The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  Visiting Guangzhou for work that year, I was astounded to find prostitutes and black marketeers. The former were relatively discreet, their lipstick one of the few tell-tale signs of their occupation. The latter loitered brazenly by the river, rolling up their shirtsleeves as you passed to reveal a dozen watches for sale on each arm.

  Street performers were another new phenomenon. I joined a crowd in a park watching a young man swallow swords, snakes and finally a solid metal ball the size of an orange. He said that this very trick had killed his father and only regurgitated the ball after he’d passed around the hat. After the show, we got talking and I invited him out to lunch. He packed up his swords in one bag and his snakes in another. The other diners in the restaurant watched with alarm as the bag with the snakes writhed at our feet.

  At the time, nearly everyone in China belonged to a ‘work unit’ which gave them employment, housing and medical care but could also dictate whom they could marry and whether they could have a child. Compulsory household registration and a system of personnel dossiers that followed them around for life made it virtually impossible for mainland citizens to choose their own job or even city. Yet this guy had left his unit because it bored him. He’d walked across the border to North Korea, just to see what it was like. He got caught and sent back. Now he was on his way to Vietnam. After lunch, he told me he had to go bathe his snakes. I never saw him again, but he became the basis for Mengzhong, the snake-charming sword-swallowing Chinese acrobat in my first novel Eat Me.

  Not everyone got away with as much as my sword-swallower. Once, I was travelling on a bus between Shantou (Swatow) in southern Guangzhou province and Xiamen, in Fujian, the province opposite Taiwan. We were driving through a particularly barren stretch of nowhere when we ran into a police roadblock. The police ordered everyone out so they could check our luggage for contraband. Sullenly, the passengers piled out, dragging with them suitcases and boxes and, in a few cases, live chickens and ducks. ‘Aha!’ cried one of the public security agents, pulling tapes by Taiwan’s queen of pop, Teresa ‘Plum Blossoms’ Teng, out of the cloth bag of a middle-aged, Mao-suited worker. ‘Pornography!’

  The other passengers silently pushed me to the front of the crowd. ‘Photograph this absurdity,’ one whispered in my ear. ‘Tell the world what we have to put up with.’ I pulled out my camera and began shooting. By the time the security men ordered me to stop, I already had the photos. I told the world, or at least Asiaweek readers, but it couldn’t save that poor bastard, who, trembling with fear, was taken off and charged.

  When I was next in Taiwan, I told Hou this story. He found it hard to imagine. From the perspective of the Beautiful Island, life in ‘bandit territory’ seemed surreal.

  In 1982, Hou involved himself in several major projects. He scored and worked on the post-production of a film directed by his manager Yu Weiyan’s brother, Yu Weizheng, called The Winter of 1905, about a Qing dynasty student in Japan. They were all excited about the film, and invited me to a special screening.

  Hou had high hopes as well for his new album. He took me to the studio where he was doing the final mixing and played it for me. The songs included an upbeat ode to the new north-south highway, the haunting ‘Man from Chaozhou’ and ‘Masters of the Future’, a sardonic comment on social conformism.

  The lyrics of ‘For Wei Jingsheng,’ dedicated to the imprisoned mainland Democracy Wall activist, displayed the combination of hubris and idealism that I thought absolutely personified Hou Dejian.

  You are the clouds wafted south by the north wind

  I am a southern breeze

  Together we can bring on the rain

  And the parched land can be sown at last.

  You are the lamp looking south for the fire

  I am the fire that will kindle the light

  What will we see when the lamp is lit?

  The possibility of hope…

  How many more years of dust and earth

  How many more miles of cloud and moon

  How many more cold farewells?

  The wind soughs and sighs.

  The album concluded with the musical self-exorcism of ‘Heirs of the Dragon, Cont’d’. An epic ballad, ‘Heirs, Cont’d’ gave expression to Hou’s increasingly anxious meditations on the nature of time. This was becoming a major artistic obsession of Hou’s. ‘Heirs Cont’d’ borrowed and blended musical idioms from rock, jazz, and Chinese and western folk music as well as the traditional songs of the Muslim Uigher people who inhabit China’s far northwest.

