by Linda Jaivin
The official told me that his job in 1983 was to reach out to younger people in the arts, to see how they could be brought closer to the Nationalist Party. He’d developed a relationship of trust with Hou and his friends. At ten o’clock on that Sunday evening, Hou’s old friend Yan Zhuang, the one who used to tease me about being a foreigner, called him to tell him the news. Yan was at our favourite bar, Fragrant Pine. Everyone was there—Luo Dayou, his girlfriend the actress Sylvia Chang, Edward Yang, Hou’s manager Yu Weiyan, the oppositionist politician Lin Zhengjie and his wife, the singer Yang Zujun. They were listening to Hou’s music and trying to work out what had happened. They were all in a state of shock.
Some of them speculated that Hou and I had been having an affair. They all suspected I’d been instrumental. I lived in Hong Kong, I was Hou’s best friend there and I frequently travelled to the mainland. At the very least, they figured, I’d be able to shed some light on the situation. They took turns phoning me, though none mentioned where they were or the fact that they were all together. In his second or third phone call to me that night, Dayou urged me to come to Taiwan as soon as possible. ‘You need to clear your name,’ he stated.
The gang talked and drank all night. By the time they left the pub, at 6 a.m. on Monday, they’d come up with the following list of possible reasons for Hou’s defection: a strong family connection to the mainland; a sense of responsibility for China; frustration with the Taiwan censorship system and the Nationalist government’s inaction on the Cambodian refugee issue; the commercial failure of Heirs of the Dragon, Cont’d; his unhappy marriage; and financial stress. They dismissed any notion that Hou might be a closet Communist.
The official went home, showered, changed and went straight to work, where he penned a report recommending the Taiwan government handle the situation with care. He appealed to the party not to vilify Hou or attack him publicly. If they did, the Communists could make political capital out of it. In any case, they shouldn’t jump to any conclusions until the foreigner known as Linda arrived and there was a chance to question her.
That same Monday morning, I showed up for work bleary-eyed. I phoned Y. K. Tso, one of the Taiwan government’s chief representatives in Hong Kong. ‘I was just about to pick up the phone and call you,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet for lunch? Usual place?’
Relieved, I hung up the phone. I liked Mr Tso. He was an elderly Cantonese gentleman with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. We met from time to time for lunch at the Foreign Correspondents Club, of which he, not I, was a member. Despite his office, he had an open mind and never tried to lecture me—as so many Nationalist officials on Taiwan had—on the subject of Commie bandits or Nationalist superiority.
Over lunch, we discussed Hou’s defection, coming to similar conclusions as his friends had in Taipei. ‘I’m afraid the Taiwan government thinks I had something to do with it,’ I told him.
‘I know they do,’ Mr Tso confirmed. ‘I’d just got off the phone from Taipei when you rang. They asked me to see you.’
I grimaced.
‘Well, did you have anything to do with it?’
‘Of course not.’ I was tired and emotional. A tear dribbled down my cheek. I was glad we’d taken a corner table, away from the gaze of the other journalists chatting boozily in the room. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ I sniffled.
Mr Tso reached across the table and patted my hand. ‘I do. Now, we need to convince them back in Taipei.’
‘How?’
‘Well, you’re going there, right?’
‘Yes.’ I paused for a moment, wondering how he knew.
‘Okay. Instead of going into too much detail about our conversation today, I’ll simply telex to say I’ve spoken to you at length and that I’m convinced you had nothing to do with it. I’ll tell them I’ll be happy to send a complete report on our conversation if they want. If I don’t make a big deal of it, it’ll be more convincing.’
I returned to the office, feeling cheered. ‘I need a few days off,’ I told my editor at Asiaweek, Michael O’ Neill. ‘I’ve got to go to Taiwan.’ I explained what had happened.
‘That’s a very bad idea,’ he said. ‘I strongly advise you not to go.’
Michael O’ Neill was a wise man. But I didn’t listen to him.
