The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  Getting around government censorship was almost a national sport in Taiwan. I recall joining with my Chinese colleagues at the magazine in an effort to steam the censor’s stickers off the entry on Chairman Mao in our Encyclopaedia Britannica. In those pre-global village times, the Nationalists had turned the island into a kind of gated community whose guards refused admission to any information they thought might undermine national morale. Once, I went with Chinese friends to a screening of the American film Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war story narrated by a wounded and paralysed soldier from the Vietnam War. The climax of the film comes when he decides life isn’t worth living and declares that he wants to die. The well-educated audience rumbled with disbelief as the Chinese subtitles for this came up as ‘wo yao huoxiaqu’—‘I must go on living!’

  When Chiang Kai-shek died in April 1975, Hou Guobang heard the news on the radio and wept—‘not that he ever did anything for me, mind you’. The Nationalists decided that the generalissimo’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, would succeed him. When Cheng-chih University considered renaming itself Chiang Kai-shek University, Hou Dejian joked with friends that they should just name it Chiang Ching-kuo University so they wouldn’t have to rename it again when the next president died.

  On 10 October 1976, the outlawed Taiwan independence movement made its unhappiness with the status quo known via a letter bomb which blew off the hand of Taiwan governor Hsieh Tung-min. The Nationalists launched an extensive witch hunt for the movement’s supporters that had ominous echoes of the ‘white terror’ of 1927, when they’d rounded up all suspected Communist sympathisers, including students who were dragged out of their classrooms never to be seen again.

  Woken late one morning in late 1976 by an insistent knocking on his door, Hou opened it to find two representatives of the Garrison Command, the military unit in charge of internal security. ‘Come with us,’ one ordered. ‘We want to ask you some questions.’

  Under martial law, the government had suspended the constitutional rights of anyone accused of political crimes. The Garrison Command was empowered to try suspects secretly in the military courts. Hou’s mouth went dry with fear. Asking them to wait while he threw on some clothes, he quickly scribbled a note to his flatmates saying he was being taken away, and then followed the two men to a waiting black Yue Loong sedan. They drove him across town to an innocuous flat that they kept for purposes of interrogation.

  ‘Why am I here?’ Hou asked.

  A cold smile. ‘You tell us.’

  Thinking someone had dobbed him in for his joke about Chiang Ching-kuo University, Hou kept quiet. The security men questioned him over several days, treating him courteously, but forbidding him to leave the flat. It gradually dawned on Hou that they suspected him of supporting Taiwan independence. Now that, he thought, was a real joke and he told them so. He was only released after the school administration, alerted to Hou’s detention by his flatmates, intervened on his behalf.

  When I first met Hou, his detention by the Garrison Command was one of his favourite stories. In the years that followed, I don’t know how many times I heard Hou boast about having been ‘arrested’ by the Nationalists. His friends in the mainland were particularly impressed. In societies where people can be imprisoned for their political beliefs, a stint in detention—no matter how brief—does wonders for one’s street cred.

  In his third year at uni, Hou and Sun became friends with Dai Hongxuan, a teacher in the music department. Dai, fourteen years their senior, was the son of a minor Cantonese warlord. He’d studied music in Europe. With his balding pate, a squint that made one eye appear larger than the other, and languorous, southern-accented voice, Dai was physically unprepossessing, but Hou, like Sun, quickly found himself under his spell. Dai introduced Hou to western philosophy and culture. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the campus folk movement.

  ‘My best memories of university life all centre around Dai Hongxuan,’ he once told me. ‘I learned from Dai Hongxuan that to be a true artist was to tolerate neither pretence nor hypocrisy, that what an artist needed most was the courage to be true to oneself. In fact,’ he reflected, ‘he probably did me a great deal of harm. I became a writer of pop songs who couldn’t stop thinking of himself as an artist—a recipe for commercial disaster.’

  Hou had been supporting his studies by giving guitar lessons and doing other part-time jobs. When a record company bought the first song he’d ever written for the impressive sum of NT$4000 (US$100), he couldn’t believe his luck. Recorded by a saccharine-voiced female singer, ‘Fishing’ became an instant hit. In an island-wide survey, fans voted it the fifth most popular song of 1978.

