The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  Hou smuggled out a copy to me. In a pencilled note scribbled on the back, he wrote, ‘The consequence of our actions is out of our hands. Perhaps you could say that the three of us are a thermometer taking China’s temperature. What happens to us will demonstrate the state of China’s health. If it really is in the grip of an extremely high fever, there’s nothing we can do to save it…At least our conscience will be clear.’

  They called a press conference at Hou’s place for Thursday, 31 May, less than a week before the anniversary of the massacre. Informing reporters of the date and time, Gao Xin joked that everything would go as scheduled unless ‘we’ve already disappeared when you arrive’.

  Hou told me about their plans on the phone. I wished them luck. I felt nervous for them, but full of admiration.

  If the Chinese leadership took action against the trio, it risked jeopardising the renewal of China’s Most Favoured Nation trading status with the US. On the other hand, if they did nothing, it would be taken as a sign that they would tolerate dissent.

  Gao Xin planned to spend the night of 30 May at Hou’s place. Driving Zhou Duo home, Hou noticed a car tailing him the whole way. When he got home himself, a nervous Gao told him that half a dozen unmarked cars had already pulled up outside.

  ‘I noticed,’ Hou replied, forcing a smile. ‘We’d better get some rest.’

  At 11.30 p.m., there was a sharp rap on the door. Hou answered it in his pyjamas. A handful of uniformed policemen stood there.

  ‘How are things going, Mr Hou?’ one greeted him.

  ‘Fine thanks,’ Hou replied. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We’d like you to come with us.’

  ‘All right.’

  He threw on some clothes. They picked up the small bag he’d kept packed for just such an occasion and carried it outside to a waiting black Nissan. Nissan seemed to be the car of choice for security men on both sides of the Strait—when Taiwan’s Garrison Command took him in for questioning some fourteen years earlier, it was in a Nissan-produced Yue Loong sedan.

  Half an hour later, more security men returned for Gao Xin and Xie. A third team collected Zhou Duo from his apartment.

  As the men drove Hou to Shunyi County, on the outskirts of Beijing, no one said a word. At the guesthouse there, they presented him with a form to sign. Across the top was written ‘Suspected counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation: legal detention for questioning.’

  No sooner had Hou settled into his room than two men in their mid-to-late thirties came in. The older one, Gao, barked accusingly at him. ‘All these years, the Communist Party looked after you…’

  Hou cut in. ‘Let’s get one thing straight. Who’s looked after whom? I think it’s more accurate to say I’ve looked after the Communist Party. I paid 223,800 yuan in taxes in one year alone. I’m paying your Party Secretary-General’s salary!’ The outburst seems to have floored Gao. He strode out in a huff.

  The other fellow, Qu, made excuses for Gao and tried to butter Hou up. Hou knew that in the model revolutionary opera of police interrogation, Qu was the bailian, ‘white face’, or good cop, playing opposite Gao’s heilian, ‘black face’ or bad cop. Qu acknowledged the situation was awkward for everyone. If Hou would only co-operate, all of his mates would be released in just a few days. That’s how Hou knew his friends were also in detention.

  In the morning, Hou phoned the president of Beijing’s Foreign Correspondents Club to cancel the press conference for ‘personal reasons’. Asked if he was under any kind of pressure, he replied in a restrained voice, ‘I don’t wish to discuss this.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Hou glanced at the security men monitoring his every word. ‘It’s not convenient for me to say.’

  Within an hour dozens of reporters had gathered outside Hou’s home in Double Elms. Four men, two of whom wore the trousers of the Public Security Bureau uniform, turned up to speak with them.

  ‘Ni hao,’ they greeted the reporters. ‘We’re friends of Hou Dejian’s. Here’s a note from him.’ The note, written in Hou’s handwriting, repeated the line about having personal business to attend to and said he’d be back after 4 June.

  The journalists noticed they were being observed by men in jeeps parked nearby. When a Canadian television crew tried to film the jeeps, one drove straight at them.

  The disappearance of the three made international headlines. The Asian Wall Street Journal ran it as the top story of the day. A government spokeswoman would only comment that ‘certain formalities’ had to be observed when Chinese citizens wanted to meet foreign journalists. The Public Security Bureau refused even to confirm they’d been detained.

