The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  A Beijing friend was one of the first to call. He’d been applying for a passport for almost a year. It had finally come through and he was going to the US to study. We figured that my empty flat was an ideal place to hold a party, combining a farewell for him and a housewarming for me. There were security men at the gates of the compound, but whereas in the early eighties the only way to invite a Chinese person inside was by registering them at the gate, it was getting more relaxed, and all you needed to do was walk your friends in.

  I didn’t realise how many people I’d invited; on the night, it seemed I was going to the gate every two minutes to bring in another half-dozen. And then my friend arrived with his friends—a massive queue that stretched like a dragon down the street.

  In one room, people danced to my collection of rock and pop cassettes, in another, a poet from the northeast drained a bottle of spirits while complaining bitterly that he’d expected other foreign women to be there—‘I just wanna fuck one, marry her and get the hell out of China,’ he declared. A couple had a massive fight in the bathroom, and several others fucked on my mattress. The writer Zhang Xinxin talked at a hundred miles an hour about her latest work to my favourite taxi driver, whom I’d hired to take everyone home in shifts after the buses stopped running. Later in the night, the avant-pop singer Liu Sola led a group in dancing wildly in a circle to a song that she made up on the spot. The disappointed poet threw up in every corner of my study and then all over my mate’s taxi.

  The party was immortalised in several works of underground prose and poetry. It also sealed my fate with the ke-ge-bo, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

  By mid-November people were dropping in nearly every night. Chinese friends whose homes had no bathrooms, and who normally had to use public bathhouses, came over for showers, to read my collection of Hong Kong magazines, to pass on gossip and make dinner. I spent many evenings at the Yangs, went to film previews, the opera and art exhibitions and made even more friends.

  Geremie arrived in Beijing for a visit in late December. Deciding to act on my growing infatuation, I jumped him in the taxi on the way back from the airport. He didn’t protest.

  Several days later, Geremie and I were sitting in the coffee shop of the Jianguo Hotel when an Australian reporter I’d noticed at press conferences due to his slightly punk haircut approached. ‘Robert Thompson, Sydney Morning Herald.’

  ‘Linda Jaivin, Asiaweek,’ I replied, feeling ridiculous as I spoke the words. I always felt like a little kid playing at being an adult.

  ‘I know who you are.’ Robert grinned. ‘And I hear you know the Australian China scholar Geremie Barmé. I’d really like to meet him sometime when he’s in town.’

  ‘Robert, Geremie,’ I said. ‘Geremie, Robert.’

  When Geremie and I got married in June 1986, we had two parties, one at the Yangs, and one at Robert Thompson’s place.

  But I’m jumping ahead again.

  In early 1986, Hou Dejian bought a flat in Guangzhou. Guangzhou was one of the few cities in China where people could purchase real estate. The municipal government built housing to sell to ‘overseas Chinese’, most of whom bought them for their mainland relatives to live in. Hou settled on a three-bedroom, 60-square-metre apartment in a complex called New East Lake Village.

  New East Lake Village looked very much like a contemporary Hong Kong apartment block. Its towers rose beside an artificial lake crossed by traditional zigzag bridges and encircled a small park, and the ground floors housed shops, markets and restaurants. The provincial government offices were located in the neighbourhood and Guangzhou’s Communist elite occupied much of the housing in the area.

  The provincial Cultural Affairs Department snipped through the paperwork for Hou, cut the going price of the flat by half to 51,375 renminbi (US$16,000), and put up the money, which Hou would repay from royalties. The government even threw in a Nissan and a driver. Hou used the car a few times and then bought himself a Peugeot from the French company’s joint-venture plant in Guangzhou. He gave the Nissan and driver back to the Cultural Affairs Department which, he told me, was most pleased with the gift. The provincial United Front Department authorised Hou to import duty-free a motorcycle, fridge, washing machine, colour TV, video recorder, air-conditioner, stereo and electronic keyboard.

  ‘Look at these.’ Hou pointed proudly at the tables, chairs and wardrobe when I made my first visit. ‘I knocked them up myself. But Cheng Lin was chief decorator.’