  ‘Fishing’ turned Hou into a leading figure in the campus folk movement. He shocked some of his more earnest fans when he answered a reporter’s query as to why he wrote music with the words ‘to get over my inferiority complex, because I enjoy it, and to pull chicks’.

  That Hou had a serious side was evident in other songs he wrote at the time, such as ‘Guiqu laixi’. The title came from a fourth-century poem by Tao Yuanming and translates as ‘Why do you not return home?’ Tao was writing of the homesickness of the mandarin, sent to govern a place far from his own home. Hou’s song—which I loved—was inspired by the true story of one of his neighbours in the juancun, the village odd-jobs man.

  Nationalist military ‘recruiters’ had abducted the man when he was coming out of a cinema with his wife and forced him to serve in the army. He was in his twenties, had only been married for two years and loved his wife very much. Forced to retreat to Taiwan with the rest of the army, he never stopped pining for her. When he was nearly sixty, he confided to Hou’s mother that he had great news. He was remarrying. ‘And my bride’s only twenty-two and even prettier than my first wife!’ he boasted. In the end, the new wife took every last cent the poor old soldier had saved and ran off. Devastated, he committed suicide.

  Hou Dejian, moved by the story, drew on the semi-classical language of Tao Yuanming’s poem:

  Why do you not go home?

  Your fields will be choked with weeds

  Years of uncertainty

  Years of pallor

  Years of waiting

  Years of trembling

  Return lest youth itself

  Be overgrown and choked with weeds.

  When I left home, she was only twenty-five

  A wave goodbye and so many winters since

  How long before we see each other again?

  The rest of the song describes the man growing old until his hair is white and his soul becomes the abandoned field.

  Chiang Ching-kuo proved more tolerant and reformist than his notoriously authoritarian father. In 1978, for the first time ever, non-Nationalist Party appointees were even permitted to run in the December elections for Taiwan’s parliament, the Legislative Yuan, though only as independents. They still weren’t allowed to form new political parties.

  Hou in Taipei, 1981. Asked how he felt about the popularity of ‘Heirs of the Dragon’, he took to saying ‘Shame! Profiting from the sorrows of the nation!’

  Fang, Jesse, Lawrence and I went to rallies to hear what the ‘dangwai’, or ‘outside the party’ candidates had to say. We weren’t impressed when one of them, spotting my foreign face in the crowd, rushed over to shake my hand, ignoring them. Still, we enjoyed the atmosphere of excitement and the new political openness.

  Then, on the morning of 16 December 1978, one week before the election, President Chiang Ching-kuo came on the TV. In solemn tones he informed the nation that the US had decided to break off formal ties with Taiwan in order to establish them with the People’s Republic of China. He postponed the elections and appealed for calm.

  Calm is just what he didn’t get. Not on the streets, where mobs quickly gathered at the US embassy to throw stones, not in the universities, and not even in our flat, where friends in various states of distress gathered to express their outrage and disappointment.

  In retrospect, it
seems bizarre that everyone was so gobsmacked by the news. The writing, you might say, had been on the Great Wall ever since US President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. He’d co-signed a document known as the Shanghai Communiqué which stated that ‘Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China’ and promised that the US would eventually withdraw the forces it had on Taiwan. That same year, Taiwan lost its UN seat to mainland China and both Japan and Australia severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in order to establish them with Beijing. If the mainland was a black hole, that black hole had finally sucked up America, Taiwan’s most stalwart and important political, economic and military ally.

  According to reports on the radio, some people were beating up foreigners. Concerned for my safety, my friends decreed that I was not to leave the flat. While some of our guests cursed the US ‘betrayal’ and others argued that it was inevitable, I kept my head down and served the tea.

  Across town, Hou Dejian was composing the song that would change his life.

  That day, Hou had taken a stroll on campus. The hysterical behaviour of his fellow students shocked him much more than the announcement itself. ‘Some were shaking their fists in the air,’ he recalled with undimmed amazement. ‘Others huddled together in fright, and some were weeping.’

