by Linda Jaivin
After a brief, unhappy stint working as a maid for New Zealand businesspeople, I landed a job editing English-language textbooks for Oxford University Press. Cantonese proved a lot harder to get a handle on than Mandarin, and it took me a while to find a congenial group of friends such as I had in Taiwan. If Hong Kong was a tough place to settle into, there was one thing about it that I adored: you could get all the news you wanted about China. You could even see mainland movies. And there was none of that cheesy ‘Deng Bandit Xiaoping’ business either. The air wasn’t all that clean, but I felt I could breathe at last.
On 16 October 1979, I watched the broadcast of Wei Jingsheng’s sentencing. Tears filled my eyes at the sight of this thin young man, dressed in a worn Mao suit, his head shaved and bowed, as he was handed his long sentence and condemned to China’s gulag. Later, I learned that Hou Dejian had watched the same broadcast in Taiwan and had been so affected that he’d written a song for Wei.
For my twenty-fifth birthday, in March 1980, my parents shouted me a three-day tour to Guangzhou, only a couple of hours from Hong Kong by train. At the time it was difficult to get permission to travel to China unless you had official business or were part of a tour group.
My letter home describing the trip was rotten with exclamation marks: ‘We landed on an air strip in the countryside,’ I wrote, ‘rice paddies on either side, big red-lettered signs saying “Long Live the People’s Republic of China!” There were People’s Liberation Army types in green Mao suits with shiny red stars on their caps! China!’
Breathlessly, I recounted all my adventures, which included meeting a twenty-one-year-old boy who invited me to lunch at his place. His flat was much poorer than any home I’d ever been into in Taiwan or Hong Kong, and I’d been to squatter villages and housing projects. It had a rough cement floor, the most basic furniture, and its only decorations were portraits of Chairman Mao, his successor Hua Guofeng and the former premier Zhou Enlai. The wok and kettle sat on coal fires, the only electrical appliance in the kitchen being the dim bare globe hanging from the mouldy ceiling. Yet his family considered themselves well-off. He showed me their prized radio-cassette player and pointed out that he and his two siblings each owned bicycles.
On my last day there, while strolling in a park, I made the acquaintance of a twenty-eight-year-old teacher of ‘Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought’. He told me his parents lived in Hong Kong. For two years, he’d been applying for a passport and permission to join them, with no luck. He said that when he got to Hong Kong he’d grow his hair long and take me out somewhere nice in his parents’ car.
‘Isn’t that awfully bourgeois of you?’ I asked. ‘You being a teacher of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought and all?’
‘Ultimately, your consciousness arises from your class background and material circumstances,’ he replied without batting an eye, ‘so according to scientific Marxism, once my material circumstances change, so will my consciousness. There’s no contradiction.’ Then he shoved me down onto a secluded park bench, tried to kiss me and, undaunted by the alacrity with which I pushed him off me, proposed marriage.
‘Look, you’re very nice but I hardly know you,’ I stammered, ‘and besides, I gotta catch a train.’ I bolted.
Having studied Chinese when that was considered an incredibly weird thing to do, esoteric at best and useless at worst, I suddenly found that my knowledge of China, its culture and language was in demand. I started writing book reviews for Asiaweek magazine and by early 1981 was working full-time for them as a Hong Kong, Taiwan and China correspondent.
Even while at OUP, I’d had a number of opportunities to visit mainland China, and I took advantage of every one. China still wasn’t the easiest place to get to, even from Hong Kong. You never knew if you were going to get a visa, and even if you did, many places were off-limits to foreigners. The service and safety record of the official CAAC airline gave a new meaning to the phrase ‘adventure travel’. When I asked a stewardess on one flight why there’d been no demonstration of the safety equipment, she told me not to worry—‘Usually,’ she assured me, ‘there’s no need for it.’ On another flight, the attendants set up folding chairs in the aisle to accommodate overbooked passengers.
