by Linda Jaivin
I know that in the short term, my friends, especially those in Taipei, will have to suffer, and I take full responsibility for this. I carry the burden of my debt to them with me on my travels. Unless I’m able to produce some works of substance within the next five to ten years, I’ll never forgive myself.
Linda, as for you, what can I say? Apart from missing you and offering my gratitude (though you might not care for it), and hoping that God will protect you, I think you probably don’t want to hear anything too revoltingly sentimental!
Xiao Hou. 14 June 1983. Beijing
Two days after the news of Hou’s defection broke, his mother wrote to the Nationalist Party. She claimed Hou had been tricked into going to the mainland, that he thought he was going to Japan but had been put on a plane to Beijing instead. She pleaded with the Taiwan government to ‘rescue’ him so he could help in the fight against communism. I was shown this letter years later by my contact in the Nationalist Party.
Knowing Hou’s mother, a practical and not very political woman, I suspect she was laying it on a bit thick. I don’t doubt, however, that her distress was real. When I spoke to her, she sounded devastated. She was angry with her son, too, for abandoning his wife and child. Most of all, she feared that she would never see him again.
Hou Guobang, on the other hand, understood from the moment he heard the news—his boy was going home.
When Hou stepped off the plane in Beijing, it was 5.40 p.m. on 4 June 1983. Guitar in hand, plastic bags stuffed into his luggage, he was struck by how many people were wearing Mao suits. Everyone here looks like an official, he thought.
‘Hou Dejian?!’ A fellow holding a placard with his name on it called out to him.
The whole world will know I’m here now, he thought crossly, unaware that back in Hong Kong the left-wing press was polishing its ‘Heir of the Dragon Flies to the Land of the Dragon’ story. As Winnie later explained, the Communists had promised not to make propaganda out of Hou’s visit, but they’d never said anything about not publicising it.
‘Ni hao.’ An older man shook Hou’s hand. ‘My name is Wang Ming. I’m a composer with the Oriental Song and Dance Troupe. Welcome to China.’ Wang introduced Hou to two ‘comrades’, a man and a woman only a few years older than Hou. The pair neglected to tell Hou that they worked for the Ministry of Culture. Hou had requested no contact with Communist officials. They’d break the news to him later that no one in China could avoid contact with officials. Hou’s first impression was right. They were everywhere.
His three minders led him out to a light blue Shanghai model sedan that looked like it was fresh off a 1950s assembly line. Lots of things about mainland China in 1983, Hou thought, seemed to be from another age. The sedan shared the long, tree-lined road into town with swarms of single-gear pushbikes in black, blue and army green, as well as horse- and mule-drawn carts, but few other automobiles. Though the road was paved, the car raised a great cloud of dust as it went along, blanketing the grim-faced cyclists in a pale brown mist. There were few modern buildings in the Chinese capital in 1983, nothing to compare with the gleaming curtainwall edifices of Hong Kong’s Central district or Taipei’s stylish Dunhua South Road. Even the newer buildings among the massive, Soviet-style apartment blocks lining the streets into the centre of the city looked dilapidated and tired.
Hou thought he’d break the ice with a little joke. ‘So, you drive on the right-hand side of the road here. I thought you’d drive on the left.’ No one laughed. They didn’t react at all.
They drove up to the Xuanwumen Hotel, southwest of Tiananmen Square, built to accommodate revolutionary pilgrims visiting Beijing to view Mao’s pickled body in the mausoleum on the square. Hou checked into a room where the feeling that he’d slipped back several decades in time was reinforced by the decor. On a dingy, synthetic red carpet stood thick, clunky-looking armchairs with wooden armrests, their mud-coloured slipcovers capped with off-white antimacassars. Under the glass top of the tea table was yet another doily. The desk was disproportionately large. The green-shaded lamps cast a verdant glow around the room.
