Even today the sound of Western music brings back to him the taste of printer’s ink, tobacco and red wine, the sorghum reek of Erguotou, and the scent of the single brand of shampoo that all the girls used in those days.
Later Guo Jian couldn’t remember exactly what music he heard that night, but every song was new. In those years the West came to China on cassette tapes, mixed by foreigners before they left home and copied for their new Chinese friends. Homesickness weighted these collections towards the iconic, to the anthems and the classics. And so, in the soundscape of mid-eighties China, ‘Sounds of Silence’ mixed with ‘Hotel California’, ‘Life During Wartime’ with ‘Brown Sugar’, and ‘Beat it!’ with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Je t’aime . . . moi non plus’. The history of Western rock and pop became the soundtrack for Beijing’s ‘summer of love’, romantic, allusive, sexy, poetic and subversive. Even today drunken reunions in China can erupt late in the evening into slurred renditions of John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, while ‘Sounds of Silence’ plays on a continuous loop for ice skaters on the Forbidden City’s frozen moat.
That night Guo Jian stepped inside the underground culture that would be his true university for the next four years. From then on he committed to a helter-skelter journey of discovery, ignoring the course laid down for him by his elders, following connections where they led, looking for new worlds in art and literature and life. And around the country hundreds of thousands of other young people would do the same.
The host of the party that night was Aniwar.
He had arrived in Beijing just a year before Guo Jian, and found that the Minzu University was the perfect base for exploration. It was an academy of outsiders, their ethnic origins marking them out from the Han Chinese majority. The neighbouring big institutions like Peking University and Renmin (People’s) University might have been in the intellectual vanguard, but Minzu was edgier.
By the time Guo Jian met him, Aniwar already had a reputation as the ‘king of cool’. ‘I think he was born cool,’ Guo Jian reminisced to me one day. ‘He was just so avant-garde, so far ahead with the music he was listening to, and the way he dressed. And he was making connections with foreigners way before the rest of us.’
On the weekends Aniwar and his friends would organise parties in their class studio on campus. They would spread the word to people they thought would be interesting, even stopping individuals they liked the look of on the street. It was natural that they would ask Guo Jian, this young guy from the south who still wore his army uniform. And every weekend there was a standing invitation to the young women who modelled for their life classes.
These women were pioneers. Nude modelling had been banned during the Cultural Revolution and it was only in 1984 that life classes were once again allowed in art schools. In that first year there were just three young women in Beijing who took up the challenge. It was still the era when people worked in assigned jobs; theirs was in a state factory, but it was the kind of place that Deng Xiaoping’s reforms would soon put out of business. The girls pulled wages of around 40 yuan a month simply to clock on and read the papers. For art school modelling they could get 8 yuan an hour and an entry to the avant-garde. It was no contest.
They modelled for each of the colleges in Beijing, and were couriers for the gossip of the burgeoning Beijing art world. They took on the role of model/muse for Aniwar and his classmates, keeping them in cigarettes, buying them canvas if they couldn’t afford it and mothering them with advice. Paid by the hour, they arrived early and left late. They would doze on the sofa they posed on, and fix their hair in the beautiful antique mirror that was rumoured to have come from the Forbidden City.
The spacious campus of Minzu University had run a little wild during the Cultural Revolution, and abandoned buildings were scattered at the corners of its ruined grounds. Aniwar and two of his friends decided to take one over for a project.
Their idea was to create a world apart into which other people could enter. All three were painters but they had no interest in staging a formal exhibition. Instead they wanted to create a space for the imagination, a three-dimensional artwork using sound, light, colour and scent. They didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what they were doing or the background in Western art to know, but they were arranging one of China’s first art installations. Wisely or not, they went ahead without official permission.
The building they chose was perfect: cavernous, empty, and a long way from their teachers’ classrooms. They carpeted the concrete floor with fallen leaves and lit the corners of the room with candles. They hung their paintings high on the walls at odd angles. Feeling something was still missing, Aniwar selected a dead tree branch and placed it high in the rafters and brushed onto its gnarled surface a single line of pigment.
When they were ready, they spread the word as they had for their parties, inviting their friends and roping in strangers from the street.
The opening was a sensation. They had created a soundscape with an ethnic-Korean drummer, a Tibetan singer and a lutenist from Xinjiang. It was like no music that anyone had ever heard. The space teemed with people, and a woodland scent rose from the crushed leaves, while shadows went leaping up the walls as the candles flared and guttered. People stayed for hours, captivated by the music and the warm light, the oddly hung paintings and the forest ambiance. When the last visitor left, the artists bedded down on the floor among the leaves.
Fine Arts in China, a critical magazine that was itself only a few months old, was enthusiastic. The university authorities weren’t. ‘You’re not here to make art,’ the three were told. ‘You’re here to learn!’ Under orders to close the space, the students sought out the biggest padlock they could find, so that if people leaned hard on the door they could still look through the gap into the space within, where the forbidden world lived on.
Early in 1986 Fine Arts invited Aniwar to publish his statement on the project. He wrote: ‘We do not want to follow any school of thought or painting. We simply hope that our successes or our failures will be of our own making.’