I flew to Taiwan several days later. When Luo Dayou met my plane he was dressed in white, a pale hat over his long hair. Though the day was bright, he wasn’t wearing sunglasses. The non-rock-star getup was his stab at anonymity. Bizarrely enough, it worked. Even when we visited the crowded flower markets together, no one approached him at all—he normally was mobbed by fans. At the markets, he bought me a tiny cactus. Its two little arms were thrust up at its side and its head was bent slightly back. It seemed to encapsulate the surprise we were feeling.
Dayou and I visited a mutual friend, a poet who lived in a beautiful Japanese-style house in the countryside. We met up there with Lin Huai-min, the founder of Taiwan’s Cloudgate dance company. Lin had named Cloudgate after a five-thousand-year-old Chinese dance; he once told me he thought of the mainland as his ‘cultural hometown’. We all understood that part of Hou’s motivation.
Sylvia Chang paced the living room of her flat like a caged tigress as she, Dayou and I discussed how best to handle Yuanzhen’s imminent arrival with Hou’s manager Yu Weiyan and Shu Kuo-chih, the essayist from whom I once hid in my room.
Yuanzhen was a wreck, her eyes red, puffy and accusing. Yu Weiyan and Shu Kuo-chih stood unsmiling on either side of her like bodyguards. I sat on the sofa opposite, between Dayou and Sylvia.
‘Why are you in Taiwan?’ Shu Kuo-chih demanded, as though I were less than welcome. Yuanzhen was already crying. Now I started too. I can’t remember much of the grim conversation, just Sylvia pushing a box of tissues in my direction and, on my other side, the comforting pressure of Dayou’s hand squeezing my shoulder.
Many years later, Shu Kuo-chih and I spoke about that day. He was mortified that he’d been so mean. ‘That’s okay,’ I told him, reminding him of the days when I lived with Fang, ‘you always did make me cry.’
I never saw Yuanzhen again.
Before I left for Taipei, Kim Wong and I had compared notes and sketched out a rough map of Hou’s movements in Hong Kong. That’s when we realised that each time he told me that he had to meet Kim, he told Kim he was seeing me. In fact, we later found out, the first time he did this he was meeting my old friend Winnie Yeung from the New Evening Post.
Soon after arriving in Hong Kong, Hou called Winnie and asked her to lunch. He told her he wanted to go to the mainland. Stunned, she asked him why.
‘I want to study music at the Beijing Conservatory,’ he told her. ‘I need your help. I don’t know anyone else with formal links to the Chinese authorities. Just you and Luo Fu.’
Winnie explained that Luo Fu, her boss, had fallen victim to an obscure power struggle. He was under house arrest in Beijing serving a ten-year sentence for selling Chinese state secrets to the US—a charge viewed as ridiculous by all who knew him. It was Hou’s turn to be stunned.
‘What exactly do you know about life on the mainland?’
‘Almost nothing at all.’ He grinned.
‘Have you had any contacts with mainlanders?’
‘Well, Lingzi and Li Zhun. They were both really nice. Mainlanders are great.’
Winnie was staggered by his naivety. ‘Are you aware of the risks?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘We’re divorced,’ Hou lied. He repeated the lie in the brief CV he jotted down for Winnie to pass on to the Communist authorities. She was outraged when she learned it wasn’t true. Hou claims he only said they were separated. Winnie also insists that she advised Hou against the move. Hou retains the impression that she was enthusiastic. Perhaps, like his line on divorce, it’s what he wanted to believe.
Winnie introduced him to friends in the cultural bureau of the Xinhua News Agency, China’s ‘sha
dow government’ in Hong Kong. They handed the case over to the agency’s Taiwan Affairs department.
Hou recalls that the Xinhua representatives seemed taken aback by his request. They told him they’d need to ask the authorities in Beijing for advice. Several days later, they turned up at his hotel room with good news: he’d be most welcome. They cautioned him to keep mum, and invited him to dinner to discuss details.
At dinner, Hou laid down three conditions. One, they were not to use his trip for propaganda purposes. Two, he didn’t want to meet with any government or Party officials. Three, he wanted help contacting mainland musicians.
‘Agreed,’ said the leader. ‘And furthermore, you’ll be able to leave whenever you want to. But we have one condition of our own.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The issue of Wei Jingsheng’s imprisonment is a very sensitive one. We know about the song you wrote for him. You mustn’t raise this issue while you are in China.’