  Hou’s new stereo system dominated one wall together with his record collection. As in every place he’d ever lived, every flat surface was covered in tea cups, pens, pencils, pads and bottles of western medicine and traditional restoratives. In addition to medicines for his lungs and stomach, Hou was now taking treatments for his liver.

  Bubbling with enthusiasm, Cheng Lin took me on a tour of the place. She pointed out the synthetic carpet, a luxury item. The sofas, she told me proudly, were real leather. She’d chosen the artificial flowers that decorated the hanging lamp herself, but the pièce de résistance was the wallpaper that covered an entire wall of the living room. It was a giant photograph of an arched and latticed window through which could be seen a wooded lawn: trompe l’oeil realism in petit bourgeois taste. She’d massed potted plants in front of the ‘window’ for extra effect. ‘The flat cost us nearly 24,000 yuan (US$7500) to decorate,’ she confided.

  The pair also had one of the greatest luxuries of all, one which money alone couldn’t buy, something for which you needed friends in high places as well: a telephone.

  They soon found an amiable group of friends, including another old mate of Geremie’s, the Guangzhou filmmaker Zhang Zeming. The kungfu star Jet Li had moved to nearby Shenzhen, on the border with Hong Kong, and stayed with Cheng and Hou when he was in Guangzhou. Hou became good friends with Li Zhengtian, an art historian and well-known dissident who’d spent time in prison for his part in writing a famous 20,000-word manifesto in 1974, two years before the end of the Cultural Revolution, calling for legal guarantees of democratic and individual rights. When in 1988 Hou put out his second mainland album, After 30, Li produced the artwork for the cover. Hou also found a soulmate in the irrepressibly good-natured An Ge, a photo-journalist working for the official press. An Ge would travel with Hou on his second journey to Dragon Village in 1988, and again with me when I visited the village many years later.

  Cheng and Hou seemed blissfully happy in what they referred to as their Guangzhou ‘love nest’. As the Chinese saying went, ‘The sky is high and the emperor far away’. Wang Kun seemed as distant as the moon.

  One Hong Kong journalist who visited them in Guangzhou reported that, after they’d chatted a while, Hou picked up a guitar and began strumming a tune. ‘Cheng Lin,’ the reporter observed, ‘stood by his side clapping her hands and praising him. It was obvious that she doesn’t just appreciate his talent, she practically worships him. Before long, she picked up a microphone and began singing along as Hou Dejian gazed tenderly in her direction.’ The reporter could scarcely contain herself, interjecting ‘How romantic!’ to which Cheng Lin, dimpling, replied, ‘We’re always like this.’

  For all the courting and cooing, the frenetic socialising and his hobbies, which now included photography, Hou confessed to me that he feared he was losing his sense of direction. His most famous song continued to haunt him; he referred to ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ as ‘an airless trap’ in which he was imprisoned.

  ‘Once and forever, an heir of the dragon,’ I quoted.

  Hou wasn’t just suffering from writer’s block. Ever since his recovery from hepatitis in 1985, whenever he tried to arrange a concert or performance anywhere outside Guangdong province, he ran into a Great Wall of ‘inconvenience’. If the dates weren’t ‘inconvenient’, the venues were. Several of the officials who fed him this line told him privately that the Ministry of Culture had issued a confidential document instructing them not to co-operate with him. Hou considered appealing again to
Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. He was hurt and disgusted by what he perceived as an ongoing plot to make his life on the mainland a misery. On the other hand, he didn’t know if he could be bothered going through all that again. He only talked about it to close friends. When one Hong Kong reporter pressed him on the subject, Hou admitted that ‘there’d been some unpleasantness’ but insisted ‘it wasn’t all that serious’.

  Cheng Lin, on the other hand, took it very seriously indeed. Though the document wasn’t aimed at her, she was equally its victim. Hou had heard that pressure had been applied to Central Television not to air a program because it featured Cheng Lin.

  When, years later, I asked her about this, Wang Kun laughed bitterly. She painted herself the victim of Hou and Cheng’s machinations. In her version, they were the betrayers. ‘Hou Dejian,’ she hissed, ‘is a snake.’

