail a taxi on the street there, just like in Hong Kong or Taipei. There were good restaurants and they stayed open past eight at night. Flouting official prohibitions, Guangzhou’s people pointed their television aerials at Hong Kong and tuned their radios to stations south of the border. Young people in this city of four million affected the softer accents and hip slang of Hong Kong Cantonese and wore good quality jeans. The city’s nightclubs and discos vibrated to the beat of the latest Hong Kong Canto-pop and western hits. It was one of the few cities in China in 1985 with a night life deserving of the name.

  The Guangzhou authorities carried out the Party’s economic reform policies with notably more enthusiasm than they applied to its ideological campaigns. This had something to do with the relatively liberal outlook of its mayor, Ye Xuanping—the film director Lingzi’s brother.

  Hou moved into the White Swan Hotel, the city’s most luxurious. The management offered him discounted accommodation, and turned a blind eye to the fact that Cheng Lin moved in with him. Though she turned eighteen on 24 March 1985, she was still two years under the legal age for marriage. Premarital sex in general and sex with a minor in particular were among the many punishable crimes known broadly as ‘hooliganism’. Lesser mortals who attempted it could win themselves a year or two of post-coital ‘education through labour’ in China’s gulags.

  If Hou’s privileged position couldn’t guarantee happiness, it did allow a certain degree of liberty. A Communist Party official once pulled me aside at a function and whispered in my ear, ‘You know, don’t you, that your friend Hou Dejian is the freest person in China?’

  Cheng Lin was young and Hou was her first boyfriend, but she was no ingenue. Her understanding of how things worked in China compensated for Hou’s naivety; she proved tough as nails when it came to looking after their financial and other interests. Money still didn’t mean anything to Hou Dejian, who gave it away when he had it and didn’t worry when he didn’t. ‘I just spend other people’s money instead,’ he told me. Cheng Lin could be generous, but she kept a meticulous balance sheet in her head of favours given and received.

  Cheng Lin took the role of practical adult to Hou Dejian’s carefree child. She replaced her pigtails with a short, modish bob, and attempted a more sophisticated style in general, with endearingly mixed success. As for Hou, he was more than happy to have her look after him. She was his ideal woman—a voice for his music, a lover, a mother and a grandmother all rolled into one. He told me he admired her character and self-assurance, and I did too.

  As far as it was possible for two public figures, they kept private the details of their relationship. Conservative social mores and Cheng Lin’s age weren’t the only considerations. Hou was still married. Although, in a letter sent through Hong Kong at the end of 1984, Yuanzhen agreed to a divorce, it was proving difficult to arrange. In the end, it had to be formalised in a Taipei court with Hou’s mother standing in as his legal representative. When Hou later heard that Yuanzhen remarried, he felt relief. Asked by a reporter about his son, he replied, ‘I’ve been a fuck-up as a father. I’ve no right to any say in the matter.’

  Having told the Hong Kong press that his first marriage had been ‘the biggest mistake of my life’ Hou wasn’t keen to jump so quickly again into matrimony. When reporters pressed Cheng Lin on the issue, she demurred, ‘The time’s not yet right.’ Her parents accepted the unorthodox arrangement, and their initial concern about the age difference was overcome when her open-minded grandmother pointed out that both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong married women much younger than themselves. Besides, Cheng’s family got to share in the couple’s charmed lifestyle. With Hou and Cheng spending most of their time in Guangzhou, her family moved from Luoyang, in Henan Province, to the flat at Double Elms. Jimi had by now acquired a place of his own.

  In March, Hou travelled to Hong Kong again to accept an award for ‘Song of the Junkman’ at a ceremony celebrating the top ten Chinese songs of the year. He kept mum about his conflict with Wang Kun, saying only that he’d moved to Guangzhou because the climate and lifestyle suited him. Had he ever felt things were hopeless? one journalist asked. ‘Every day,’ he answered, calling his creative output pathetic—‘two years and only one album. I could have done far more in Taiwan or Hong Kong.’

  The Taiwan press had a field day with his remarks. A typical headline was ‘Two Years in the Mainland and Nothing to Show for It’. His monthly salary there, another writer claimed, ‘wouldn’t even be enough to pay for one meal with friends in Taipei’.