  In the guesthouse, Hou’s captors presented him with a portfolio of press clippings. ‘You said at least a thousand people died on 4 June last year.’ Gao stabbed the clippings with a finger. ‘What’s your proof?’

  ‘Your crimes really aren’t that severe,’ Qu chimed in reassuringly. ‘Just admit to them and everything will be fine.’

  ‘We could send you up for fifteen years,’ Gao snarled. He listed thirty statements that Hou would have to retract, including his condemnation of the use of tanks and automatic weapons against unarmed citizens.

  ‘I’m an artist,’ Hou replied. ‘The most important thing to me is the truth. Lies are of no use to you anyway.’

  They ordered him to write a ‘sincere self-examination’.

  When he handed the result over to Gao, the policeman exploded. ‘This isn’t a self-examination! This is a self-justification!’

  ‘You know,’ Hou said to me later, ‘I wasn’t trying to be a smart-arse. I wanted them to understand my motivations.’

  After ten days, an official of the Public Security Bureau arrived at the guesthouse. Storming into Hou’s room, he snapped, ‘What’s wrong? They’re being too nice to you, are they?’ He smirked. ‘We know everything, you know. We even know what you say in private.’

  ‘I always suspected you were bugging my phone,’ Hou replied, hiding his anger. ‘If you’ve got all the evidence you need, go ahead then, take me to court.’

  ‘I’ve come to tell you that the highest authorities have made their decision, and it’s final. You have a choice: go to prison or return to Taiwan.’

  ‘If I choose prison, how many years are we talking?’

  ‘Let’s see…counter-revolution, probably fifteen years.’

  ‘What’s your proof?’

  ‘Listen, Mr Hou, no one wants you to go to prison. You always got away with a lot more than any ordinary Chinese citizen could. If you were a nobody, you’d have disappeared a long time ago.’ He paused.

  ‘Your friends are in our hands. If you return to Taiwan, we’ll let them go. If you don’t, you know what will happen to them. Returning to Taiwan would also be a good move so far as your Sichuan relatives here are concerned. We know you care a lot about your friends and family and wouldn’t like to see them in any trouble.’

  A chill went down Hou’s spine. ‘I’ll go back to Taiwan,’ he said. ‘But what if Taiwan won’t have me back?’

  ‘We’ll look after that, Mr Hou.’

  On 3 June, more than one thousand students at Beijing University defied the authorities by gathering late at night on campus to sing protest songs and smash small glass bottles—a reference to the fact that Deng Xiaoping’s name sounds like the phrase ‘little bottles’. Despite heavy security on the square, someone managed to scatter disks of white paper, symbolic money for the dead, from a passing car. AK-47-wielding troops beat several foreign journalists outside the universities and roughed up some students, but otherwise the anniversary of the massacre passed in the capital without major incident.

  The security men took Hou Dejian back to his apartment on 13 June. While he put some clothes in a bag, they searched his apartment for diaries, letters and papers, and confiscated his PRC passport while they were at it. They brought in a notary public so that Hou could formally turn over the management of his affairs to Xie, who u
nbeknownst to Hou had been detained in the same guesthouse.

  On 16 June, an armed escort drove Hou to the military airport at Nanyuan. After the other passengers on the flight to the coastal city of Fuzhou had boarded, he and his guard settled into the first-class compartment by themselves. Another policeman videotaped him every step of the way. Hou felt sick to his stomach. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the mainland, his life, his family and all his friends there. Sensing that it would give the leaders for whom the video was being made too much satisfaction were he to appear as pathetic as he felt, he pulled faces at the camera.

  In Fuzhou they took him to a nondescript flat belonging to the Public Security Bureau. They woke him early on the following day, and were driving him towards the harbour when a gale blew up. They turned back.

  ‘Why are we turning around?’ Hou asked.

  ‘The weather, moron,’ Gao replied.

  The following morning the weather was fine.

  AT 6 a.m. on 18 June 1990, Chinese border patrol boat 231 sped out of Fuzhou harbour, heading into the Taiwan Strait. Some forty men were aboard the fast, thirty-metre armed vessel. They included sailors of the People’s Liberation Army as well as employees of both the Beijing and Fujian Province Public Security Bureaus.

