The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  ‘Now if Hou Dejian had been able to write something as good as this,’ one of the students says, ‘he’d have been such a success that he wouldn’t have needed to go to the mainland in the first place.’

  ‘Who did write this song?’

  ‘Dunno.’ The conversation returns to politics.

  Shortly before Hou Dejian left for Hong Kong, his friend, the film director Yu Kanping, whose family ran the club where Father Jerry Martinson performed, approached him with a proposal. Yu was just finishing his new film and wanted Hou to compose the theme song for it. Hou demurred. He had too much on his plate. Why not ask Luo Dayou?

  ‘I want you to do it,’ Yu insisted.

  Hou shook his head. ‘I can’t.’ He knew that if his secret plan succeeded and, what’s more, became public knowledge, the Taiwan government would ban his work. If he composed the theme song for Yu’s new film, the film might get the axe as well. He couldn’t risk doing that to his friend. But he couldn’t explain, either. And Yu Kanping wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  So Hou wrote ‘Song of the Junkman’. Yu loved it. He couldn’t understand why Hou insisted that he receive no credit for the song, either on the film or the album of the soundtrack.

  THE political connections of the film director Lingzi ensured she was one of the first to hear about Hou’s arrival on the mainland. She sought him out and introduced him to Geremie Barmé.

  Geremie took Hou on his first bus ride in Beijing, on one of the old electrical trolley buses. Hou was so appalled by the crowding, the smells, the filth and the rudeness that he swore he’d never take another. Although private cars were unheard of in China at the time, Hou told Geremie that, as soon as he could afford it, he’d import a Mercedes Benz. Geremie laughed.

  Geremie told Hou the story of the old western leftist who’d lived for nearly fifty years in China off the fact that he’d once shaken the hand of the writer Lu Xun in the 1930s. ‘You just keep singing “Heirs”,’ Geremie said, ‘and the Commies will be happy.’ He gave Hou a scroll painting of a Buddhist monk done by Winnie Yeung’s husband, Charles Ng. The monk was wearing a walkman, and the painting was inscribed with the saying, ‘Into this great stomach fits all the things which heaven cannot abide; this smiling face laughs at all that is risible in humankind.’ Geremie wryly admonished Hou that if he wanted to stay out of trouble in China, he’d behave like a monk. Hou smiled, took the painting and ignored the advice.

  A second gift that Geremie gave Hou was an official booklet called How to Recognise Pornographic Music, an anthology of articles published by the editors of People’s Music the year before. It described rock concerts as orgies of ‘drinking, drugs, fighting and homosexuality… a scene of mad turmoil where some people even lose their lives’. With any song that had a strong beat, it was possible to ‘fall under the influence of “temptation”—you begin to dodge and dart, and soon it’s turmoil’. It warned that even Taiwan songs expressing love for the motherland could conceal the hidden political agenda of a call to arms against communism. Hou found the title amusing, but couldn’t read the text—he was still stumped by simplified characters.

  Geremie’s greatest gift to Hou was to introduce him to a number of people who would become his closest friends. These included the elderly translators Gladys and Xianyi Yang, whose home was a gathering spot for the Beijing literati. Geremie had met the Yangs while studying in China in 1977, just after the Cultural Revolution. Gladys had been born in China, the daughter of English missionaries. She’d graduated in 1940 from Oxford University, the first student there to receive a bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature. At Oxford, she met Xianyi, the scion of a Chinese scholarly family from Tianjin who were also bankers. He was studying English literature, Latin and Greek. They fell in love and returned to China, where they joined the revolutionary underground in the forties and fell in with a group of talented, witty and bohemian intellectuals, including the playwright and opera composer Wu Zuguang, Wu’s wife, the popular Chinese opera actress Xin Fengxia, the calligrapher Huang Miaozi and Miaozi’s wife, the painter and essayist Yu Feng.

  The Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, had a strong anti-foreign flavour. Because of Gladys’s nationality and Xianyi’s time abroad, the pair were arrested as spies. Despite the absurdity of the charge, they spent four years in prison, Gladys in solitary. Their three children suffered terribly; one committed suicide. Geremie met the Yangs as they were just beginning to enjoy the post-Cultural Revolution thaw. Though deeply distressed about their son’s death, they were philosophical about what they’d been through and retained their sense of humour, but had begun the heavy drinking that would eventually take its toll on Gladys’s health.

