by Linda Jaivin
The Shanghai singer Ye Kuifu was one of many people astounded by their first glimpse of Hou Dejian. He’d first heard of Hou in 1981, when Central Radio played ‘Heirs of the Dragon’. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes!’ he told me. ‘I thought you had to be really old to write songs. Hou was a big influence on me, on my decision to write songs and sing.’
Hou was happy, inspired. After a visit to the Youth Culture Palace in Shanghai, he wrote ‘Our Tomorrow’, a duet:
A: You were born on the Beautiful Island
B: You grew up on the vast central plains
A&B: We’d never met though
It’s like you’ve been right before me all along—
I’ve never seen anyone quite like you
I’ve only heard tell about how you live
But I can’t tell who’s who
If you’re me or I’m you—
Having insisted that he would not be used for United Front propaganda, Hou composed the ultimate United Front propaganda song.
In May 1983, the month before Hou’s defection, Hong Kong welcomed its new governor, Sir Edward Youde. ‘He speaks Mandarin,’ I wrote to my parents, ‘and everyone hopes he’ll be able to find a reasonable solution to 1997.’
As Asiaweek’s Hong Kong correspondent, I was doing more and more of what we called ‘1997 stories’. That was the year when Britain’s lease on Hong Kong’s New Territories would expire. Deng Xiaoping made it clear that, come 1997, China intended to reclaim sovereignty over the whole of Hong Kong. This prospect made many in Hong Kong nervous, for despite the fact that the British only granted the territory a tokenistic degree of democracy, the citizens of Hong Kong enjoyed many more freedoms and rights than their ‘compatriots’ in the mainland. They hoped that Britain would push for a solution that would allow them to retain them.
The British, as the territory’s administrators, were in a position of strength but no moral authority. The dirty history of their occupation of Hong Kong began in the nineteenth century, when they craved Chinese tea, silk and porcelain but discovered to their astonishment that China desired nothing they had to offer in return. The British redressed the trade imbalance by smuggling opium from India into China. The Chinese government, rightfully appalled, banned the importation of opium. The British defended their illegal drug trade with gunships. The first Opium War, between 1840 and 1842, ended with Britain claiming the island of Hong Kong in perpetuity. The second Opium War, from 1856 to 1858, resulted in the ceding of the Kowloon Peninsula, and in 1898, under the terms of yet another humiliating treaty, China leased over two hundred offshore islands plus the land between Kowloon and the Shenzhen River—the New Territories— to Britain for ninety-nine years, ending in 1997.
By the 1980s, the three areas—Hong Kong island, Kowloon and the New Territories—were so thoroughly interdependent that no one seriously imagined that the Chinese could recover the New Territories without taking the other two as well, though that would clearly have to involve negotiations.
I hadn’t been back to Beijing since Hou’s defection. My chance came with the resumption of the Sino-British negotiations over the future of Hong Kong in October 1983.
AFTER three months on the road, Hou Dejian rocked back into Beijing with hundreds of pages of diary entries, including thirty essays, a short story and six new songs. He moved into suite 622 in the old Overseas Chinese Hotel on Wangfujing, near Tiananmen Square, and wrote out a list of plans eleven pages long. Among other things, he wanted to ‘experience the life of mainland Chinese’ and get a handle on modern Chinese history and communist theory.
His keenest ambition was to establish a ‘Sound of the Orient’ recording studio. It would have state-of-the-art equipment on which young mainland singers, songwriters and bands could practise and record. No other mainland studio catered for pop or rock.
Hou wrote in his journal that he was so excited he felt like ‘shouting and jumping’. More soberly, he predicted that when he finally did come down from his ‘flying height’ he’d be in for a hard landing.
Two days after Hou’s return to Beijing, I stumbled into his hotel room in pain from the maotai-fuelled follies of the night before, and interviewed him for Asiaweek.
Hou told me he felt the need to write something better than ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ but insisted that if it required having to experience ‘yet another event that brought out the most shameless, spineless and hopeless aspects of the Chinese character, I’d rather never write another song in my life’. As for his defection, if he was running away from failure and disappointment, his actions also had an idealistic and positive side. In any case, he said, ‘I don’t feel I have to go out of my way to explain myself to those who’ll never understand me.’
He felt terrible about the suffering he’d caused his friends and family and even apologised to the Nationalists for the ‘trouble, pressure and embarrassment’ he’d caused. ‘I must confess that I’m an extremely selfish person,’ he said.
I threw the ‘heroes of opportunism’ question at him.
‘Perhaps I’m not the best person to judge their individual contributions. But I stand by my words to your magazine then.’
‘If you knew five months ago what you do now, would you still have flown to Beijing?’
‘Certainly.’
