The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  The second story was that of Wu Feng, a Qing Dynasty official who managed to put an end to the Taiwan Aborigines’ custom of headhunting, at the cost of his own scalp. ‘There were two points to that story,’ says Hou. ‘One was that Taiwan was under Chinese control in the Qing Dynasty. The other was that the Chinese made sacrifices to bring civilisation to the island.’

  One of the first things Hou asked me that day in 1981 at the Hong Kong Arts Centre was if I’d been to the mainland. I was the first person he’d ever met who’d been there since the revolution. He wanted to know everything I could tell him. He listened to my China stories with a keenness that wasn’t always present when I chatted about my work at Asiaweek or Hong Kong politics or my love life or whatever else was occupying me.

  I didn’t blame him. Nothing in the world seemed as interesting. China was our shared obsession. Hou had suffered from it all his life, whereas I’d come to it through taking Asian studies at university. I began those studies infatuated with the exoticism of silk-robed emperors, bound feet, and the adventures of Jesuit astronomers in the Ming court, and ended up mesmerised by Mao and revolution.

  Dismissing reports of prison camps, torture and starvation as Cold War propaganda, I swallowed a utopian vision of China that was based on photographs of happy, apple-cheeked peasants in magazines such as People’s China, books written by ‘fellow travellers’ like Ross Terrill and Han Suyin, and my own dissatisfaction with American-style corporate capitalism. I wanted to believe that China was building a better world, with none of the problems of my own.

  I still remember the thrill of reading how, on 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong stood on Tiananmen Gate and proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China. Mao had earlier said that China, the ‘sick man of Asia’, had finally ‘stood up’. From my comfortable perspective inside a western university, Mao’s radical economic, political and social programs had an intense, abstract appeal that was, I later realised, lost on many of those who were forced to live through them. China had stood up all right. The problem was, her people would not have a chance to sit down and take a break for many decades.

  I alarmed my parents with my intention to go to China after graduation to work on a People’s Commune and serve the revolution. They didn’t have to worry. By the time I graduated, in 1977, Mao was dead. Even in China no one knew quite how to serve the revolution any more. Besides, I was an American citizen. The US didn’t recognise the People’s Republic, only the Republic of China on Taiwan. Visas were an almost insurmountable problem. I think I was secretly relieved when I realised the more feasible option was to further my Chinese studies in Taipei.

  As determined to ‘liberate Taiwan’ as Chiang Kai-shek was to ‘recover the mainland’, Mao first tried to take the offshore island of Jinmen (also known as Quemoy) from the Nationalists in 1949, shortly after their retreat to Taiwan. Jinmen, only two kilometres from Xiamen, a port city in Fujian Province, lies within artillery range of the mainland and along the shortest direct invasion route. The Nationalist troops repulsed the PLA in a bloody battle that Mao came to view as the worst defeat of the civil war.

  Mao planned to build up the strength of the PLA and attack again. Then the Korean War broke out. Mao had reckoned on engaging a third of his forces in the battle for Taiwan. Once he committed his troops to Korea, he was forced to postpone Taiwan’s ‘liberation’. The conclusion of the Korean War established America’s presence in the region as a strategic ally of the Nationalists. Mao put Taiwan in the too-hard basket and turned his attention to domestic issues.

  In August 1958, the PLA opened fire once more on Jinmen and other islands held by the Nationalists. Jinmen copped 100,000 artillery hits in three days alone. The sirens sounded on Taiwan as well. Hou Dejian, who was two years old, dimly remembers being bundled up and rushed into an air-raid shelter. The Nationalists defended their offshore islands with a ferocity and military competence that took Mao aback. Yet only when the nuclear-equipped aircraft carriers of the US Navy’s Task Force 77 joined the Seventh Fleet already patrolling the area did the Communists abandon their offensive. The war continued on a largely symbolic level, with mainland bombardments of Jinmen on odd-numbered days, and return fire from Jinmen towards the Fujian coast on even-numbered days. The Nationalists took the threat of a flare-up extremely seriously, devoting over half their entire budget to defence for much of the time when Hou was growing up. In 1961, when Hou was five, 56 per cent of Taiwan’s government budget went to the military.