It was the spirit that drove a lot of things in those years. All over China people were trying to make their own decisions and find their own way, not just in the universities, but on the farms, and among the burgeoning group of independent traders who were beginning to change the face of the cities. People wanted to be themselves. More dangerously, many of them wanted to be heard.
Guo Jian stood in the crowd pressing up against the stage waiting for the concert to start. He’d taken a risk to be here. At the door a stony-faced clerk had registered his name and checked his details against his identity card, while a stream of foreigners flowed past him into the hall unchallenged. Direct contact between ordinary Chinese and foreigners was discouraged, and making Chinese register was a form of silent intimidation. Guo Jian had spent long enough in army administration to know things like this always ended up on your file, but he no longer cared enough to be cautious.
Ever since the night of the party, he had been chasing connections. He was always sneaking off from school to see new exhibitions before they were closed down. He had been to Aniwar’s show and was amazed. He couldn’t understand where all these ideas were coming from. He stopped painting and started reading. Suddenly it seemed like every book in the world was available. He’d pick them up one after another in the markets, or from a guy selling off a pedal cart by the side of the road. Lu Xun, Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams—new books would come so rapidly that he never seemed to finish one before another demanded his attention.
The whole of Western modernism was coming at China in a rush. Revolutions in thought long assimilated into the Western canon broke over them in waves. The whole of twentieth-century art was telescoped, too: Cubism, Expressionism, Warhol and Dali were jumbled into whatever patterns Guo Jian and thousands like him felt like making. Just like the mix tapes of Western music, Western culture arrived in China in a glorious mash-up th
at gave it a new vitality.
Among his teachers Guo Jian found one true iconoclast. Still in his twenties, the teacher guided him to art he might never have found on his own, like the tortured erotic works of Egon Schiele. He gave him his first real education in Western music as well, spinning cassettes for him and tracing the influences of Prince, the Police, the Eagles and the Beatles.
All over Beijing, young Chinese musicians had started putting their own rock acts together. It was only a matter of time before one of them broke out, but no one was prepared for the impact of Cui Jian when he arrived. He had written a hit that was being sung from one end of the country to the other, and now Guo Jian was standing in the surging crowd, waiting for him to take the stage.
In the early eighties, Cui Jian had been a classically trained twenty-something trumpeter with the Beijing Philharmonic Orchestra when a friend sat him down with some mix tapes of American rock. Cui Jian went straight out to buy his first guitar and by the mid-eighties he and his new band were playing the capital’s sketchy bar scene. Then, in May 1986, at the age of 24 he took the stage at a nationally televised concert for peace at the Beijing Workers Stadium. Dressed in a traditional high-collared tunic like a Qing-dynasty guitar hero, he played ‘Nothing to My Name’ for the first time. Chinese rock and roll was never the same after that.
It was ‘Nothing to My Name’ that Guo Jian and everyone else had come to hear that night, and when the first shimmering chords floated through the hall, the crowd went wild. The song’s plaintive start is a lover’s plea to a woman who spurns him. Through the first two verses he offers her his dreams and his freedom but she just laughs at him because—in the words of the famous chorus—he has nothing to his name. Suddenly, a fiery instrumental duel breaks out between guitar and Chinese trumpet, and hope fills the final verse as the singer sees his lover’s hands begin to tremble and her eyes fill with tears. The song ends with the soaring realisation that she will go with him after all.
‘Nothing to My Name’ was written as a love song, but its theme of alienation, its triumphant progression, and Cui Jian’s Springsteen-like delivery turned it into something that spoke to Chinese youth about a lot more than a boy and a girl. Like all great rock and roll anthems, it had a simple lyric that caught the mood of the moment: just singing the chorus was a release for young people who were starting to wonder if the world they were living in could ever measure up to the one they dreamed of.
Guo Jian told me years later that ‘Nothing to My Name’ was the first song he ever heard that really seemed to be in a Chinese voice. And he wasn’t alone. Coming home to Guizhou in the holidays he found his old school friends were singing it, too. They swaggered down the street at night, roaring drunk, singing it at the top of their lungs. It was how they felt, that they had nothing to their name, no direction and no way to express what they felt. And then this song had come along and they realised they weren’t alone. Three years later students would be singing it in Tiananmen Square.
‘I don’t think it was by chance that Cui Jian came along when he did,’ Guo Jian told me one day. ‘At that time there was so much going on, new books, new ideas—the time was ripe. Cui Jian was conjured up by people’s needs. You wanted to express yourself, you wanted to make a noise and Cui Jian brought us together to make a noise.
‘He was our Bob Dylan.’
I first heard ‘Nothing to My Name’ sung a cappella in Mang Ke’s tiny apartment one night in the early summer of 1986. Midway through a drunken dinner, a skinny guy with high cheekbones and weathered skin swayed to his feet and began to sing. At first I thought it was a folk song, as it had that kind of raw simplicity. But I soon knew this was no folk song. Around the low table people beat time, urging him on, and in the final verse they joined in: ‘Oh! You will go with me! You will go with me!’ It was exhilarating. We applauded and then toasted the moment with beer and Erguotou. I asked the nearest person to write down the lyrics for me in my notebook and I later spent hours deciphering the characters until I had my own rough translation. I carried the piece of paper with me for years, even after the events of June 1989 leached the words of all their triumphant joy.