  Hou’s new friends Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang—graduates of Oxford University, underground workers for the Communists before the revolution, bon vivants.

  Their work at the translation quarterly Chinese Literature, where Xianyi was chief editor, brought them into contact with the newer generation of writers. Their home behind the Foreign Languages Bureau in Beijing’s west became a salon at which artists and writers of all ages gathered, where the conversation, the jokes and the whisky never stopped flowing. I’d spent many happy evenings at the Yangs myself.

  The Yangs took an immediate liking to Hou. Xianyi told me he found Hou ‘very genuine, very honest’. Though Chinese Literature had never featured a pop song, Xianyi published a translation of ‘Heirs’.

  Geremie also introduced Hou to the Australian diplomat Richard Rigby, the brother-in-law of Geremie’s teacher Pierre Ryckmans— ‘Simon Leys’, whose Chinese Shadows had such a huge influence on me. Richard, a China scholar in his own right, played guitar and was a great raconteur. His wife, Tai Fang, was originally from Taiwan, and made Hou feel immediately at home.

  Hou also became friends with ‘Auntie’ Wang Kun of the Oriental Song and Dance Company. He sang ‘The Song of the Junkman’ for her, and she sang one of her famous arias from Brother and Sister Reclaim the Wasteland for him. She introduced Hou to her son, Zhou Yue, a photographer for the magazine New Observer and a fan of Hou’s music.

  Hou got used to the idea that he’d be in China for a while.

  And I got used to the idea I wouldn’t be going back to Taiwan. Friends told me that the government there took seriously the rumours that linked me to Hou’s defection; it could be some time before they’d give me a visa.

  Around this time, another Taiwan citizen, of no particular fame, crossed the border to China. He carried several cameras and bought some local newspapers to read. The Chinese security forces found this so suspicious that they arrested him on charges of spying for the Nationalists. He spent four months in detention before being released and deported. Despite the official rhetoric, not all Taiwan citizens were as welcome as Hou. Soon after the Chinese media broadcast news of Hou Dejian’s arrival on the mainland, a letter addressed to him was delivered to the Ministry of Culture. It was signed Hou Degen.

  ‘I am your first cousin,’ the letter began. Hou Degen first heard ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ in 1981. He’d been startled to see that the composer not only shared his surname, but also the character de, ‘virtue’, assigned to his generation by family tradition. When he learned that Hou Dejian was a Sichuanese, he was overcome with excitement. No one in the family had heard any news of Hou Guobang since the war. They’d mourned him for dead. Hou Degen wondered if it was possible that Hou Dejian was the son of Hou Guobang.

  Reading the letter, Hou Dejian nearly jumped out of his skin with excitement. Together with his minder Liu Xilang and the composer Wang Ming, he set off on 26 July 1983 for Shamaness Mountain and Dragon Village. Their first stop was a village in Hubei Province, just east of Sichuan. There they found Hou Degen, a schoolteacher some forty years older than Hou. The cousins stared at each other awkwardly, neither sure how to begin. Then they both began to cry. Hou later told me that, of all the things he’d ever done or seen or heard, nothing affected him more deeply or intensely than meeti
ng his relatives in China.

  For Hou Dejian, Hou Degen’s life was a short course in the history of Chinese communism. Hou Degen had graduated from Chongqing University with a degree in maths in 1949, the same year his uncle Hou Guobang fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists. Turning down an opportunity to study at New York’s Columbia University, Hou Degen elected to stay and contribute to the new, socialist society.

  Nearly half of the family had been wiped out in the civil war. As Hou Guobang had feared, the Communists killed his father, Hou Shangmei, and Hou Degen’s own father, Hou Dejian’s uncle. Then, during the Land Reform Movement of the early fifties, activists tortured Hou’s grandmother. Calling her the ‘wife of a big landlord’ and accusing her of hiding gold, they wrapped her fingers in oily rags and forced her tearful niece—Hou Guobang’s cousin and first wife—to set the rags ablaze. Though Hou Dejian’s grandmother survived into the late seventies, she never regained the full use of her hands.