  With horror and shame, Hou wondered how his fellow citizens had come to be so lacking in self-confidence and respect, so culturally and politically uncentred. Why were the people of Taiwan so emotionally reliant on America? What did it really mean to grow up Chinese on Taiwan? What were the consequences of claiming for your own a culture of which every symbol, from the Yangtze and Yellow rivers to the Great Wall, came from a land you might never set foot on? How could you call a place you’d never been ‘home’?

  Moved by a powerful inspiration, Hou Dejian sat down and in half an hour composed the words and music to ‘Heirs of the Dragon’.

  A few days later, he played it at a concert at the university. Jane Chiamei Coughlan, now a lecturer at Australia’s Curtin University, attended. She recalled that the hall was packed with uni students, still ‘burning with fear, helplessness and anger. Although the concert seems a life time away to me,’ Jane told me, ‘I remember vividly that after “Heirs” was sung, the atmosphere in the hall changed and an incredible sadness filled the audience. The tune resonated in the soul. The sadness and the shock waves were very powerful indeed.’

  Hou was invited to sing ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ on the radio and a few days later, one of Taiwan’s two largest newspapers, the United Daily News, published the words.

  In the far-off east flows a river called the Yangtze

  In the far-off east flows the Yellow River too

  I’ve never seen the beauty of the Yangtze

  Though often have I sailed it in dreams

  I’ve never heard the roar of the Yellow River

  But it pounds against its shores in my dreams.

  In the ancient east there is a dragon;

  China is its name.

  In the ancient east there lives a people

  The dragon’s heirs every one.

  Under the feet of this mighty dragon I grew up

  And its heir I have become

  Black eyes, black hair, yellow skin,

  Once and forever, an heir of the dragon.

  A hundred years ago a quiet night

  The deep dark night before the great changes

  A quiet night shattered by gunfire.

  Enemies all round, swords of ignorance

  For how many years have those gunshots resounded—

  So many years and so many years more

  Mighty dragon, open your eyes

  For now and evermore, open your eyes.

  Before the week was up, hundreds of fan letters poured in from all over Taiwan.

  Commenting on the sadder implications of the song, particularly the use of the phrase ‘far-off east’, the singer Yang Zujun felt that ‘anti-Communist propaganda has truly penetrated deep into our hearts. When we speak of China, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, we do so with a boundless feeling of distance and fear.’

  Yet most people heard the song very differently. When they sang it themselves, they invested it with, in the words of Sun Weimang, ‘feelings of glory, self-congratulation and even chauvinism, turning it into a marching song. That’s because few people are able to cope with the song’s message of anxiety, grief, admonishment and humiliation.’

  ‘After I wrote the song,’ Hou told me, ‘it was as if people associated me with the very concept of Chineseness. It was like, “Hou Dejian” equals “Chinese”.’ One day in Taipei, an elderly professor, a mainlander, asked Hou to visit him at his home. ‘Come,’ he whispered, leading Hou to the bedroom where his young son slept. He looked at his son, and then back at Hou with a pitiful expression. ‘Please,’ he begged, ‘please take us back to the mainland!’ Hou didn’t know what to say.

  The runaway train that was ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ was just building steam. Already, Hou wondered if he hadn’t just called up the imagery of a monster—the dragon—but created one himself. Asked how he felt about the song’s popularity, Hou took to saying, only half in jest, ‘Shame! Profiting from the sorrows of the nation. Shame!’ Writing in the United Daily News, Hou said that if people would reflect on recent Chinese history, they’d see that being an ‘heir of the dragon’ was ‘nothing to shout about’ and declared that he had ‘no intention of encouraging uncontrolled chauvinism’.

  His intentions were irrelevant. ‘Heirs of the dragon’ entered the language as a synonym for the Chinese people. Hou Dejian, self-confessed third-rate uni student, womaniser and bullshit artist, a songwriter who by his own description was a ‘pretty lousy poet and undistinguished musician’, found himself apotheosised as the Conscience of the Nation.