Over the next few days, Hou’s minders showed him the sights of Beijing. Hou never stopped trying to get a rise out of them. ‘Sometimes I’d burst into a refrain from “The East is Red” when they came to pick me up in the morning. I’d make jokes. No matter what I did, they never laughed. They never revealed what they were thinking. They were correct and polite but absolutely flavourless, like white bread without butter or jam.’ By the time Hou arrived in China, Deng’s economic reform and Open Door policies had been in place almost five years. Compared with Taiwan, the mainland remained materially backward. Only one in 150 could afford a TV compared to one in 3.6 people on Taiwan. The mainland’s factories produced one bicycle for every thirty-seven people while one in six Taiwan Chinese owned a motorbike and private cars were common on the island.
Yet life was improving. The peasants, allowed to grow vegetables, fruit and other cash crops once they’d fulfilled their state grain quotas, sold their produce at new ‘free markets’. No longer did the people of Beijing have to survive the long winter on the meagre fuel of gritty rice, cabbage and carrots, though cooking oil, pork and grain were still rationed. And, for the first time in decades, the ‘four moderns’— tape recorder, bicycle, watch, camera—were in reach of the every-prole. Though Mao suits were still common, young Chinese in the cities sought out, and were allowed to wear, jeans and colourful if modest frocks.
The Communist Party was distancing itself from the radical politics of the Mao era, and particularly the decade-long ultra-leftism of the Cultural Revolution. Asking the Chinese people to forget the injustices and wounds of the past—particularly those inflicted on them by the Party itself—the government urged them to xiang qian kan, ‘focus on the future’. A popular pun substituted the character for ‘money’ (also pronounced qian) for ‘the future’. ‘Focus on money’ became the unofficial slogan for material girls and boys in what was to become China’s own decade of greed.
A week after Hou’s arrival in Beijing, the official All-China Musicians’ Association held a tea party in his honour. Among the guests was a fifty-nine-year-old singer and actress called Wang Kun. Wang was a veteran of the Party’s time in Yan’an, the isolated mountain stronghold where the Communists regrouped after the Long March, and where Mao wrote many of his most famous speeches. It was there that Wang Kun had played the lead role in the original, 1940s production of the revolutionary model opera White Haired Girl of the Mountains. She starred in other agitprop classics like Brother and Sister Reclaim the Wasteland and the 1964 epic song and dance extravaganza, The East Is Red. Having joined the Ministry of Culture’s Oriental Song and Dance Company when it was established in 1962, she was now its director. She would come to play a major role in what would unfold as the less-than-model opera of Hou’s life on the mainland.
The chairman of the association, Lü Ji, addressed the gathering: ‘“Heirs of the Dragon” expresses a patriotic attitude and profound feelings for the people,’ he declared. ‘Our policy is to allow a hundred flowers to bloom. We warmly welcome any work that is patriotic and serves the people.’ Turning to Hou, he said, ‘I hope you will have the chance to travel around the country and learn about our folk music traditions. The beautiful impression they will make upon you, and the beautiful poems and lyrics and language that you will find in them will help you create even more individual works that will be welcomed by the people.’
It was Hou’s first introduction to what’s been called the ‘wooden language’ of socialist officialdom, and it floored him.
‘Everyone here,’ he replied after a pause, ‘is older and more experienced than myself. I really don’t know what to say.’ He talked about the campus folk movement and sang ‘Heirs, Cont’d’ for them. They responded with blank stares. Afterwards, several other musician-officials expressed their hopes that Hou would ‘serve the country’ with his music. A singer asked Hou to perform ‘Heir
s of the Dragon’ in a duet with him, and another sang the propaganda ditty ‘I Love You China’. If Hou thought he was misunderstood in Taiwan, he concluded, ‘I wasn’t on the same wavelength with these people at all.’
The excitement of the new adventure pushed any second thoughts about his decision to the back of his mind. ‘I’d never been anywhere so strange as the mainland,’ Hou told a reporter some years later. ‘I had two hopes. The first was that it wouldn’t be too easy for me to adjust, because anything that comes too easily isn’t worth all that much. The second was that it wouldn’t be so hard that I’d lose my courage.’