  The two security men assigned to guard Hou Dejian took turns spewing over the rails. Hou himself lay on one of the six bunks in the cabin, his whole body frozen with tension, anger and fear.

  He’d caught his last glimpse of the green coast of Fujian Province in mid-morning. A piercing blast on the boat’s siren around six in the evening gave him a start. He listened closely. They’d cut the engines and he could make out the thump of a second boat being hauled up alongside. As the Public Security Bureau goons, still green around the gills, blundered into the cabin, Hou closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

  ‘Why the fuck aren’t you ready?’ one of them snapped. ‘Get your stuff together. Hurry up!’

  Hou stretched, sat up and tied his shoelaces with provocative slowness.

  Appearing on deck, he saw they had the video camera out again. He made a face. Then, with a shock he felt deep in his guts, he noticed that the boat secured alongside was merely an old, run-down fishing boat from Taiwan. What was going on? Hadn’t they promised to make official arrangements for his return?

  By now, several armed PLA soldiers and policemen had boarded the fishing boat. ‘Which one of you is the captain?’ a policeman demanded roughly of the two Taiwanese men on board.

  ‘Me,’ answered thirty-nine-year-old You Yindi nervously. He produced some documents, which the mainlanders inspected. His nineteen-year-old first mate was so terrified he burst into tears. They had even less idea than Hou what was going on.

  ‘Right,’ the policeman said. ‘I order you to take this person back to Taiwan with you.’ He pointed to Hou Dejian.

  ‘I wouldn’t dare!’ You cried. The penalties for smuggling people from the mainland to Taiwan were severe.

  The policeman intimated that Hou was a Taiwan businessman involved in illegal dealings on the mainland.

  ‘How do I know he’s not a spy?’

  The policeman ignored the question. ‘Do you have a hiding place on the boat?’

  ‘No.’ You Yindi glanced nervously at Hou.

  The policemen frowned. ‘This is a fishing boat, yeah? Surely, you’ve got a refrigerated compartment for your catch.’

  You nodded and pointed it out. It was about two metres long, and just high enough for someone to sit up inside. There were no fish and the cooling equipment was turned off.

  ‘Move it.’ One of the policemen ordered Hou onto the other boat. Clutching his bag of possessions, he glared into the lens of the video camera and declared in English, ‘I shall return!’ Then he boarded the fishing boat and, with as much dignity as he could muster, eased himself down the hatch and into the hold.

  Hou had played many roles in his thirty-three years. Now heading back to Taiwan with no travel documents except his long-expired Taiwan passport and no guarantee that Taiwan would welcome him back, he was about to play illegal immigrant or refugee. Hou briefly savoured the irony. The composer of the most popular Chinese patriotic ballad of the decade, the very title of which had entered the language as a synonym for the Chinese people, had become a man without a home on either side of the Taiwan Strait, a nationalist without a nation.

  In the stinking, stuffy refrigerator compartment, Hou battled nausea and kept his head as close to the opening as possible, sipping from a bottle of water given to him by the fishermen. The mainland police had warned You not to allow his ‘guest’ to roam around the boat, but also to make sure that he not suffocate to death either. ‘All these orders,’ You muttered to himself, ‘and not a cent in compensation.’

  A few hours later, You loosened the hatch on the compartment to give Hou more air. Soon afterwards, Hou crawled out and appeared on deck, looking so haggard that You took pity on him and allowed him to stay. Together with the boy, Ah Chuang, they shared a smoke and a snack of bread rolls.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Hou asked cautiously.

  ‘Nup,’ the captain answered. If he was curious, he didn’t let on.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Hou assured him. ‘If the Taiwan police catch us, they’re not going to do anything too serious to me.’

  You told the press later that it wasn’t Hou he was worried about.

  The Chinese patrol boat continued to tail the fishing vessel from a distance. When, close to midnight, it slowed to a halt, the patrol boat raced up and pulled alongside. Several security men boarded the boat. Two of them scrambled up to the helm. There, they discovered Hou lying sound asleep. There was no sign of the two fishermen.

  One of the policeman woke Hou with a shove.

  Hou opened his eyes, took one look at the Communist uniform and struck out furiously, hitting the policeman in the arm.

  ‘Looking for trouble, arsehole?’ the policeman shouted. He would have struck back but his partner restrained him.