Hou promised he wouldn’t.
Afterwards, Hou called Yuanzhen in Taipei and told her he’d be flying directly from Hong Kong to London, that his application for study there had been approved. He fed Kim, me and the Hong Kong press the story about going to Japan.
He bought a new guitar with a HK$10,000 (US$1400) loan from Xinhua, whose reps tried to prepare him for life on the mainland. ‘Take lots of plastic shopping bags,’ they advised him. ‘You’ll need them. It’s hard to find plastic bags there.’ Hou laughed. What strange and unexpected advice. He realised he had no idea what he was getting into.
On 4 June 1983, Hou rose at eight and packed his bag. Winnie and some Xinhua people gathered at his hotel to see him off. They were there when I called. A Xinhua car took them to Kai Tak Airport, where he boarded CAAC flight 102 for Beijing. They asked Hou to pose for a photo just before he passed through the departure gates.
‘You’re not going to publish this, are you?’
‘Of course not. It’s just for a souvenir.’
Hou leaned on his guitar case, smiled and waved at the camera. The following morning, he was waving out of the pages of all the left-wing dailies in Hong Kong. Before he even left Hong Kong, Xinhua had broken its first promise to him.
In Taipei, Dayou and I studied the clipping from the New Evening News which I’d brought with me. The unbylined piece was titled ‘Hou Dejian, Composer of “Heirs of the Dragon”, flies to Beijing to Explore New Wellsprings of Creativity’. It reported that Hou had ‘happily declared’ that ‘as an ordinary Chinese and an ordinary folk musician, he was supremely confident that in the homeland of the dragon, in that vast land where the earth itself is permeated with Chinese traditional culture, he would at last be able to tap into the ever-flowing wellsprings of creativity and find broader avenues for Chinese folk music.’
‘Does that sound like Monkey to you?’ I asked Dayou. We snorted with laughter.
Years later, Hou told me, ‘Not a word of it was mine.’
Michael O’Neill had been right in warning me that by rushing over to Taiwan to explain myself, I’d firm up any suspicions about my involvement. Several weeks after I returned to Hong Kong, he gave me an assignment in Taiwan. The Taiwan government refused to give me a visa. I was floored. Michael was rightfully contemptuous. It was time to contact Mr Tso. He was the only one who could clear up this mess. When I rang his office, his stricken colleague informed me he’d died of a heart attack the day before.
I went to Mr Tso’s funeral on 2 July with Nansun Shi, Tsui Hark’s wife. We bowed three times to the portrait of the deceased and once to his family. I wept, for myself and for Hou as well as my late friend.
On 18 June 1983, two weeks after Hou’s defection, a headline in the Taiwan press read: ‘Where has Hou Dejian gone? A dense fog hides what goes on behind the Iron Curtain—wide concern for how this special case will be handled.’ In their coverage of the defection, the Taiwan media was cheerfully undeterred by lack of reliable sources or facts. Depending on which article you read, Hou Dejian had gone to the mainland to escape gambling debts, had been kidnapped by the Communists or, my favourite, thought he was going somewhere else, took a wrong turn, and ended up in enemy territory. Some reports named a mysterious foreign woman, known only as Linda, as the suspected mastermind behind the defection. She was Hou’s secret lover, or a Communist agent, or both, but it was widely known that his wife had long suspected there was something not right in their relationship.
Contacts in the Hong Kong media tried to draw out from me anything they could about the Hou story. I grew exhausted and crabby with the whole business.
I was glad for the frivolity of Hong Kong life. I hung out with Cantonese lesbians who cross-dressed to look like men, kungfu actors, fashion designers and musicians and went to parties where I mixed with upcoming young stars like Chow Yun Fat. I dined with Communists, anti-Communists, diplomats and, on one memorable occasion, the Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima. I was a judge for Hong Kong’s first annual film awards. Life was full and, though Hou was never far from my thoughts, I was more than happy to lose myself in work and play. On 18 June, I wrote to my parents that Hou was ‘gallivanting around the mainland, a big star. Most of his friends, me included, are fed up with him. The whole situation is so complicated and he really left his wife and kid in the lurch. What a shmuck!’
