The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  Despite the massive interest shown in the case by mainland reporters, few articles were printed in the mainland press. The authorities had reportedly ordered newspapers and magazines to let public interest ‘cool down’ in the hope that an out-of-court settlement could be reached.

  Geremie, still travelling in China, wrote to me in Canberra with the marvellous news that he’d been able to make a direct-dial call from Hangzhou to Taiwan.

  WITH the case on hold, Hou focused on promoting his new album, After Thirty, which was released in the mainland, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia in June 1988. The tracks on After Thirty reflected all of Hou’s usual themes—homesickness, concern for his country and people, and a nostalgia for lost youth, though he made fewer attempts to blend traditional forms or instruments into the mix. Hou told me that it had finally occurred to him that ‘I’m not an ethnomusicologist, I’m a pop song composer. With After Thirty I stopped trying so hard to be “Chinese”—I just want to be a human being.’

  He played the album for me when I next visited. ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I reckon it’s no less Chinese than Heirs, Cont’d.’

  ‘Oh?’ Hou cocked his head at me and drew on a cigarette. ‘But Heirs, Cont’d was so self-conscious. I worked so hard to achieve those effects, to be Chinese.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I suggested, ‘the problem is you simply are Chinese.’

  ‘That’s why the two of us get along so well,’ he replied after a pause. ‘No matter what you do, you remain incredibly western. Extremely western. Me, I remain incredibly Chinese. Extremely Chinese. But we keep experimenting with our identities. So, in a weird way, we understand each other perfectly.’

  One thing I didn’t understand so well was why, at the age of thirty-one, Hou felt so detached from his youth. True, the Chinese did not traditionally make a cult of youth. In one of his most famous aphorisms, Confucius had said that thirty was the age at which a man ‘established himself ’. What surprised me was how someone who was so bohemian, iconoclastic and eccentric could so readily adopt such a traditional way of thinking. Hou’s lyrics began to sound like the lament of an old man:

  Only after thirty did I realise

  Changes move faster than plans,

  Only after thirty did I realise

  Nothing turns out all that bad.

  Before thirty you rage around the world

  And fantasise all sorts of things

  After thirty, you shut the door

  On winter, spring, summer and autumn

  Only after thirty did I realise

  Rivers flow to the east, and the waves wash away

  Generation after generation

  And there’s always a new one to come

  No one wins the contest with time

  No one loses the love they’ve given away.

  It wasn’t just me who found Hou’s premature obsession with ageing peculiar. A Taiwan critic of New Shoes, Old Shoes had already remarked that Hou was beginning to sound like a ‘pedantic old fogey’ obsessed with the passing of time. He called the result ‘at once suffocating, ambiguous and excessively sentimental’.

  Another song on the new album became a personal favourite of mine—and of Hou’s as well. He’d written ‘Old Zhang’ as the theme song for a film, Night Freight, about an old Nationalist soldier in Taiwan. It drew on his feelings for his father who, like Old Zhang, had gone from proud young officer to sad old man.

  The album included another film theme song, ‘I Love’, for the film Chinese Heroes, directed by and starring the kungfu actor Jet Li. Its central metaphor is that of a son’s love for his mother, the mother representing China.

  I love

  This weak and fragile body

  Its back bent under the weight

  Of a heart too heavy

  I love

  That hurt soul

  Surviving

  Unsurvivable days.

  Hou covered two of Luo Dayou’s songs as well, and sang one composed in collaboration with his Hong Kong friend Teddy Robin.

  What was truly innovative was Hou’s decision to make music videos of a number of the songs—the first music videos made in China— with the director Sun Zhou. In the most memorable clip, Hou came out looking like a closet queen—or Oriental Song and Dance Company performer—in eyebrow pencil, thick foundation and lipstick.

  I found the videos passably earnest at best and at worst an audiovisual chop suey of pretension and kitsch. Maybe I just didn’t get them. When they were seen in Taiwan the following year, critics there praised them highly.

  After Thirty sold more than 700,000 cassettes on the mainland. In Hong Kong, only about 3000 were snapped up, less than a third of the sales enjoyed there by New Shoes, Old Shoes. By way of comparison, Luo Dayou’s most recent album had sold over 10,000 in Hong Kong and Alan Tam, a popular Cantonese singer, enjoyed sales approaching 200,000. Hou claimed that he wasn’t surprised, telling one reporter that ‘only mainlanders and Taiwan people can understand my songs’.