At least I could get there. Hou, back in Taipei, with his China dreams and his Taiwan passport, didn’t imagine he ever could.
In April 1980, the same month that the singer Li Jianfu released the version of ‘Heirs’ that would conquer the Chinese world, Hou was still at university. A group of aid workers going to the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand invited him to join them. Among the refugees were many ethnic Chinese. The aid workers suggested Hou could sing ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ for them, though as Hou wrote in his diary, ‘What good that would do I had no idea.’
With US$200 donated by friends in his pocket and his guitar in hand, Hou set off for Thailand. The conditions in the camps shocked him. Housing was primitive, sickness rife, and medicine scarce. The refugees had escaped one hell only to find another. One day, a Thai soldier punished a Cambodian black-market vendor of fried cakes by picking up her wok of boiling fat and pouring it over her. She died in agony.
Yet the refugees refused to go back. They were far more afraid of Pol Pot, whose killing fields they’d fled. One girl told Hou that she’d been forced to watch as Pol Pot’s soldiers murdered her father, cut out his heart, cooked it and ate it. Growing up as he did, Hou had learned to guard his emotions. But hearing such stories, he broke down and cried. He threw himself passionately into whatever work needed doing, whether it was transporting medicines or helping refugees locate relatives in other camps. He organised a chorus and four hundred people signed up to learn ‘Heirs of the Dragon’—one refugee later told him the song had rescued him from despair.
One afternoon a pack of Xinhua News Agency reporters rolled up in an air-conditioned luxury van. It was Hou’s first glimpse of mainland Chinese. ‘Wonder what they’re doing back here,’ a refugee remarked to Hou. ‘We sent the last bunch away under a hail of stones.’
‘What happened?’ Hou asked.
‘This reporter asked us to describe the persecution we’d suffered under Pol Pot. One guy retorted that he should know, since the Chinese Communists helped create Pol Pot in the first place. The reporter got pissed off and snapped that we were all “black capitalist elements”. That’s when we reached for the stones.’
Another day, one of Hou’s Thai co-workers brought up the subject of how, the previous December, Taiwan police had used violence to break up an International Human Rights Day Rally organised by the oppositionist magazine Formosa in Kaohsiung. Hou laughed a bit too loudly. ‘No government’s perfect,’ he said, unexpectedly defensive. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I’ve been a political prisoner myself and they even let me travel abroad.’
He’d been there for two months when border skirmishes erupted. It was not very safe. The last of the Taiwan volunteers persuaded a reluctant Hou to return home with them. In Taipei, he turned into a man with a mission. He appeared on television and radio appealing for donations of books and other aid to the refugees, and asking people to write letters to the children there. He called on Taiwan to open its doors to the 20,000 ethnic Chinese refugees in the camps. ‘Free China’, after all, had long advertised itself as a beacon of hope for Chinese around the globe.
In the end, Taiwan accepted only a handful of refugees. Hou was devastated. ‘I learned that all that rhetoric was bullshit. Neither Taiwan nor mainland China gave a stuff about Chinese people in strife,’ he told me, still fuming about it years later. ‘When you discover that things you’d believed your whole life were lies, you begin looking at the world a little differently.’
Not long after returning to Taiwan, Hou received another lesson in the way things worked. It involved James Soong Chu-yu who, as the head of the Government Information Office, was the government’s chief spokesman.
I’ve known for a long time that I need to be careful how I tell the story about wh
at went on between Soong and Hou twenty years ago. My last contact with James Soong, whom I used to interview from time to time for Asiaweek, was a letter dated 1 July 1991 and typed in English on official Nationalist Party Central Committee stationery. He had risen by then to the position of Party secretary-general. In the letter, he turned down my request to be interviewed for this book because he refused to be part of what he called Hou’s ‘self-promotions’.