  Snake or not, he was the one who gave me her unlisted home phone number so that I could hear her side of the story. I knew that his side wasn’t always perfectly reliable. While researching this book, I came across one news clipping which had him telling reporters that he was broke, sleeping on public transport and relying on the kindness of friends to find a place to live. ‘Heh heh,’ Hou chuckled when I confronted him with this. ‘I did sleep one night in my car while the flat was being redecorated. I think I may have embroidered things a little bit.’

  For nearly half a year, a time bomb was ticking in the background. It exploded in the form of a short, handwritten letter from the Nanhai Acoustics Company, which handled the mainland distribution of New Shoes, Old Shoes. The note informed Hou that, as of April 1986, the album had earned 1,119,466 renminbi in royalties. After deducting income tax, taxi fares, his hospital fees and other expenses, 196,000 was left. The Ministry of Culture had instructed the company, the letter went on, apprehension and embarrassment rising like an odour from the page, to remit that amount straight into one of the ministry’s accounts.

  Several times, Hou learned, the ministry had tried to get local government to lean on Nanhai for the money. It claimed that Hou had defaulted on a promise to give the Oriental Song and Dance Company 200,000 yuan for the studio they were going to set up with him. Letters to this effect went out to the Central Office of Taiwan Affairs, the United Front Department, the Guangdong Province Party Committee Office as well as the Minister for Culture Zhu Muzhi and vice-ministers Situ Huimin and Zhou Weichi, Wang Kun’s husband—but not to Hou Dejian himself.

  In a state where even the most ordinary affairs were typically conducted in an atmosphere of paranoia and secrecy, not even his own record company thought that Hou should be told what was going on. Then, in May, the ministry issued a final communication, ‘document 35 of 1986’, that declared, ‘Our ministry is the higher level authority in charge of both the Oriental Song and Dance Company and Hou Dejian. We have the right to adjudicate this matter.’ They demanded that Nanhai remit the remaining 196,000 immediately to People’s Bank account number 93006, Dongsi Branch, Beijing—the account of the ministry’s arts bureau under Zhou Weichi.

  If Hou had any queries, the short note from Nanhai concluded, he’d best address them directly to the ministry.

  EXAMINING the documents, I noticed that the ministry’s story changed from one day to the next. Were they claiming the money for the establishment of the studio? To pay for the services of the singers who appeared on New Shoes, Old Shoes? To pay for the recording itself? Or was it the Oriental Song and Dance Company’s standard claim on an employee’s outside income?

  ‘I don’t owe them anything,’ Hou fumed. Up until then, he’d been like a bubble child, protected by a membrane of privilege and fame from the germs of pettiness, spite and vindictiveness that made up the smog of a corrupt communism. ‘On the other hand,’ he told me, ‘this has its up side. I’m finally like everyone else on the mainland. A victim. Slandered and accused of crimes I haven’t committed. Now I understand. It’s kind of fulfilling.’

  My own bubble burst around the same time. My experiences of being tailed in Sichuan and at the picnic had turned into a pattern of systematic surveillance and harassment of my Chinese friends. I was already marked as a dubious character for my close contacts with Hou, the poet Yang Lian and certain other Chinese friends. My wild housewarming party had sealed my fate as someone to watch. Twenty-four hours a day.

  I wasn’t aware of this for a long time. Between work and play, I kept insanely busy. I reported on developments in the Chinese economy, politics, society and culture. Every day I scanned Chinese and English-language newspapers, including the People’s Daily, the Youth Daily, the Workers’ Daily and the ever-thrilling Peasants’ Daily. I tried to keep up with the latest in Chinese literature, art, theatre and film. I was a Chinese opera fanatic, and Wu Zuguang and Xin Fengxia made sure I always had tickets, even for sold-out events. I don’t think there was a single night in which I stayed home alone, unless I was working to deadline on some story for Asiaweek. ‘It’s a wonder I have time to brush my teeth,’ I wrote to my parents. I definitely didn’t have the time to look over my shoulder to check whether anyone was ducking behind trees.