  No one can call back youth

  Not you

  Not me

  Not laughter

  Not tears…

  How many people for how many years

  sing one song

  I sing it to eternity…

  An unchanging sky

  The same old earth

  Between heaven and earth

  Our eternity, our eternity

  In hindsight, it strikes me that one of the more humble tracks, the wistful ‘It Seems’, best summed up Hou’s own increasing sense that life was elsewhere:

  It seems like

  A breeze outside my window

  It seems like

  Someone singing in the wind

  Who is it?

  Who stands outside the door?

  Why not come in

  So I can see your face

  It seems like

  It seems like…

  Synco, the company that produced his other songs, declined to take on the album, judging it to have little commercial potential. Several tracks were long enough to challenge even the most enthusiastic of radio presenters: ‘Heirs of the Dragon, Cont’d’, was an ear-bending nine and a half minutes long. Besides, intellectual angst doesn’t move units. Where were the love songs?

  Forced to find independent backing, Hou came up with a novel idea: he’d pawn the rights to six of his songs in order to get enough money to cover production costs. It was such a quirky notion that several newspapers reported on it in detail. Someone came forward with half a million New Taiwan dollars (more than US$12,000) and the album went into production.

  For his cover art, Hou enlisted the collaboration of the talented photographer Zhang Zhaotang, reproducing some of his off-beat, sepia-tinted images as inserts for the album. The packaging made Heirs of the Dragon, Cont’d a collector’s item, but as Teddy Robin observed to me, ‘We all know it’s young people who buy albums. It was like Hou set out not to please them.’

  Between the studio and the market lay yet another hurdle: the censorship system mocked in one of Luo Dayou’s most popular songs as ‘the scissors that await’. The Government Information Office (GIO) under James Soong had to clear both music and lyrics before any song could be broadcast on radio or television. Hou Dejian had had run-ins with the GIO in the past. Before ‘Fishing’ could be released, he’d had to change the name of the kid in the song from ‘Xiao Mao’ (a common child’s nickname) to ‘Xiao Niu’. Even ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ allegedly had some trouble making it past the censors at first.

  Hou, the newspapers and the GIO all have different versions of what happened to Heirs, Cont’d. ‘Masters of the Future’ was banned from broadcast for its potentially disruptive influence on young people, and Hou claims three other songs were also proscribed, including ‘Man from Chaozhou’, though one report I saw said the committee liked the song so much they highly commended it. I wrote to the GIO for clarification but never received an answer.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, Hou accused the GIO of not understanding young people, of being ignorant, narrow-minded and short-sighted. The GIO responded by asking Hou to serve on the committee. He did so for nearly half a year, refusing to ban any song on any grounds other than plagiarism.

  When the album came out in September 1982, music critics were intrigued by Hou’s innovative use of Chinese instruments. They praised the way the desolate tones of the erhu, the two-stringed zither, highlighted the sense of alienation in
‘Masters of the Future’ and lauded the use of the suona, a resonant Chinese horn, in ‘Man from Chaozhou’. But Teddy Robin had a point. It went right over the heads of the masses. Hou had taken the popular out of pop.

  Heirs of the Dragon, Cont’d sold only 7000 copies, a poor showing for someone as well known as Hou. Luo Dayou’s first album, which came out the previous year, also suffered from the banning of several songs from radio and television, but soon climbed past 50,000 in sales.

  The Winter of 1905, meanwhile, failed to secure theatrical release. ‘All people want to see is kungfu and stupid romantic comedies,’ Hou fumed. ‘There’s no place for true art in Taiwan.’

  As Hou reluctantly accepted commissions to write jingles for washing machines and cream soda in order to feed his young family, Dayou began his immensely successful career at the cutting edge of Chinese rock and pop.