The formalities dispensed with, we got on with the business of being mates. Hou told me all about his travels, and invited me to see him perform with the Oriental Song and Dance Company at the Workers Stadium.
The performer who most impressed me, I told him afterwards as he led me backstage, was the doll-like teenager who played the erhu, the two-stringed zither, and sang the Hebei folk song ‘Little Cabbage’.
Hou brightened. ‘That’s Cheng Lin,’ he told me. ‘I’ll introduce you.’ He told me that Cheng Lin had been a child prodigy, invited to play the erhu with a traditional music ensemble in the navy when she was only eleven. She’d been singing on stage since she was thirteen; her debut concert, in which she strutted the stage in her navy uniform while belting out Taiwan pop songs, including one by Luo Dayou, had been a wild success. Now sixteen, she’d been the subject of a television special and already people were calling her China’s answer to Teresa Teng.
Not everything had gone well for her. After the television special was aired, Party officials criticised her for being ‘sexually provocative’ and banned her from the stage. Her plight had moved the respected eighty-five-year-old painter Li Kuchan. He painted a tiny bird singing on a rock under which lurked a crab, and calligraphed a dedication to Cheng Lin describing her talent as ‘boundless’. Li’s admiration for Cheng Lin made it awkward for the Party to continue harassing her. Wang Kun, an old friend of Li’s, invited Cheng Lin to join the Oriental Song and Dance Company.
On 11 June 1983, the day before her first performance with the company, Li Kuchan died of a heart attack. They only told her afterwards. Cheng Lin sobbed inconsolably.
The Party-controlled media continued to snipe at Cheng Lin. One article even accused her singing of ‘giving our soldiers all the wrong ideas, causing them to lose their fighting strength’. Wang Kun stood by her protégé, even producing her debut album, Child’s Cradle.
We found Cheng Lin in her dressing room. On stage a consummate professional, poised and confident, in person she seemed more childlike than western girls her age, blushing and giggling when I told her how much I’d enjoyed her singing. A petite little thing, she wore her hair in two pert pigtails, which made her seem even younger. She had a contagious laugh, dimples, a bright smile and an endearing personality. As we took our leave of her, Hou remarked, ‘She’s a cute kid, isn’t she?’
On 12 October 1983, Deng Xiaoping put his Communism’s Mister Nice Guy image on ice. With a virulent rant against ‘decadent bourgeois culture’, the concepts of ‘humanism and individual worth’, as well as ‘bad people…enemies of socialism…and Taiwan spies’, he unleashed a political campaign against the ‘spiritual pollution’ which, he claimed, w
ould ‘bring disaster upon the country and the People’ if it weren’t stamped out.
‘Auntie’ Wang Kun: The original star of White Haired Girl of the Mountains, she was to play a major role in the less than model revolutionary opera of Hou’s life on the mainland.
It was a bit rich for Deng to call for a struggle against bourgeois decadence when most people enjoyed nothing of the kind. Despite all the hype of reform, the consumer revolution was far from a dinner party. Each time I left Hong Kong for Beijing, my carry-on luggage was full of green vegetables, toothpaste, tissues and other basic consumer items wanted by my friends on the mainland. They enjoyed few of the services or amenities people in Hong Kong and Taiwan took for granted. Almost no one who wasn’t a high official had a private telephone, for instance. Calling a friend involved dialling a ‘neighbourhood phone’ and then holding on for ten or fifteen minutes while an old man shuffled off with a megaphone through which he’d announce the fact of the phone call to the entire ’hood. Per capita GNP hovered around US$300, compared with US$5100 in Hong Kong, US$2371 in Taiwan and US$10,080 in Japan. Bourgeois decadence? Hel-lo?
The campaign particularly targeted writers, artists and musicians who had the nerve to be more concerned with self-expression than, in Deng’s words, ‘extolling the revolutionary history of the Party and the People and their heroic deeds’.
I dropped in on Wu Zuguang, the elderly playwright who was an old friend of the Yangs. His wife Xin Fengxia, the opera singer, had been so badly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution that she was left paralysed on one side of her body. Over a lunch of steamed dumplings eaten with cloves of raw garlic, Zuguang raged against the new campaign. ‘There’s no good in politics,’ Auntie Fengxia fumed, pushing more dumplings in my direction. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’ After she went into the bedroom for her afternoon nap, Zuguang told me that ever since the campaign had begun she’d had violent nightmares in which the Red Guards were coming for her all over again.
On another day, I discovered Lingzi in Hou’s hotel room, frowning and muttering over the latest anti-spiritual-pollution update in the People’s Daily. If the daughter of a Politburo member struggled to make sense of the campaign, the rest of China didn’t have much chance.