  ‘We’re only concerned about your safety, Mr Hou,’ the second man averred.

  ‘That’s rich,’ Hou muttered. He refused to speak to either of them. They located the two fishermen below decks tinkering with the engine, which had broken down. The police ordered two navy mechanics from the patrol boat to assist with the repairs. Soon the fishing boat was on its way again.

  The following day, You and Ah Chuang caught a large fish, which they cooked in rice porridge with pickled vegetables for lunch. They’d hardly said a word to Hou the entire time.

  ‘This is delicious. What sort of fish is it?’ Hou figured fish was a safe topic to raise with fishermen.

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ You snapped. Then, as if embarrassed by his own gruffness, he picked out the most tender part of the fish with his chopsticks and placed it in Hou’s rice bowl.

  At approximately eight o’clock on the evening of the second day, the lights of Keelung, Taiwan’s northernmost port, twinkled in the distance. It took four more hours to reach the entrance to the harbour at Nanfang’ao, a fishing village in nearby Yilan County. By now there were many other fishing boats around. You Yindi had been at sea for forty days and didn’t have anything to show for it; he bought some fish from the other boats so that he’d look like he’d actually been fishing. Hou wondered silently if You’s catch normally consisted of smuggled goods.

  Hou with his mother Luo Yingwen in Taipei after he became the first Taiwan defector to be returned to sender in June 1990.

  The captain broke into Hou’s thoughts. ‘Can you swim?’

  ‘No,’ Hou lied. He guessed that if he said yes, he’d be over the side before you could say ‘Welcome to Taiwan’.

  They slept one more night on board. Early the next morning, You persuaded another, smaller boat into taking Hou ashore. Hou had given You US$600, half of all the money he had on him. You gave Ah Wang, the owner of the smaller boat, a little over half of that. Both captains were aware that
, only two weeks earlier, Taiwan’s new prime minister, Hau Po-tsun, had vowed to strengthen Taiwan’s coastal defences and threatened to use the military to crack down on smuggling if necessary. Yet after a further fifteen minutes concealed in the hold of Ah Wang’s boat, just two days after leaving the mainland, Hou slipped ashore undetected by anyone at all. It was Wednesday 20 June. Exactly seven years and sixteen days after Hou stepped foot on the mainland, he became the first Taiwan defector to be returned to sender.

  You Yindi had given Hou some Taiwan currency in exchange for another $200. Filthy after fifty hours at sea without a wash, exhausted and dazed, Hou straggled into one of the village’s little seaside restaurants for breakfast. The owner looked Hou up and down, and saying, ‘We have very good water here,’ handed him a towel and soap, and pointed him to a tap out the front. After breakfast, Hou caught a taxi to the Taipei suburb of Muzha and the family home he hadn’t seen since 1983. At the sight of him, Luo Yingwen, whose last news of her son was that he’d been taken from his Beijing home by security forces three weeks earlier, nearly fainted with surprise and relief.

  After a day with his mother, Hou turned himself in to the Taiwan Bureau of Investigation. Questioned extensively (including, after all these years, about whether I’d had anything to do with his defection), they placed Hou in his mother’s custody.

  ‘The return of the author of “Heirs of the Dragon” from the homeland of the dragon to Taiwan,’ a Hong Kong journalist wrote, ‘is an event that has shaken the entire world of “heirs of the dragon”.’

  It certainly presented the Taiwan government with a few problems and not only because his return made a joke of the government’s pledge to shore up the island’s maritime defences. The Nationalists had recently made a point of prosecuting long-standing political cases, including those of dissidents and advocates of Taiwan independence who’d returned to Taiwan after years in exile. In fact, an exiled Taiwan dissident, Chen Chaonan, was arrested at the airport days after Hou’s return. There was the problem of whether or not to prosecute Hou for sedition for going to China in the first place, as well as illegal entry. To top things off, his return came at a sensitive time in cross-Strait relations. President Lee Teng-hui had just appealed to the mainland to open government-to-government talks. As the Far Eastern Economic Review commented, ‘Into this volatile mixture of issues arrives Hou, with his ready made pop following, his international cachet, his demonstrated propensity for provocative comment and his odd mixture of reunification advocacy and pro-democracy militancy.’