  The first song Hou remembers learning went fangong, fangong, fangong dalu qu! ‘Counter-attack, counter-attack, counter-attack, all the way back to the mainland!’ Another one went, ‘Little plane, little plane, drop those bombs. Kill the Commie bandits by the tons! And President Chiang laughs—ha ha!’

  Hou’s birthday, 1 October, was the Communists’ National Day. When a teacher, noting this, teasingly called him ‘little Mao Zedong’, he burst into tears.

  Breathlessly, he and the other kids would ask each other, ‘When do you think we’ll counter-attack? Do you think it’s going to be tomorrow? Are you scared?’ By the time Hou Dejian reached high school, recovering the mainland had turned into something of a joke. ‘Someone would say, “Lend me some money.” You’d go, “When can you pay me back?” The answer would be, “The moment we recover the mainland”.’ Adolescent boys also had a great time with the slogan gongfei wukong buru, meaning ‘Commie bandits are masters of extensive infiltration’ but literally expressed as ‘There’s not a hole into which Commie bandits will not go.’

  Slogans, slogans, slogans. Everywhere you looked—the walls of classrooms, billboards, in newspapers and on television—you were urged to recover the mainland, counter-attack, maintain eternal vigilance. Every public bus carried a sign advertising the special hotline for dobbing in Communist spies; cinemas displayed instructions for what to do in case of air attack. The rhetoric of recovery, paranoia and war was the white noise of Hou’s youth.

  I giggled when I first sighted the hotline number. It was hard to take seriously all the slogans about ‘Commie bandits’, even if by now I’d read Simon Leys’ Chinese Shadows, a sharp and learned critique of the destruction wrought by Mao and the Communists on Chinese culture and society, and was mortified by my earlier, naive enthusiasm. By the time I arrived in Taiwan, in August 1977—or ‘year 66 of the Republic of China’ as it was officially called there—all the carry-on about recovery and counter-attack seemed quaint.

  I was charmed by Taiwan. I made many Chinese friends— something I knew would be difficult on the mainland, where relations between foreigners and Chinese were strictly monitored. The food was delicious and so cheap that even as a student I could afford to eat out three meals a day. I took kungfu lessons in the park, and negotiated Taipei’s chaotic traffic on a high-handled bicycle I bought from a departing Mormon missionary.

  Taiwan was not yet the economic powerhouse it was to become in the 1980s. One day, I went to the bank to cash some travellers’ cheques. The door was open, but there appeared to be no tellers on duty. The guard sat slumped in a chair with his eyes closed. ‘Excuse me,’ I addressed him uncertainly. ‘Is this a bank?’

  He opened one eye, pointed to his watch—it was noon—and replied grouchily, ‘Nap time.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologised. ‘But I need to change some money.’ Grumbling, he stood up and shuffled over to the service window. I now saw that the tellers were all asleep at their positions, heads resting on their folded arms. He prodded one awake. She squinted at me, ran a hand through her hair and blearily reached for my travellers’ cheques, which she rifled through and then, taking my passport, woke the guy next to her and, handing him the lot, went back to sleep. He yawned, sniffed, peered at the documents, woke someone else, and went back to sleep—and so the transaction unfolded until, red-faced with embarrassment, I finally tiptoed out with my money, careful not to wake the guard, who was snoring.

  Even martial law had its entertaining aspects—
the pubs and clubs got round the official early closing time by sending everyone out the front door, locking it, putting up black-out curtains and then letting them in again through the back. When the police arrived to break up a dance party at my house that had gone on past curfew, I pretended not to speak Chinese. While they called for a translator, my Chinese friends dashed to the bathroom, climbed out the window, slid down the drainpipe to the street and ran home.

  I met an earnest young Taiwanese with chunky black glasses, awkward hair and a guitar he carried everywhere. He serenaded me with the maudlin English tunes ‘Today’ and ‘Summer Wine’. His crush on me went unrequited, just as my crush on my Chinese flatmate Alex, who was intolerably handsome and could recite Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ from memory, ended in tears when, of all appalling treacheries, he brought home another foreign girl.