  Reporting on China had its freaky moments. In Shanghai, I interviewed a theatre director so worried about Public Security bugs that he insisted on conducting the entire interview on paper. My written Chinese got a workout as we silently passed my notebook back and forth between us. When we finished what was, frankly, a fairly ordinary interview, he motioned for me to re-read the script. Then he stood up, ripped it into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet. After this, he grabbed me and attempted—without success—to kiss me on the mouth.

  Such drama and paranoia seemed absurdly overblown. Yet not long after this, back in Beijing, I got a phone call from my artist friend Ah Xian. He sounded distraught. He asked me to meet him at a hotel.

  I was shocked to see how terrible he looked. He said he’d been drinking heavily and not sleeping, and confessed he wasn’t sure if life was worth living.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, alarmed. I loved Ah Xian. He was one of my best friends. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I hadn’t wanted to tell you.’ His tone was oddly apologetic and, for a moment, he couldn’t go on. ‘They’re trying to make me spy on you.’ He wiped at his eyes.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘These two guys from the ke-ge-bo, they keep coming to see me. They want me to meet them on a regular basis to report on your activities— what you’re doing, where you’re going, who you’re seeing.’

  ‘What?’ I began to shake.

  ‘I told them I won’t do it. They say they can make things very difficult for me. I don’t care. I couldn’t live with myself if I did. But now they’re turning the screws on my mother. The security people in her work unit are putting pressure on her to make me co-operate. I asked them why they were so interested in you. They said that they hadn’t worked you out. They told me you’re too huoyue, too lively, that you know too many Chinese people, and you get too close to them, much closer than any foreigner should get to Chinese.’

  ‘Fuck me dead. They’re doing this because I have too many friends?’ I laughed, though I wasn’t feeling much joy.

  ‘They also want to know all about the “Spouting Association” we joked about that day. Is it a counter-revolutionary organisation? Why is a foreigner at its head?’ Now it was Ah Xian’s turn to laugh. ‘It’s so ridiculous.’

  ‘How’d they know about the Spouting Association?’

  Ah Xian shrugged. We recalled how we’d been followed the day of the picnic. Had the ke-ge-bo used powerful bugging devices to eavesdrop on our conversation? It was like something out of a Cold War thriller.

  ‘Do they think I’m a spy?’

  With Ah Xian at the Summer Palace, Beijing, 1985. Members of the ‘Spouting Association’ never said no to a picnic.

  ‘They told me they had no evidence that you were actually a spy, but they weren’t sure.’

  ‘God,’ I said. ‘Would a spy e
ver be as indiscreet as I am?’ Ah Xian smiled. He’d been my friend and confidant long enough to know about all my flings and personal dramas.

  ‘A good one wouldn’t be,’ he agreed.

  ‘Ah Xian, I’m quitting my job. I couldn’t live with myself if I put you through this for another day. Tell them that.’

  And I quit straight after that. Asking around, I discovered that Ah Xian wasn’t the only friend who’d been hassled, just one of the most vulnerable. My acquaintances were routinely questioned after visiting me. They were usually traced by the registration plates on their bicycles, as I realised when someone who rode a borrowed bike to my place told me the owner of the bike had been questioned two days later. Now that I was looking over my shoulder, I saw that, wherever I went, security men followed—on foot, bicycle and in cars.

  I called Geremie in Hong Kong, and told him what was happening.

  ‘So where will you go?’

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Why not come to Australia?’

  ‘Why not.’ I’d never been to Australia before but I liked the sound of it.

  There was one hitch: with my American passport, I’d get a three-month visa and wouldn’t be able to work. I had a crateload of stuff and didn’t relish shipping it all the way to Australia just to ship it out somewhere else again in three months time. Besides, I needed to work.

  I flew down to Hong Kong. Geremie and I discussed the options. We referred to the main one as ‘It’, as in ‘If It doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.’

  We posted the banns at the Australian embassy in May 1986, had our interview with the immigration officer there and began the bureaucratically labyrinthine process of getting married in China.

  The Yangs held a party to celebrate both our engagement and Yang Xianyi’s acceptance into the Communist Party. At the party, Hou Dejian made everyone laugh when he proposed that the only reason the ever-satirical Xianyi had joined the Party was in order to be able to preface every sentence with ‘We in the Communist Party…’