  The significant thing was that he now had a Taiwan market. In October 1988, Julie Su Jui sang ‘Song of the Junkman’ on a popular Taiwan TV show—the first time this intensely popular song had ever been broadcast by the mass media there, and the words ‘lyrics and music by Hou Dejian’ appeared bold and clear on the screen. A Taiwan reporter phoned Hou to tell him. He asked Hou how he felt.

  ‘Terrific! I’m really moved. I feel like I’ve been accepted.’

  Yet when another Taiwan entertainment program decided to screen several of Hou’s videos, the authorities intervened, citing laws relating to the import of mainland cultural product. In the words of one Taiwan newspaper, the whole affair resulted in Hou becoming ‘the newest hotly discussed personality’ on the cultural scene.

  Hou was on a roll. Together with the avant-pop star and novelist Liu Sola, he wrote and produced a rock opera about a pregnant schoolgirl in the Cultural Revolution who dies during a botched abortion. It was to be performed by three women—Liu Sola, Cheng Lin and Li Dandan, an opera singer—in a style that combined rock and Beijing Opera. In the end, they had trouble getting past the censors, and the opera was never performed.

  In the middle of 1988, Hou Dejian’s mother and father arrived separately on the mainland to see their son and revisit their old homes and families. Ever since the mainland had allowed phone calls to be placed to Taiwan, he’d spoken to his mother about once a month, sometimes for up to an hour. And over the years he’d managed to remit to his family more than a million Taiwan dollars (US$35,000) from his royalties.

  Luo Yingwen arrived first, with her second husband, another ex-army man named He, and Hou’s grandfather. Hou’s beloved grandmother had died in 1977. Luo Yingwen told me later that ‘as soon as I’d crossed the border I felt like I was home again’.

  His father arrived later that northern summer. He’d survived two more unhappy marriages and miserable divorces by then. The prospect of returning to Dragon Village for the first time in forty years had him so worked up that Hou noted in his journal that ‘you only have to spend three days with him, and you’re bound to witness an explosion. Anything sets him off, and he’ll blow up in front of anyone. Three minutes later he smiles and makes some joke, and five minutes later he’s completely forgotten what the tantrum was all about.’

  Having lived a lonely life in Taiwan, and reading little, Hou Guobang had become a veritable Mrs Malaprop, frequently mixing his metaphors and mis-stating traditional sayings. This charmed Hou Dejian, who perceived his father’s inability to wrap his mind around the clichés of the language as a positive sign of eccentricity and nonconformism.

  In his father’s straightforward, if unhinged, personality, Hou Dejian recognised the same volatile individualism that animated himself. At the same time, he realised that ‘I couldn’t carry on like my father. No one would ever work with me. If I think someone’s behaving like a bastard, I let them know, but in a way that we can still get along. That’s why I us
ually win where my father loses out.’

  Accompanied by Hou’s photographer friend An Ge, Hou made a second emotional journey back to Dragon Village, this time with his father. The surviving members of his family, overjoyed to see Hou Guobang, wept, embraced him and demanded that he tell his story from the beginning.

  ‘Now what year was it exactly,’ his younger brother Guoguang asked, ‘that you went to Taiwan?’

  Hou and his father’s emotional return to Dragon Village in 1988: the Hou clan (Hou Dejian is second from the right in the first standing row. Hou Guobang is in the first row, seated, centre, white shirt, white trousers, sunglasses). Hou Guobang (top right), and Hou and his aunt.

  ‘Year 38 of the Republic of China, let’s see, that’s…’

  ‘1949,’ Hou Degen interjected.

  Another relative sighed. ‘You were lucky.’

  ‘It hasn’t been easy for me, either!’ Hou Guobang exclaimed, spilling out his tales of financial and emotional woe. The villagers, most of whom lived on the edge of subsistence and had survived political campaigns, famine and social disorder on a scale unimaginable to an outsider, listened sympathetically if without real comprehension. He seemed well-off enough to them, what with his famous son and the satchel of gifts he’d brought—cigarette lighters, nylon stockings, watches, gold rings, necklaces and perfume.