According to Hou, James Soong asked him to his office sometime in mid-1980. He told Hou he’d added a verse to “Heirs of the Dragon”. Hou looked at the new lyrics. They were full of jingoistic phrases. He also recalled that:
Several days later, [Soong] spoke to uni students receiving military training at the summer reserve camp of Chenggongling on the theme of ‘heirs of the dragon’. Reading about this in the press and hearing about it on radio and TV, I actually felt quite honoured. Then, my record company, Synco, received a call from the GIO, requesting that they re-record the song, adding Mr Soong’s lyrics. Synco felt they should get my approval. I said no.
It wasn’t anything to do with an unwillingness to ‘self-strengthen’ or whatever. It was just that these were political slogans, slogans of the Nationalist Party, and I didn’t want to turn myself into a propaganda tool. I’ve always been a bit of a lone knight errant. I stuck with my decision. Of course, I groused about the incident in front of friends and boasted about it in front of girlfriends. It helped me establish the image of an oppressed hero.
Dr Soong asserted in his letter to me that Hou’s version of events was ‘untrue and self-serving’. He also claimed that if it hadn’t been for his efforts to promote it, ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ would have remained ‘just another ballad’. He enclosed an article from an August 1980 edition of the United Daily News. The article quoted Soong saying he’d only written the new words to complement the message of his speech at Chenggongling, not to have them replace the original lyrics. The newspaper also reported that Soong organised a gathering of people from Taiwan’s music scene, including Hou, to discuss the new lyrics. One participant suggested transposing the song from the minor key in which it had been written to a major one. That would give it a more upbeat feel and suit the new lyrics. The paper reported that Hou loved the suggested changes. ‘The new lyrics are so much better than the old ones!’ it quoted him as saying.
I showed the article to Hou and asked him if he’d been serious about the new lyrics being an improvement. He laughed. ‘I don’t remember saying that at all. Of course, I might have said it sarcastically and the reporter misunderstood.’
Soong’s last verse, to be sung in place of the original, went as follows:
From the dream of a century of humiliation
The great dragon awakes in the deep of the night
The chimes of self-strengthening stir the national spirit
Toughening oneself through hardship is the sword
with which to avenge one’s country
Our achievements must not be just for the moment,
but for all time hence
Only those who take up this heavy burden
are the heirs of the dragon
Oh mighty dragon, awaken quickly
Once and forever the dragon of the east
Heirs, oh heirs, grow up with speed
Once and forever the heirs of the dragon.
In his letter to me, Soong said that Hou had ‘many personal troubles’ and he wished him well. He ended with a warning that he would sue if he perceived any defamation of his character in this book but invited me to ‘surprise’ him, declaring he doubted that I could write objectively about Hou. I hope to surprise Dr Soong. But I can’t claim to be objective. Does objectivity even exist? On the other hand, I do strive to be honest and truthful. My biases, political and personal, are on the table.
Whatever the truth of this incident, it’s probably a good thing that James Soong didn’t give up his day job.
Around this time, Hou dropped out of university. He’d been studying on and off for six years, including one year off to look after his parents’ divorce and another to recover from a bout of tuberculosis he’d contracted as a child. His weak lungs meant he was excused from military service. He had much he wanted to do.
He published his refugee camp diary in October 1980 under the title Heirs of the Dragon in Distress. The camps gave him the inspiration for another ballad. It told the story of a refugee whose family had immigrated to Indochina generations earlier from a place near Chaozhou, in Guangdong Province. He’d lived in Vietnam, producing and selling soybean milk, like his father and grandfather before him. When the Viet Cong came, they accused the family of being capitalists and murdered his grandfather. He fled to Cambodia, only to run into the Khmer Rouge. ‘I’ve been on the run now for fifteen years,’ he told Hou. ‘There were more than thirty people in my clan. I’ve no idea how many of them are still alive.’
Man from Chaozhou
Time itself is growing old
The sky above is ash, the road ahead is long
Even the mountains are weary
Even the clouds are weary
There’s homesickness in your eyes, in your tears.