  Then I met Jeffrey Tang Yu-fang (‘Fang’), Jesse Chang Ta-hsiu and Lawrence Liu Shao-liang. Graduates of Taiwan University, they were smart and funny and fun. Soon we were inseparable, calling ourselves ‘the gang of four’. They were doing their compulsory military service in the Nationalist Army. As talented musicians, they’d been recruited into the Ministry of National Defence Demonstration Band, whose job was to play at official occasions including greeting and farewelling visiting foreign heads of state. That part of their brief wasn’t very taxing. Taiwan didn’t have diplomatic relations with many countries. The US headed a list that included a handful of South American dictatorships, Pacific island nations and African countries more impressed with Taiwan’s aid offers than those of the mainland. Taiwan’s most prestigious allies, the Americans, kept their distance. No US president had been to the island since Dwight D. Eisenhower visited in 1960.

  After reveille and roll call, the boys ditched their uniforms, jumped the fence and headed over to Tang Yu-fang’s place, which I shared with him, his brother Tang Yu-pei and another fellow who was nicknamed Bird, to plan the day’s mischief. So long as they sneaked back into the barracks by dawn, no one seemed to care. Every evening, our flat was crammed with young writers, musicians and artists passionately discussing the latest books and films, arguing politics and playing music. With so many articulate and witty people around I had to be quick just to get a word in. My Chinese improved rapidly.

  I’d quit my studies by then and was working at a small magazine. My other, occasional job was doing voice-overs for Jesuit-produced educational films, though I used to joke to my employer, friend and fellow voice-over artist, Father Jerry Martinson, ‘What’s a nice Jewish girl doing in a place like this?’

  My three best mates formed a band called Trinity that did covers of Jim Croce, the Eagles and songs like America’s ‘A Horse with No Name’. They played at Idea House, a black-walled coffee shop which could seat around fifty people. I loved going to gigs and hanging out in the band room. It was an exciting time for popular music. The ‘campus folk’ movement was in full swing. A student called Yang Xuan had kicked off the trend in 1975, when he set a poem by the contemporary poet Yu Guangzhong to a tune that could be played on a guitar. If campus folk was born in the universities, smoky bars and coffee houses like Idea House were its incubators. Suddenly everyone was a singer-songwriter. Even Jerry Martinson, SJ, performed at a club called The Wooden Door.

  Hou Dejian was another Idea House regular. He’d liked music from the time he was a kid. In primary school, he sang in a choral group, often landing solos. He played the glockenspiel in a school marching band; he calls the time he and his classmates played their beat-up instruments at a funeral his first ‘professional gig’. It never occurred to him that the fact he could go to a movie and come out humming the soundtrack was anything special. ‘I thought everyone could do that,’ he told me. Linking it to the facility with which he could pick up dialects, accents and even memorise long sequences of numbers, he said, ‘I’ve got 20-20 vision in my ears.’

  Hou purchased his first guitar for the equivalent of three American dollars when he was in high school and taught himself to play. Months later, a young colleague of his grandfather’s who was a classical guitarist gave him a few pointers. The most valuable of these, Hou later recalled, was ‘tune the thing’.

  When, in his final years in high school, the market was flooded with cheap, pirated versions of western albums, Hou collected them by the dozen. ‘We got the sixties and seventies all at once,’ he told me, explaining why ‘Knock Three Times’ really was the first western pop song he ever learned. By the time he got to university, he owned seven hundred, mostly pirated, albums. He started to write his own songs.

  I must have seen him perform at Idea House in those pre-‘Heirs of the Dragon’ days, though he couldn’t have made a huge impression. We both reckon we’d have at least met at the time. It wasn’t that big a club.