  Hou Guobang was reunited with his cousin and former bride, now an old woman. ‘When we knew you were coming…’ her voice cracked and she went silent for a moment. ‘Hou Guoguang, Hou Degen, they all said…’ She was having trouble continuing.

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘They told me not to feel sad. You see, I’ve been with this other fellow ever since then. I…I’ve cried so much my tears have all dried up.’

  Most of their days were spent visiting ancestral graves or just falling in with the rhythm of village life, seeing friends and relatives, catching up on the lost years. Sitting in the modest home of a peasant relative one evening, Hou sang ‘Lao Zhang’ for his father. Hou Guobang, recognising himself as the subject of the song, wept unashamedly.

  ‘It’s changed so much,’ Hou Guobang told his son when they left the village. ‘This road we’re on, the electricity, it’s so much more prosperous than before.’ Hou noted soberly in his journal that, at the time of their visit, the average income in the village was about 100 yuan (US$27) per year, still less than one fifth of the national average and lower than much of the rest of the province.

  While Luo Yingwen warmed to her de facto daughter-in-law, Hou Guobang and Cheng Lin did not get along well at all. In Hou Guobang’s eyes, Hou Dejian was the only thing that had gone right in his life: he was famous, wealthy, and he’d gone to the mainland. He enjoyed basking in the glow of his son’s success. So when Cheng and Hou invited him to fancy restaurants, he naturally insisted on dragging along seven or ten of his mainland friends and acquaintances to bear witness.

  Cheng Lin soon became fed up with Hou Guobang’s behaviour and what she perceived as his drain on their finances. For his part, Hou Guobang considered Cheng Lin tight-fisted and ungracious. The tensions between them would trigger a series of events that led the following year to Hou’s participation in the protest movement, his transformation into a full-time dissident and his ultimate expulsion from socialist paradise.

  NOT long after his father returned to Taiwan, Hou plunged himself once more into the brave new world of litigation. He lodged a fresh suit, this one with the Beijing Intermediate Court and directly against the Oriental Song and Dance Company, for illegal appropriation of his name. He alleged that they’d used his name to get official approval for the Sound of the Orient studio. He demanded that the company pay him compensation and cover his legal expenses. He confided to me that not only was this whole court business a lot of fun for a ‘born troublemaker’ like himself, but potentially lucrative and ‘an excellent way of getting free publicity’.

  Hou also felt he was reaching a deeper understanding of the society in which he lived. Having experienced Chinese political systems on both sides of the ideological divide, he concluded that China’s problems lay deep in the national character, in what the Taiwan essayist Bo Yang called ‘the soy sauce vat of Chinese culture’. Hou wrote in his diary, ‘Deep in the Chinese soul lies the collective urge to punish anyone who would strive for freedom, who is dissatisfied with the status quo, who has ambition. Such individuals make others feel insecure, they appear to threaten family life and social order. Chinese society tries to quash such people.’

  With thoughts like these, it was inevitable that Hou would become close friends with Liu Xiaobo, the feisty literary critic, aesthetician and university lecturer, fan of Nietzsche, brilliant political essayist and general ratbag, who shared Hou’s critical view of the Chinese national character. It was the same Liu Xiaobo who so detested ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ that he wrote a diatribe against it.

  Xiaobo was one year older than Hou and also one of Geremie’s closest friends in Beijing. A skinny chain-smoker with acne-ravaged skin, a severe stutter and thick glasses, he nonetheless possessed a strange charisma and was an irrepressible raconteur. His written output was prodigious and he could recite everything he’d written word for word—and frequently did. Though I enjoyed the style with which Xiaobo blasted nearly all of Chinese culture’s sacred cows, and admired his essays, I thought him intolerably full of himself. He also had the worst table manners I’d ever seen in my whole life. Once, when I was staying with the Yangs, he came to visit after dinner. Xiaobo fetched a pair of chopsticks from the kitchen and hoed into the leftovers, scarcely pausing to swallow or even chew, all the while delivering a monologue on the subject of why women didn’t make great mathematicians or philosophers. I was so appalled by the whole performance I think I may even have yelled at him.

  When Xiaobo first met Hou, in 1987, he told him straight off that a pop composer had no business being so weighted down by the ‘traditional burdens’ of the Chinese intellectual, concern for the fate of his nation and his people. You can’t dance to angst, he said. Hou surprised Xiaobo by agreeing with him.