Two days later, the phone rang. It was the shmuck himself.
‘I’M sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to implicate you or anyone else.’ Hou’s voice trembled.
‘Yeah, well, great. I’m up to my neck in it. I’ve been banned from Taiwan thanks to you. Can you please tell me what this is all about?’
‘I’ve met your friend Geremie. He’s with me now. He has a letter for you which he’ll give you when he gets back to Hong Kong. It’ll explain everything.’
I sighed. ‘Are you happy?’
‘I don’t know. No. Maybe. I’ll give this two months, then I’ll see. I’m going to stay away from the media. And I’m going to Sichuan. To Dragon Village. I want to see where I come from.’
‘Are you okay for money?’
‘Geremie gave me six hundred yuan. I should be fine.’
‘Your friends, we all love you, you know.’
‘I know.’
There are many conversations in this book between Hou and myself that I’ve reconstructed, with Hou’s permission. I can’t vouch for their absolute veracity. There’s no such thing as a word-for-word guarantee in biography or memoir. Besides, nearly all the conversations in this book took place originally in Chinese, which is also the language of most of the letters, diary entries and media reports from which I quote. You lose and you gain in translation. All I can promise is that I’ve tried to be faithful to both memory and the truth of the situation. For the above conversation, I was lucky enough to have five sources on which to base my reconstruction. There’s what Geremie, Hou and I remember of it. There’s also an entry in my journal under 20 June 1983 that has ‘Xiao Hou’ written in Chinese. ‘Xiao’ means ‘Young’ and is a common, affectionate term used before people’s surnames. Under ‘Xiao Hou’ are the following scribbled notes, the first two of which no longer make sense to me:
gave message
letter—recvd?
w/Xiao Bai [Geremie’s Chinese nickname]
not happy.
Sichuan.
2 mos. then see
sorry. not told anyone—couldn’t
told him we loved him.
And, finally, I have to thank the record made of the conversation by China’s internal security forces. They tapped Hou’s phone, transcribed and summarised the conversation. Then, they either shared it with their Taiwan counterparts or it simply got into the hands of one of Taiwan’s spies on the mainland. My source in Taiwan, who showed me the transcript, hinted that Taiwan’s spy network was formidable. The transcript, which I wasn’t allowed to photocopy, provided the detail of Hou’s voice sounding ‘nervous’.
Yet it got a few details wr
ong. It had Geremie giving Hou US$600. Geremie, a student at the time, assures me he most certainly did not have US$600 to give away.
Geremie arrived back in Hong Kong on 23 June. I fidgeted the entire day, thinking of nothing but my appointment with him that evening in the coffee shop of the Excelsior Hotel. I was keen to hear everything he could tell me about Hou’s situation.
The letter he brought from Hou was four pages long. I’ve cut out the repetitious and waffly bits:
Dear Linda,
I never imagined that the first letter I’d ever write to you would be for such a reason as this. Leaving Hong Kong, all I could think about was how much I needed to exile myself from Taipei, because I was unable to find myself there. I was lost … My actions were determined by fate; I was predestined to do what I’ve done … All I ask is that all those who love me and all those who hate me stay calm, give me a chance, and see this as the beginning of something, not the end. I need enough time to find some answers, and perhaps there will be something for my friends to reflect on as well. Only if I can produce from within myself ‘a contemporary Chinese voice’ in the next ten years will I be satisfied, and I’ll please everyone else as well. If I can’t do this, then I’ll never find my place in the world.
As for my wife and child, I’ll never be able to make up for the hurt which my actions have caused them. But it’s hard to predict how we’ll all look at this in ten or twenty years’ time. I really miss them, especially my son. When I think of him, my heart feels like it’s been sliced through with a knife. This pain has only just begun—when the north China winter sets in, I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand it … But the world is turning, China is changing, and I’m not willing to miss this excellent opportunity to participate in it all.
As for my mother and my family, I sincerely hope that I’ll be reunited with them. Not now, and who knows where—but I have to find my own answers first. If I can earn enough money, I’ll definitely send them some, though it’s never been my fate to earn much.