  In 1956, the year of Hou Dejian’s birth, Chairman Mao had encouraged intellectuals to speak their minds, even if it meant criticising the Communist Party: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.’ Hou Degen was one of many who answered the call. Whether Mao was genuinely surprised by the strength of the response or whether he’d intended from the start to smoke out the Party’s critics, the ‘Hundred Flowers’ had no sooner bloomed than Mao trampled them. Hou Degen was one of nearly half a million victims of the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, sent to a labour camp on an indefinite sentence.

  Mao’s next big project was the utopian Great Leap Forward, in which superhuman effort, revolutionary fervour and over-fulfilled production targets were to propel China into the golden age of true communism. Instead, it brought the Chinese economy to its knees. Following an ideological split between Mao and Khrushchev, the USSR withdrew economic and technical aid to China, another body blow. When a series of natural disasters hit the country, famine was the result.

  During the terrible period between 1958 and 1961, when as many as thirty million Chinese died of starvation, Hou Degen laboured in primitive and gruelling conditions on the construction of a reservoir. He barely survived, and was haunted for years by the memory of the emaciated corpses of colleagues and friends he’d carted to the crematorium.

  Although he’d been a labourer since 1957, Red Guards labelled Hou Degen a ‘stinking intellectual’ when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. They broke his elbow while ‘struggling’ him for alleged thought crimes before a hysterical and bloodthirsty mob.

  After the Cultural Revolution, at the end of the seventies, the Party ‘rehabilitated’ some 400,000 former victims of the Anti-Rightist campaign but somehow forgot about Hou Degen. When Hou Dejian met him, he was still officially a criminal, though the authorities let him teach in the village school. His wage was about 60 yuan (US$37) a month, which together with the unsteady income his wife earned doing odd jobs, went to support their four children. All six of them shared a two-room shack. Hou Dejian, who until then had had a generally agreeable experience of Chinese-style communism, was deeply shocked.

  Hou on the road to Dragon Village, 1983.

  Hou Degen, Hou Dejian and Hou’s official escorts piled into a jeep and drove towards Dragon Village, picking up more family members in villages along the way. The party’s imminent arrival sent the inhabitants of the village into a tizzy.

  Hou Dejian’s grandfather’s status as landlord and petty official, and his father and uncle’s service in the Nationalist Army, had brought incredible suffering on the family. The Communists had persecuted many of his relatives. Some were murdered, others driven mad.

  Hou Guobang’s younger sister, Hou Guoshu, had lived in dire conditions ever since the land reform that had left her mother a cripple. Deng’s economic reforms hadn’t done much to make her life easier. When the cadres parcelled out land to the village households, they gave her the most barren patch of all. Yet when she heard that Hou Dejian was coming, she insisted he stay with her. As his paternal aunt, she was his closest relative.

  The local Communist Party officials were terrified of the impression Hou might get of the village were he to stay with Hou Guoshu. One official tried to persuade her to switch houses with him for the duration of her nephew’s visit. She refused. In the end, they hauled a western-style bed up the mountain and installed it in her home, bought fresh bedding, fixed up her house and gave her enough money to feed him well.

  Hou Dejian stayed in Dragon Village for over a week. He was overjoyed to find so many relatives still alive, and to meet so many he never knew existed. Those who’d survived revolution, starvation and more revolution numbered more than six hundred. It was a proper clan. How different this was from the disjointed, displaced life of the juancun where he’d grown up.

  The clan was thrilled to know that not only had Hou Guobang survived but that he’d had four children, including three sons to carry on the family name. ‘It was almost as if my arrival in the village symbolised an end to their years of pain and suffering,’ Hou told me later. ‘As for me, I felt like I knew who I was at last. I was so happy to be welcomed somewhere not just because I was the author of “Heirs of the Dragon”, but because I was Hou Dejian, son of Hou Guobang, grandson of Hou Shangmei.’

  Hou’s mostly illiterate or semi-literate peasant relatives accepted him as part of the family. But they couldn’t understand what he did in life, or why the local officials were so keen that he get a good impression of the village. ‘They tried to place me in some category that would explain it. I was university-educated. Was I an “intellectual” then? I wrote songs. Was I a pop star? It was hard to explain that none of these labels really fitted.’