  IN May 1985, my brother Jonathan (‘BJ’) and his fiancee Melissa arrived from the US for a visit. We took a boat down the Yangtze from Chongqing in Sichuan through the Three Gorges to Wuhan in Hubei and then a train up to Beijing. There we found a Hou Dejian far removed from the pathetic creature of the Taiwan press reports— happier, in fact, than I’d seen him for some time.

  BJ and Melissa could barely contain their amazement when, the day after we arrived in Beijing, Hou and Cheng Lin took us to meet their newest friend, Aixin Gioro, the brother of China’s last emperor, who wrote out a calligraphic inscription for each of us. I pretended to be blasé—another day, another member of the imperial family—but BJ and Melissa saw right through me.

  As they’d also met Ah Xian, I pointed out to BJ and Melissa the two paintings by him that were hanging on Hou’s wall. Hou had bought them for 800 yuan (US$365). It was the first time Ah Xian had sold any of his work, and though the amount was trifling from Hou’s perspective it meant a lot to Ah Xian.

  I noticed a slim volume on Hou’s bookshelf with the title Reunification of the Motherland Is Everyone’s Responsibility. I pulled it from the shelf and waved it at Hou. ‘You on a mission?’ I teased.

  ‘God no,’ he said. ‘Someone gave that to me. I’ve never even looked at it.’

  Reunification of the motherland may have been everyone’s responsibility, but it was one man’s burning ambition. Hong Kong—tick. Taiwan—to do. Deng Xiaoping, about to turn eighty-one himself, knew that once the older generation of Nationalist leaders passed on, it would be even harder to get Taiwan to the negotiating table. He announced that the Party was prepared to offer Taiwan ‘even more generous terms’ for reunification than they’d given Hong Kong.

  Negotiating with Communists, Nationalist President Chiang Ching-kuo replied, was ‘like bargaining with a tiger for its skin’. The overture was a ‘plot’.

  The Communists reminded the Nationalists that they hadn’t renounced the option of taking the island by force.

  The Nationalists went shopping in the US for ground-to-air missiles.

  Madame Deng Yingchao revealed that Beijing was simplifying the procedures by which Taiwan ‘compatriots’ could visit China. They were welcome to invest in mainland enterprises while they were at it.

  The Nationalists responded by reminding Taiwan’s citizens that it was forbidden to visit China. Anyone caught doing business with the mainland would face a minimum of seven years in prison. If ‘sedition’ was involved, the penalty was death.

  Three hundred alumni of the Whampoa Academy, Hou Guobang’s alma mat
er, appealed to former classmates in Taiwan to get behind the cause of reunification. Beijing’s Central People’s Broadcasting Station began half-a-dozen daily programs in which they broadcast recorded messages from mainlanders to long-lost friends and family in Taiwan. For the first time ever, the national Military Museum displayed photographs of Chiang Kai-shek and acknowledged the Nationalists’ contribution to the war against Japan.

  Asiaweek wanted a story. Hou introduced me to his contacts in the United Front, and put me in touch with other Taiwan defectors, many of whom I’d already met. My favourite, the pilot-defector Huang Zhicheng, spoke to me at Hou’s place. ‘At first,’ he complained, ‘it’s ni hao, ni hao, and then’—he tossed one of Hou’s sofa cushions across the room—‘they leave you to fend for yourself.’ I pointed out he wasn’t fending too badly. In his four years on the mainland, Huang had put on thirteen kilos. Patting his gut, he chuckled and acknowledged, ‘There have been a few banquets.’ He’d also bought a second-hand white Mercedes-Benz, one of the few private cars in China, with his reward money. I’d ridden in it several times myself to the twenty-four-hour coffee shop at the new luxury hotel, the Great Wall Sheraton, Huang’s favourite spot for a midnight snack.

  As he was the biggest celebrity among the Taiwan defectors, Hou Dejian’s happiness was a great concern for the authorities. The new general secretary of the Communist Youth League, Hu Jintao, and the director of the office of the Party’s Central Committee, Wang Zhaoguo, invited Hou to a meal of Mongolian hotpot at the Beijing Hotel.

  ‘Party Secretary General Hu Yaobang’s work team,’ Hu Jintao began, with a glance at Wang, ‘has found the charges levelled at you groundless.’ He picked out some slices of lamb, dipped them in the boiling broth, and placed them in Hou’s bowl. ‘The views of, um, certain individuals don’t necessarily represent those of the Party.’