  ‘So,’ Hou told me, ‘Xiaobo goes, “W-w-well, actually, I d-d-d-d-on’t know your w-w-w-ork very w-w-well.”’ Hou loved imitating Xiaobo’s speech defect. ‘He’d only really heard “Heirs of the Dragon”. I played him some of the songs from After Thirty and he said he really liked them. Of course, Xiaobo was never a great audience. He could never shut up long enough to listen to a song all the way through.’

  I asked Xiaobo if this was true. ‘N-n-no! I listened t-to the wh-wh-whole thing!’ he insisted.

  From the day they met, the pair became the closest of friends. It was, Xiaobo later said, ‘a kind of love at first sight’. It didn’t matter to Xiaobo that they came from such different worlds, though some of his friends in academe would chide him for hanging around with a pop singer.

  Xiaobo told me he liked Hou because—and you’ll just have to imagine the stutter here—‘I’d rather listen to an extremely intelligent person say something totally ridiculous than to a mediocrity deliver a whole pile of truths.’ I agreed, which is why I so enjoyed my own conversations with Hou, despite his occasionally crackpot logic. Xiaobo recalled that, ‘One day, Dejian said to me, “I know that God doesn’t exist.” I asked him how he knew. “Because if there were a God, how could I stand not being him?”’ Xiaobo chuckled. If Hou had a touch of the megalomaniac about him, so did Xiaobo; they were a perfect match.

  An Australian diplomat who was friends with both dubbed Xiaobo ‘Dostoyevsky’ and Hou ‘Tolstoy’. Xiaobo was critical from the start of what he called Hou’s ‘messiah complex’, sensing that his famous generosity masked a desire to patronise.

  For his part, Hou was much taken by Xiaobo, recording the critic’s observations on art and life in his own journal. ‘I tend to have two types of friends,’ Hou later admitted to me. ‘The first are more like followers or fans. The second, and they’re rare, are people I think are wonderful, and who
are my equal. People like Liu Xiaobo.’ When Xiaobo left China late in 1988 to take up visiting fellowships at universities in Europe and the States, Hou mourned the loss of his company.

  Even with Xiaobo overseas, Hou was increasingly drawn to life in the capital. His infatuation with Guangzhou was fading. Since he was going to be spending more time in Beijing, he decided to invest in a little ‘political insurance’. He joined his first official organisation, the Committee for Promoting the Peaceful Reunification of China. The committee was headed by Yan Mingfu, head of the Party’s United Front Department. Yan was so chuffed at Hou’s enrolment that he made him a member of the committee’s presidium. Yet Hou still couldn’t toe a Party line to save his life. He told a Hong Kong reporter that he saw no reason why the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong couldn’t just peacefully co-exist as they were. If there had to be some kind of reunification, it ought to be based on the ‘will of the people, democratic principles and the rule of law’.

  By the end of 1988, nearly half a million Taiwan Chinese had visited the mainland. Taiwan also opened its doors to mainlanders who wanted to attend family funerals or visit sick relatives in Taiwan, and invited mainlanders studying abroad to visit the island. In practice, they were extremely careful about who they let in: there was a long blacklist and no Communist Party members need apply.

  So many academic, sporting and cultural exchanges took place that Taiwan’s newspapers stopped reporting every one of them. Business links blossomed as well—Taiwan’s exports to the mainland, channelled through Hong Kong, were growing by nearly 70 per cent a year. Taiwan investors, inspired by new ‘Regulations on Encouraging Investment from Taiwan Compatriots’ that gave them better terms and conditions than those enjoyed by foreign or other overseas Chinese investors, defied Nationalist bans to put their money into mainland enterprises. At the first meeting of the Committee for Peaceful Reunification that Hou attended, the weiqi (go) champion Nie Weiping announced that he’d been invited to play a tournament in Taiwan. He declared that if he went, he’d take with him the mission of reunification. Everyone but Hou applauded. Then Yan Mingfu spoke. He said Nie’s intentions were good, but since he’d been invited to play weiqi, that’s what he should do, no more, no less. Hou laughed. ‘This time,’ he told me, ‘I was the only one who applauded.’