  Though his family asked for nothing, Hou was overwhelmed with an urge to help them. But the cash Geremie gave him had evaporated ages ago and he was travelling on money borrowed from the Ministry of Culture. He didn’t need to worry. Thanks to reports sent back to Beijing from his minders, Hou Degen was ‘rehabilitated’ and assigned better housing, the Party made his impoverished aunt a member of the county-level People’s Congress and all his close relatives were allocated better farming land.

  Travelling by train and plane, Hou and his minders covered nearly one-third of the country. He met Muslim Uighur and Kazakh singers in northwestern Xinjiang, and took pages of notes on the region’s strong folk music traditions, which he’d already drawn on for some of the songs in Heirs, Cont’d. He visited the mausoleum of his childhood hero Dr Sun Yat-sen in Nanjing, saw the famous canals of Suzhou, ‘China’s Venice’, and sampled the fine teas of Hangzhou by the scenic West Lake.

  When he developed a bad chest cold, Hou feared a relapse of TB, and consulted a doctor. The doctor informed him that his heart was lower in his chest cavity than it should be. ‘You probably won’t live past forty,’ he predicted.

  Once he got over the shock, Hou thought, if I can’t do what I want to in thirteen years, I’d rather be dead anyway.

  The grand tour ended up in Shanghai, where Wang Kun’s Oriental Song and Dance Company was performing. On 1 October 1983, Hou’s twenty-seventh birthday, the troupe put on a party for him with cake, candles, the works. China’s National Day no longer seemed like such an inauspicious date for a birthday.

  Wang Kun invited Hou to participate in their Shanghai concerts. Before leaving Beijing, Hou had mentioned to Yang Xianyi that he was thinking of studying at the Central Music Conservatory. ‘You’d hate it,’ Xianyi advised. ‘If Wang Kun asks you to join the Oriental Song and Dance Troupe, you’d be better off there.’

  The troupe was like none Hou had ever known. Its nearly three hundred members were charged with being the country’s ‘cultural ambassadors’ abroad, taking Chinese song and dance to third-world countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America while introducing to Chinese audiences the performing arts of the rest of the developing world. When they sang songs from other countries, they dressed in approximations of those countries’ national costum
es, even wearing blackface and waving spears for African numbers.

  By the time Hou arrived in China, the troupe had toured forty countries and performed for more than one million people in China itself. It was cautiously experimenting with pop music—revving up the beat of songs like ‘Without the Communist Party There Would be no New China’ and accompanying them with an electronic synthesiser.

  That was about as rock as China got. In the late seventies, a group of foreign residents led by a Reuters journalist, several Americans and a Madagascan named Robinson Randriaharimalala (‘Lao Luo’ to his Chinese friends) formed a rock band. Calling themselves the Peking All-stars and later the Beijing Underground, they played mainly at diplomatic functions and other foreigners-only gatherings. As prohibitions on Chinese people socialising with foreigners gradually relaxed, their audience came to include Chinese as well. The first real local rock band—a mix of Chinese and foreign musicians including Lao Luo’s brother Eddie—didn’t appear until 1985.

  In August 1983, not long after Hou’s arrival on the mainland, the Musicians’ Association and the Ministry of Culture sponsored China’s first-ever national conference on pop music, though they preferred to call it ‘easy listening’ (qing yinyue) rather than ‘pop’ (liuxing gequ), with all the latter’s ‘pornographic’ implications. ‘Easy listening’ was okay so long as it was ‘healthy’ both in content and style of performance.

  The Oriental Song and Dance Company was very healthy. The singers stood stiffly on stage, heads cocked to one side, fingertips pressed together in front of their tummies. The women wore either bland, sexless suits, conservative variations of the cheongsam, or violently frilly frocks showing little leg and no cleavage. The men wore dark suits, western or Mao, and a tad less lipstick and rouge than their female counterparts.

  Into this hybrid world of revolutionary rectitude and petty bourgeois aesthetics stepped Hou Dejian, with his longish hair, jeans, and natural stage manner. Accompanied only by his guitar, he sang ‘Heirs’, ‘Return’ (the song about the old soldier) and a few other numbers.