  One day around this time, Hou went with a friend to the movies. Taiwan cinemas all played the national anthem ‘Three Principles of the People’ before the feature. Accompanying the anthem was a film clip filled with patriotic images. Everyone had to rise. That day, when the familiar sight of the late President Chiang Kai-shek reviewing his troops appeared on the screen, Hou was suddenly struck by the similarity of this image to photos he’d seen of Hitler, Mussolini and even Mao Zedong. Filled with disgust, he plonked himself back down in his seat. Within seconds, he felt a blow to his head. He turned around and faced his assailant, another guy in his mid-twenties.

  ‘How can you be so stupid?’ Hou snapped. ‘What the hell is the difference between this and fascism?’

  ‘You’re an unpatriotic son-of-a-bitch.’

  ‘And you’re a fuckwit.’

  Hou’s friend dragged Hou off to another seat before a fight could break out.

  The Nationalist Party’s Cultural Department invited Hou to compose a song on the theme of reunification under the Three Principles of the People. According to Hou, they told him ‘the big boss’ wanted to invite him to breakfast to discuss it. ‘I certainly could’ve used the money,’ he told me. ‘But I just couldn’t bring myself to do political hack work. And if President Chiang himself had asked me to write something—I’m sure that’s who they meant by the “big boss”—I’d have felt obligated to say yes.’

  Disenchanted with his life in Taiwan, Hou flirted with the idea of studying film composition in London. But if he still likened himself to Monkey, he secretly found the idea of a journey to the west daunting. ‘I’m a somebody in Chinese society,’ he confided to me. ‘I’m nobody over there.’

  Yuanzhen, ‘Little Bean’ and Hou, 1982.

  He grew depressed. All his friends worried about him. I remember a conversation we had in late 1982.

  ‘How’s your music going?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not so good. All Yuanzhen has to do is walk into the room and whatever melody I’m working on flies away.’ He sighed. ‘I look forward to running out of cigarettes so I’ve an excuse to get out of the house. I love my son but marriage is stifling me. I’m afraid if I don’t get out of it I’ll never write music again.’

  ‘Are you thinking of asking Yuanzhen for a divorce?’

  ‘She’d never agree to it. Anyway, I can’t blame her for my unhappiness. It’s not her fault.’

  In early 1983, Kim Wong, a twenty-eight-year-old Cantonese who scouted Taiwan talent for a Hong Kong record company, picked up a copy of Heirs, Cont’d. ‘I was so struck by it,’ Kim told me. ‘It was the best album I’d ever heard from Taiwan.’ Kim realised it would be hard to market in Hong Kong but didn’t care. He flew to Taipei to ask Hou if he could be his Hong Kong agent. Hou warned Kim that it wasn’t a smart business proposition. ‘I know,’ Kim replied. It was a deal.

  They agreed that Hou would go to Hong Kong later in the year to promote the album. Kim hadn’t even started to make the arrangements when Hou called and informed him he was on his way.

  He called me too. He sounded very excited, alive, like the old Hou I’d known before marriage and the lack of post-‘Heirs’ success had ground him down. He told me he’d sold off all his musical instruments and stereo equipment before he left Taiwan. He needed the money, he said. He hadn’t totally given up on the London option.

  Kim arranged a full schedule of television, newspaper and magazine interviews, lunches, dinners and meetings. Hou was a publicist’s dream, a born media personality, quick with a soundbite, always quotable. He was also considered the thinking person’s pop star. Journalists who wouldn’t normally deign to speak to a singer clamoured to get his views on everything from censorship to socialism. (‘China can’t be helped by any “ism”,’ Hou told the press.)

  Fresh and focused in his interviews, he was also indefatigable in his partying. On several nights when I had to work the following day, I left clubs at three or four in the morning while Hou was still going strong. He bought a new guitar and found the time to draft a few new songs.

  Pai Hsing, an influential Hong Kong magazine, called Heirs, Cont’d the ‘most important and accomplished album to come out of Taiwan this year’. It said that several of its tracks were the ‘boldest and most significant songs Taiwan has produced’.

  Hou told the press that despite the way some people might interpret ‘Man from Chaozhou’ and ‘For Wei Jingsheng’, ‘I don’t think communism is the enemy.’ Asked to explain, he replied naively, ‘Because I don’t believe that there’s any communism to speak of being practised on the mainland.’