Why don’t you go home, man from Chaozhou?…
Hou Dejian’s themes of exile and displacement had long fascinated me and in some ways defined my own life. Both my grandfathers were exiles. They’d fled the pogroms and conscriptions of imperial Russia, and ended up in the US via, in the case of my paternal grandfather, Argentina. In the small town of New London, Connecticut, where I grew up, the cantor at my synagogue and his wife, one of my Hebrew School teachers and other members of our community were concentration camp survivors. By comparison with what they’d gone through, it seemed a mild injustice that when I was young, the local golf, sailing and country clubs routinely turned down the applications of Jews for membership. (Blacks had a hard time getting in also.)
Though we had many friends who were not Jewish, some Christians clearly didn’t like their children associating with us. The gang of kids I hung out with most in my teenage years consisted of about a dozen other Jews and one Arab. I protested against the Vietnam War when I was thirteen and became an environmental activist at fourteen, continuing with political activism through my university years. I suppose it’s not surprising that I never felt particularly connected to mainstream America.
When I left for Asia in 1977, I missed my family and friends, bagels and the Village Voice, but little else. The fact that I chose to go to China, a society to which I could never possibly belong, seems to indicate that I wasn’t particularly concerned with belonging.
BY the end of the seventies, Taiwan’s campus folk movement had fallen victim to its own success. Every cheesy cocktail lounge singer in every cheesy cocktail lounge on the island claimed to be a campus folk artist. By the time campus folk had become a respectable enough topic for the Hong Kong Arts Centre to host a forum on it in August 1981, Hou wasn’t just one of its most famous representatives, but one of its only true survivors.
That’s when he flew to Hong Kong, I laughed at his jokes, and we became friends. I took Hou shopping at the humungous China Products department store. We wandered through aisles stacked with silk embroideries, wood carvings, children’s clothing and stationery. ‘In Taiwan, they tell us that mainland factories produce almost no consumer goods at all,’ he remarked, amazed.
‘Well, you’ll find more for sale here than in most shops on the mainland. They produce them,’ I told him, ‘but mainly for export.’ We came upon a display of calligraphy brushes, ink stones and rice paper. ‘My grandfather would love these,’ Hou exclaimed, choosing a magnificent set of calligraphy brushes for Luo Bingqian. ‘Brushes from China,’ he marvelled.
Back at my place, he powered through my bookshelves, devouring Hong Kong editions of books by mainland authors, as well as works by Lu Xun and other pre-revolutionary writers banned on Taiwan. I pointed out some interesting mainland editions, but Hou found the s
implified characters in which they were printed too hard to read.
Mixing with ‘Commie bandits’ in Hong Kong, 1981. Seated from left: Charles Ng, Lingzi, Hou. Winnie Yeung stands between Charles and Lingzi.
Several mainland authors were visiting Hong Kong at the same time. At a function at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the elderly writer Li Zhun told Hou that his children and grandchildren all knew the lyrics to ‘Heirs of the Dragon’.
One evening, my friend Winnie Yeung Li-Kwan invited us to a meal. Winnie was a petite and soft-spoken woman whose enthusiasm for everything from Beijing opera to local literary gossip was infectious. She worked for the New Evening Post, one of the ‘left-wing’ Chinese newspapers whose editors answered to the Communist Party. Winnie was a popular figure in Hong Kong’s cultural circles. Her daughter Helen was a prominent choreographer and her son Michael a well-known pop music composer.
Winnie had asked Hou if she could interview him about the campus folk movement. She carefully explained the political position of the New Evening Post, aware that Taiwan citizens were forbidden to have any contact with Communists or their representatives. She was impressed by Hou’s willingness to speak with her anyway, but later complained to me that, ‘He digressed all over the place and…didn’t seem to know much about the subject at all.’
Still, he was a character and a star. So she invited him to dinner. Her editor at the New Evening Post, Luo Fu, came along as well.