Mang Ke’s apartment was up several flights of grey concrete steps in a characterless building in a remote part of town. Harshly lit and minimally furnished, it was also one of the most exciting places in Beijing. Ever since he had first started writing poetry Mang Ke had attracted people around him, but his work with Today had made him a legend. Bei Dao and Huang Rui had both left the country but Mang Ke remained. Aspiring artists, poets, dreamers and random foreigners sought him out and he received us generously, though not indulgently.
Conversation was always vital around him. Suddenly I found myself having to have opinions again on TS Eliot or Albert Camus or Nietzsche or Freud—subjects I hadn’t felt passionate about since I was a teenager. Encountering them again in Beijing in those days, their works hit me afresh. It seemed like every foreigner was treated as an emissary; I found myself thinking more deeply about my own culture than I had ever done before.
Poetry came easily then, too. People got up to read their work as naturally as they would get up and sing. You would find yourself at poetry parties, the best of them held in the ruins of the Old Summer Palace beyond the university district beneath the Fragrant Hills. A group of vagabond poets lived there, renting tumbledown rooms from farmers who cultivated crops among the fallen stones of what had once been a grand pleasure garden for the Qing emperors. You’d swig mouthfuls of burning strong Erguotou and lie on your back and look at the stars, the words reeling in your head. On warm nights you would sleep outside and in the morning cycle back into town in a dream. In those days I’d often find lines of Western poetry humming in my head, as powerful as if they had been written for that moment. On a seemingly endless loop came the famous couplet from Wordsworth’s ‘The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
It was bliss, and I missed entirely the warning in the title.
Leaving Mang Ke’s place or the Old Summer Palace was always disorienting. On the surface the city seemed not to be changing at all. The stately bicycles still dominated the roads, clerks still napped, heads on their arms, on the counters of the state-owned stores, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still held their surreally uninformative press conferences weekly without fail, and most of the city was shuttered and dark by 6 p.m. That was when the other Beijing came to life. In those years I often felt that my existence was a black and white movie that only flared into colour after dark.
Much of my journalistic round focused on the stream of businessmen, legitimate and carpetbaggers alike, who were flocking to China in search of a fortune, or on the revolving door of world leaders coming to pay court. Every few days a new national flag would be hoisted alongside China’s on Chang’an Avenue, and China Daily would feature yet another headline hailing China’s ties with yet another nation. One day it would be the Pakistan relationship that was going from strength to strength, then a few days later it would be New Zealand’s turn or Zimbabwe’s. Queen Elizabeth II came calling, too. She arrived by plane but the royal yacht met her in Shanghai where she threw a lavish shipboard banquet, much to the chagrin of the trade officials of less favoured countries. Hard to compete with a yacht, they muttered.
Covering these visits could be fun—notably the Queen’s arrival, which found me throwing back a super-charged gin and tonic at 11 a.m. at a special drinks party for the Commonwealth press corps—but there was a sense that most of the business stories in those days were going nowhere. It would be some time before foreign companies and governments discovered how best to work the angles to profit from China’s opening.
But all of that was just a sideshow beside the momentousness of China’s transformation. We were witnessing a movement of people and an economic upheaval to rival the Industrial Revolution. It was irresistible
to look to history for clues as to what this might mean. Releasing farmers from the communes, promoting private enterprise and encouraging a free flow of workers to the cities and to the new ‘special economic zones’ seemed to guarantee a rise in Chinese people’s autonomy and a loosening of the control of the Communist Party. We looked to countries like Britain where industrialisation had led to the rise of the middle class, the establishment of trade unions, a free media, non-government organisations and other hallmarks of a civil society, and ultimately to parliamentary democracy. Surely China would go the same way?
The opening up of China’s economy and society became visible to us in small ways every day. A new freewheeling class of independent small traders known as getihu appeared across the city, repairing shoes and bicycles, tailoring colourful clothes made to measure, roasting sweet potatoes and chestnuts on upturned oil drums, and hawking candied apples, pinwheels and brilliantly coloured kites. Free markets popped up near the diplomatic compounds and out near the Beijing Zoo, selling clothes that had mysteriously slipped out of the export stream and onto makeshift stalls on dusty patches of parkland, many of which sheltered a brisk black market in foreign exchange as well. Farmers would suddenly appear by the road selling types of fruit and vegetables that hadn’t been seen in the city in decades. I can still remember the excitement when a pedal cart laden with strawberries was sighted trundling into town along the Third Ring Road. In the following days I ate strawberries everywhere. Today they are a regular part of spring in the capital but then they seemed like they came from another world.
We believed the flow of Western ideas and liberalisation was unstoppable. The anti-spiritual pollution campaign was officially condemned as a mistake, a piece of overreach by the old guard that had foundered once it was seen to threaten economic reforms and relations with the West. There was a freer tone in the media, too, not just in cultural magazines, but in bold experiments such as the World Economic Herald in Shanghai, which pushed for deeper reforms.
The Phoenix Years Page 10