  His happy mood didn’t last. His various ailments flared up, and he grew moody and distant. He no longer included me in all his plans.

  The phone would ring on my desk at Asiaweek. ‘It’s me,’ he’d say. ‘When are you getting off work?’

  ‘Around seven. I could meet you by half past.’

  ‘Right, uh, great, uh, how about we meet at 8.30 then?’

  ‘What are you doing before then?’

  ‘I’ve got to see Kim.’

  Hou and I used to joke that we knew all of each other’s secrets, private and professional. When this sort of thing happened several days in a row, it occurred to me that he might be having an affair. That wouldn’t have shocked me. The truth did.

  RECOVERING

  THE

  MAINLAND

  ON Friday, 3 June 1983, Hou was supposed to meet me to see a performance at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. At the last minute, he cancelled, mumbling something that didn’t make much sense. He told me to phone him afterwards. When I did he sounded cheerier. He said he was going to Japan the following day to work on a film project. I asked what time his plane was. Since I didn’t have to work that Saturday, I could see him off. It was our little tradition to do the airport thing.

  ‘Early. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I don’t mind. How early is early?’

  ‘Early early. Besides, Kim’s seeing me off. We need to talk about record stuff.’

  ‘All right then.’ I knew it wasn’t reasonable, but I felt hurt at being excluded. ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘In a week. I’ll be free then. We can spend lots of time together.’

  ‘Okay, I look forward to it. Have a good trip.’

  The following morning, I woke up with a nagging feeling that Hou hadn’t been straight with me. Around 10 a.m. I resolved to put my doubts to rest by phoning his hotel, which would no doubt inform me that he’d checked out earlier that morning. ‘Putting you through,’ said the operator.

  ‘I thought you were leaving on an early plane.’

  ‘It was delayed.’

  ‘You’re lying to me,’ I accused. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Linda, I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment. This Japanese thing, it’s, uh, quite a big project. When I get back, I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘Why don’t I believe you?’ I was getting shrill.

  Hou sighed. If he was fed up, his tone remained gentle, almost sad. ‘I don’t know. But I can’t talk now. I’ve got record company people h
ere.’

  ‘Bullshit. I don’t know what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it. Whatever it is, you’re behaving weirdly and I’m upset that you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s going on.’

  Another sigh. ‘I gotta go. I’ll see you in a week. I’ll phone. I promise.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Piss off then.’

  On Sunday morning, I went to the Hong Kong Arts Centre for a program of early Chinese cinema. I was in the foyer, waiting to go in, when Shi Shuqing, a middle-aged Taiwan author living in Hong Kong, rushed up to me.

  ‘What’s all this about Hou Dejian?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ My stomach twisted into a knot. ‘He’s in Japan, working on a film.’

  She shook her head. ‘No he’s not. He’s defected to the mainland.’

  The floor dipped. The next thing I knew I was holding onto a wall. ‘Are you sure?’ I gasped.

  ‘It’s in today’s papers.’ She looked at me oddly. ‘There’s a photo and everything. I thought if anyone knew his plans, it’d be you.’

  As it turned out, she wasn’t the only one who thought that way. My phone rang off the hook all day. I’d just gone to bed that evening when it rang again, at about 11 p.m. It was Luo Dayou, calling from Taipei. ‘What’s the story with Dejian?’ he demanded. Dayou wanted to know if it was true, what I knew about it, if Hou had said something, what it was all about and if I’d had anything to do with it. I told him: yes, very little, nothing at all, didn’t have a clue, and nothing whatsoever. Dayou said he was relieved that I wasn’t involved because word was already going around that I was the ‘black hand’ behind the defection.

  It took a while to fall asleep. Just as I was drifting off, the phone rang again. It was the film director Edward Yang. The phone didn’t stop ringing all night. Each of Hou’s friends had similar questions—not a coincidence, as I was to find out nearly sixteen years later when a friendly Nationalist Party official showed me the confidential files from that time.