  AT the end of 1978, Deng Xiaoping, the original little battler, Red Army veteran, wily politician and convicted ‘capitalist roader’ who survived several of Mao’s purges, emerged from a two-year tussle for power in the Communist Party’s backroom with all guns firing. Economic reform! An ‘open door’ to the outside world! Modernisation! Not to mention the establishment of diplomatic relations with that old ‘paper tiger’, Mao’s nemesis, the United States.

  To quote Hou’s musical idol, the times they were a’changing.

  The west was in love. Time named Deng ‘Man of the Year’ for 1978 (and would do so again in 1985), calling him a ‘visionary’ who had ‘embarked on what sometimes looks suspiciously like a capitalist road’. Other overseas commentators blithely predicted that China would soon shed communism and transform itself into an advanced and free nation. In China itself, people were less sanguine. More modestly, they hoped for a tad less dictatorship, a touch more freedom and justice, more vegies at the market and meat on the table. When in early 1979, Deng, having decided that Democracy Wall—a tolerated forum for grievances about the party and the Cultural Revolution— had served its purpose and crushed it without mercy, the Chinese were a lot less surprised than pundits in the west.

  Among the pro-democracy activists arrested in the crackdown was the twenty-nine-year-old electrician Wei Jingsheng, who’d had the nerve to suggest that, without institutional safeguards, even Deng could turn into a dictator. The state prosecutor told him during his trial, ‘Our constitution stipulates that you have freedom of belief, and that you may believe or disbelieve Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought— but it also states that you are forbidden to oppose it.’ Wei got fifteen years, reportedly on Deng’s direct orders.

  Having launched his reforms and wiped out his enemies, Deng turned to another item high on his Do List—reunify China. He declared it would happen in his lifetime. He was seventy-five years old. The clock was ticking.

  On Hong Kong and the mainland, ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ served as a spiritual focal point for Chinese nationalistic sentiments excited, perhaps over-excited, by Deng’s reforms and the prospect
that all China—the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan—might be reunited for the first time in a century. It represented an ideology-free zone in which Chinese of all political persuasions could gather and commune. If China was the religion of the Chinese, then ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ had become the church’s main hymn.

  The Nationalists scorned the Communists’ proposals for ‘peaceful reunification’ as ‘sugar-coated bullets’. A popular Taiwan cartoon parodied China’s offer to help Taiwan out financially. It portrayed a shabby, Mao-suited Communist on an old bicycle waving a handful of renminbi (‘People’s Currency’) at a well-dressed man driving an expensive sedan. As for Deng’s much-vaunted Open Door, the Nationalists reminded their citizens that should they happen to stroll through it, there’d be a military court and possibly a life sentence waiting for them when they got back home.

  Me, I couldn’t wait to go through that door. For all the great times I’d had there, Taiwan didn’t add up to China. At least not the China that had captured my imagination in university. That China was undergoing extraordinary changes and I’d be damned if I didn’t get to witness any of them.

  In 1979, Fang, Jesse and Lawrence completed their military service. They applied for and were accepted into programs at prestigious American grad schools, Fang to do a doctorate in electrical engineering, Lawrence a doctorate of jurisprudence and Jesse, one year later, a law degree. It was time for me to leave Taiwan as well. I went to see Jerry Martinson play and he farewelled me with possibly the only version of ‘Hava na gila’ ever sung by a Jesuit for a Jew in a Taiwan nightclub.

  My three mates and I had one last big night together. The only detail I can remember now is Fang driving us along a coastal highway towards home at about four in the morning. Jesse was in the front seat and I was in the back, snuggled up against Lawrence and dozing off when I became aware of Jesse chanting ‘Fang, Fang, Fang, Fang’ in the low but insistent voice I’d thought of as his ‘disaster voice’ ever since the time the ceiling lamp starting swinging and he intoned, ‘earthquake, earthquake, earthquake’. I opened my eyes and realised that Fang was asleep at the wheel. We were about to smash into a telegraph pole or barrel off the cliff. Just at that moment, Fang came to, wrenched the wheel, and we survived to move on, the boys to America and me to Hong Kong.