  One night, a young woman called Yang Zujun stepped on stage at Idea. With her good looks, velvet jumpsuit and acoustic guitar, she seemed to me the essence of cool. (It was the late seventies.) She sang a song called ‘Meilidao’, ‘Beautiful Island’, to the most enthusiastic applause I’d ever heard at Idea. ‘Beautiful Island’, or Formosa, is what the Portuguese explorers called Taiwan when they first sighted it in the sixteenth century. The expression had come to symbolise pride in and love for the island that transcended—and implicitly rejected—the Nationalist view of it as a temporary fortress.

  Like Hou Dejian, Yang Zujun was a member of the first generation of Chinese born on Taiwan to mainland parents. Singers, writers, artists and filmmakers of both Taiwanese and mainland background had begun focusing their gaze on the place they lived in, and the result was electrifying the island’s culture. The ‘nativist’ trend sent students and urban trendies searching out peasant hats and palm-frond raincoats to hang on their walls. Neo-traditional tea-houses replaced coffee shops as favourite haunts of the engagé, and young mainlanders, like my flatmate Fang, prided themselves on their ability to speak Taiwanese.

  Many Taiwan-born mainlanders shared the native Taiwanese distaste for the old mainlander attitudes of cultural superiority. They found it hard to get worked up about recovering the mainland and resented the fact that the Nationalists’ claim to be China’s sole legitimate government was turning Taiwan into a diplomatic pariah. Like their Taiwanese peers, they desired more freedom of expression, a greater degree of democracy and a government that put Taiwan’s interests first.

  The Nationalist administration was a transplant, and Taiwan the body was threatening to reject it. To state this in public was to risk imprisonment. But you could get away with singing songs like ‘Beautiful Island’.

  RETURNING to university in 1975 after his parents’ divorce, the nineteen-year-old Hou Dejian enrolled in accounting. Like music, maths was a natural talent for Hou. In sixth grade, his teacher assigned the class a problem to be worked out on their abacuses. Hou calculated it in his head. His teacher insisted he still needed to learn the abacus. He asked why. She wrote an extremely complex problem on the board, agreeing that if he could solve it in his head before the best student in the class could compute the answer on her abacus, she wouldn’t bother him again. He did and she didn’t.

  But accounting bored him to tears, so Hou transferred to Cheng-chih University’s Chinese literature department. He’d always loved classical poetry and literature, identifying now not just with Monkey, but also with the hopelessly romantic Jia Baoyu from the Qing Dynasty classic Dream of the Red Chamber, which western readers may also know as The Story of the Stone. Studying literature wasn’t the most practical move for a boy from a poor background. But Hou never showed much interest in practicality. He even refused to join the Nationalist Party, though at the time joining up was considered important insurance for one’s future career.

  Hou collected around him an eccentric group of friends, including one nicknamed the Pope for his determination to save the human race, another fellow who eventually landed in a mental asylum, and Sun Weimang, now a prominent Taiwan journalist and novelist. Hou impressed S
un with his guitar playing, his talent for making himself the centre of attention, and his uncanny ability to get everyone else to run around doing things for him.

  They called the flat they shared renzha wo—‘nest of human dregs’. Their favourite game was inviting well-known academics and writers over for tea and then grilling them about their work. ‘We loved getting stuck into people who were up themselves,’ Sun told me. ‘Poets were the worst. We really went after the poets.’ They earned a reputation as free spirits, enhanced each time someone dropped into the flat only to find them sitting around drinking, playing the guitar and debating the issues of the day—stark naked.

  Hou read voraciously. He ploughed through Nietzsche and Sartre and less orthodox streams of Chinese literature than he’d been exposed to at school. He adored the writing of the feisty and prolific Taiwan essayist and historian Li Ao, whose criticisms of the Nationalists had twice landed him in prison. Li Ao was equally scathing about traditional Chinese intellectuals. ‘They say the same things, write the same bullshit and kiss the same arses,’ he wrote, claiming you could only tell them apart by ‘a few minor facial features’. Li’s uninhibited and witty rants made Hou feel ‘as though a window had been opened in my brain and the sun shone in’. He also devoured the works of Lu Xun, a brilliant essayist, satirist and social critic writing in China in the 1920s. Because the Communists approved of Lu Xun, his books were banned in Taiwan, so Hou had to search out dog-eared samizdat editions.