As in Taiwan, the cultural establishment on the mainland gave ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ an heroic interpretation. Some schools even used the song, whose lyrics appeared in officially published songbooks and magazines, as a tool for instilling national pride in students. When, in late 1984, the People’s Educational Publishing House put out a collection of historical essays intended to foster in China’s youth ‘an understanding of the greatness of the Chinese nation’, it called it Heirs of the Dragon after the song.
The song had also won a passionate public following on the mainland. It seemed weird that a song which referred to China as the ‘far off east’ could find such resonance in China itself. In 1991, I asked the lead singer of the Shanghai pop group Major Construction Project, Ye Kuifu, about this. ‘For so many years,’ he said, ‘we were wrapped up in political struggles, cut off from the world, unconnected to the rest of humanity. We really were “far off ”.’
Ye’s friend, the music critic Liu Qing, another fan of ‘Heirs’, added, ‘I think we’ve unconsciously accepted the Eurocentric view of the world in which China is the far east. Besides,’ he went on, ‘every other patriotic song talks about loving the country. “Heirs” seemed to speak of loving the people.’
Not everyone was impressed. The most virulent tirade against the song that I saw in the course of my research came from the pen of the Beijing literary critic, scholar and fan of Nietzsche, Liu Xiaobo. In an unpublished essay which he showed me, Liu Xiaobo raged, ‘I feel no heaven-sent sense of mission to behave as an “heir of the dragon”…I am not an “heir of the dragon”. I am a product of nature. We in China must transcend our narrow nationalistic concerns. We ought to subscribe to the notion that “I belong to no one but myself”.’ In one of those bizarre twists of history, years after writing this, Liu Xiaobo would become one of Hou’s closest friends—and their unlikely friendship would nearly cost them both their lives.
Hou welcomed to China by Xi Zhongxun, minister for the United Front and Politburo member Yang Shankun (on right). ‘I’d never been anywhere so strange,’ he thought. ‘Everyone here looks like an official.’
Soon after the tea party, China’s Minister of Culture, Zhu Muzhi, Vice-minister Situ Huimin, Lü Ji, Wang Kun and Lü’s vice-chairman at the Musicians’ Association, Sun Zhen, invited Hou to a Mongolian hotpot dinner at the Beijing Hotel. ‘Don’t think of us as officials,’ they suggested. ‘We’re artists, just like you.’
Over paper-thin slices of lamb, cabbage and tofu cooked in a simmering soup, Zhu attempted to explain to Hou some of the facts of life on the mainland. ‘One of the Communist Party’s top priorities is to ensure food, shelter and clothing for all the people of China. So factories produce clothes, and that’s good, but all the clothes look the same, which isn’t so good. Under the circumstances, it’s the best we can do. The state can’t cater for all tastes.’
Hou thought about it for a minute. ‘Why does the state have to be involved at all?’ he asked. ‘Why can’t you leave it up to designers and factories and consumers—to the market?’
The minister exchanged worried glances with the others. ‘Have some more lamb,’ Wang Kun urged.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported on the dinner, as did the English-language China Daily. The article quoted a party official predicting the reunification of Taiwan with China by the end of the eighties. Hou was learning that the Communists had no intention of observing their promise not to use him for propaganda.
In Taiwan, the Nationalist official who’d been with Dayou and the others on the night following the defection continued to monitor Hou’s movements as best he could. In his official reports, he referred to Hou as ‘Hou ni Dejian’, or Hou ‘Traitor’ Dejian just as the mainland officials he met were always, for instance, ‘False Minister of Culture Zhu “Bandit” Muzhi’. The Nationalist official didn’t believe that Hou would last long on the mainland. The Communists would milk him for all the propaganda value they could, he predicted, but Hou would in the end prove too difficult to cope with.
The official advised the Taiwan government to hedge its bets. On the one hand, they couldn’t allow their citizens to think it was okay to visit the mainland. On the other, if they condemned Hou too harshly, the Communists would have a propaganda field day. The biggest concern for Taiwan, he wrote, was to limit the effect of the defection among Taiwan’s young people and cultural circles.
The Government Information Office issued a terse statement. They would deal with Hou’s case ‘according to the law’ and based on his words and deeds in the mainland. Years later, Hou commented in his memoir The True Story of a Troublemaker that the Taiwan government’s response had been ‘quite rational…more than I can say for that of some so-called friends and certain journalists’.
Indeed. The Taiwan press now were labelling Hou an opportunist, a failure and even ‘an absurdity’. They published photos of Yuanzhen, her soft face stained with tears, cradling their infant child as she struggled to cope with her husband’s public defection and private desertion.
The singer Yang Zujun was one of the first commentators to attempt a serious analysis of Hou’s defection. In an essay for the journal Progress, Yang wrote that ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ represented ‘the China of Hou’s student days, a profound enigma that keeps people awake at night… the China of conjectures, hopes and anxieties’. In the following issue, the popular novelist Chen Yingzhen declared that the defection was neither a victory for the Communists nor a defeat for the Nationalists. ‘Any attempt…to censure Hou or accuse him of being a traitor,’ Chen insisted, ‘does dishonour to natural nationalistic sentiments.’
Typical of the heated response to Chen’s article was a commentary titled ‘My China is Taiwan!’, also published in Progress. The author dismissed Hou’s defection as his own ‘personal business’ with negligible repercussions on either the musical or political scenes of Taiwan. ‘Only those who identify with the place where they live can claim to be patriots; those who don’t, who can’t see Taiwan as China and the Taiwanese as their compatriots are by no means patriots!’ he declared.
Hou Dejian was forgotten as the debate raged on in public forums and the pages of numerous Taiwan journals through the following year. The historian Chen Fangming, writing under the pen-name Shi Minghui, collected these articles into a book called Selections from the Debate on Taiwan Consciousness. According to him, the debate smashed the taboos surrounding the sensitive topics of Taiwanese–mainlander relations, the hopelessness of ‘recovering the mainland’, and Taiwan’s own evolving identity. It was, according to Shi, a ‘milestone’ in the oppositionist movement.
Some writers used Hou’s defection as a platform from which to criticise government interference in the arts and the censorship system, though others pointed out that if Hou went to the mainland to escape censorship, he had quite a shock coming to him.
One of the major newspapers published an essay by a writer who used about 4000 words to make the point that too much ink was being wasted on the question of Hou’s defection.
Sun Weimang, Hou’s university friend, privately thought Hou’s action had been liaobuqi, ‘admirable’. ‘To our minds, the mainland was a kind of hell. It was very gutsy of him to go there.’ Sun thought that Hou would have ‘suffocated’ in Taiwan. As for whether Hou was an opportunist, he told me that there were ‘different interpretations’ you coul
d give to the word. ‘If opportunism is taking advantage of an opportunity to improve yourself and your situation, I don’t see what’s wrong with that.’
I imagine this scene. It takes place in one of the neo-traditional teahouses which by then were very popular in Taiwan. A group of students is sitting on the tatami, nibbling snacks flavoured with sweet red beans or black sesame. One of them tends to the miniature teapot, pouring out fragrant Iron Goddess of Mercy tea into thimble-sized cups.
Some of the students detest Hou for what he’s done. Others envy him. Their talk leads to questions of national identity. When they reach the subject of Taiwan independence, they lower their voices, and look around nervously to see if anyone appears to be listening in with professional interest.
A song comes on. They stop talking for a moment to listen. It’s the theme song from a new movie, Papa Can You Hear Me Sing?, a melodrama about a man who picks through trash for recyclable objects and, finding an abandoned baby girl in a bin, raises her as his daughter. She grows up to be a pop star and feels ashamed of her ragged, uneducated father, only to realise how much she loves him when he falls ill and dies. Its chorus is the traditional singsong cry of the Taiwanese junkman as he pushes his cart up and down the narrow alleyways: jiugantang maiwo?—‘Any old bottles for sale?’ The film is a box office hit in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, and ‘Song of the Junkman’ has been topping the charts, turning singer Julie Su Jui into a superstar.
Without heaven, there’d be no earth
Without earth, there’d be no home
Without home, there’d be no you
Without you, there’d be no me…
When will you return to my side and let me sing with you
Once again
Jiugantang maiwo?
Any old bottles for sale?