In December, the magazine People’s Music warned that ‘musical works harmful to the construction of socialist spiritual civilisation and the physical and spiritual well-being of the people’ would no longer be tolerated.
Hou had accepted an invitation to perform at a series of concerts at the People’s Theatre in Beijing in December. He invited Cheng Lin to sing ‘Our Tomorrow’ with him. They were rehearsing on the afternoon of their first performance when a theatre administrator strode in with the news that they were pulling Cheng Lin from the program: a Party document had named her an agent of ‘spiritual pollution’.
Hou couldn’t believe his ears. ‘If I perform without her,’ he told them, his voice tense with anger, ‘I’d be polluting myself.’ He turned to Cheng Lin. ‘C’mon. We’re leaving.’
She hesitated, her big eyes round with fear. What would happen to her if she followed him? Then she looked at him and thought, this man will protect me. They walked out together.
Hou’s stay on the mainland had so far been a tremendous publicity coup for the Communists. His example seemed to prove to Hong Kong and Taiwan ‘compatriots’ that you didn’t have to be a revolutionary zealot to get along in China. Nervous administrators at the People’s Theatre made excuses for Hou when he didn’t show up that night, but alerted the Party’s United Front Department to the crisis.
United Front officials ordered the theatre to apologise to Hou. The following evening, a triumphant Hou welcomed Cheng Lin onto the stage with him. On the third day, the minister in charge of United Front work invited the pair to perform together at an official new year’s party. Cheng Lin was out of trouble.
At the fete, the pair sang ‘Our Tomorrow’ and another new song by Hou called ‘New Shoes, Old Shoes’. The inspiration for this one came from a scene Hou had witnessed in a shop in Wuhan, an industrial city on the Yangtze. A mother tried to persuade her son not to wear the new shoes she’d just bought him because they might get dirty. Defiantly, he’d put on the new pair and tossed away the old. Hou glanced down at the mother’s own shoes. Made of cloth, they were well-worn, with ragged soles, and in far worse condition than the ones that her son had discarded.
The melody drew on a folk song from Hubei Province. Hou sang the first verse, Cheng the second:
Before the new shoes are all stitched up
Don’t be in a hurry to throw out the old
Before the old shoes are all worn out
Don’t be in a hurry to put on the new
That’s what the old men and women say
Life in the past was lived that way
All the old men and women say
Today’s kids don’t know how to get by day to day
But if an old shoe’s worn, why keep it around?
I’d rather go barefoot and keep my feet cool
Once new shoes are ready why not wear them around?
If I wait too long I’ll outgrow them.
All the little brothers and sisters say
We don’t want to miss out on our youth
All the little brothers and sisters say
Old men, old women, you’ve had your day
Madame Deng Yingchao, Premier Zhou Enlai’s elderly widow and a member of the Politburo, was one of many dignitaries in the audience. She rose to applaud, and others followed her lead. Approaching Hou and Cheng, she clasped their hands in her gnarled paws and enthused about the songs’ ‘vitality’. She wondered aloud why no mainland composers had ever come up with anything like them.
As one Hong Kong newspaper commentator later noted, when Chinese songwriters did come up with songs like that, they were usually banned.
‘Young Hou,’ asked the highest-ranking woman in the Communist Party, ‘can I join your band?’
And so Hou Dejian fought and won his first battle with the Chinese authorities. Victory wouldn’t come so easily in the future; sometimes it wouldn’t come at all. For the moment, Hou was enormously pleased with himself. Later, when Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang issued guidelines limiting the anti-spiritual-pollution campaign’s impact on the arts, Hou heard that this incident had been influential.
The linking of Hou and Cheng’s names benefited them both, bringing Hou to the attention of Cheng Lin’s millions of fans, and gaining Cheng respect among the intelligentsia. In mid-1984 New Observer ran a cover story on her. The fortnightly had previously printed the words and music to ‘Our Tomorrow’, ‘New Shoes, Old Shoes’ as well as ‘Return’ in an issue whose cover photo—taken by Wang Kun’s son, Zhou Yue—pictured Hou strumming a guitar.
Hou and Cheng Lin became close friends, though Hou, who was almost twelve years older, still referred to her as a xiao hai’r, a kid.
At the end of January 1984, I arrived in Beijing with bursting luggage— groceries for my friend Ted Chan, a UPI reporter whose spare room I often claimed, pens and paints for Lingzi, shirts for Hou and sweaters for his relatives. When I delivered his parcel, Hou told me he’d formally joined the Oriental Song and Dance troupe. He was seeing Wang Kun and Cheng Lin that afternoon. Did I want to come along?
It came up in conversation with Wang Kun that the women of the troupe weren’t happy with their stage costumes. Because I counted some of Hong Kong’s leading fashion designers as friends, I volunteered to speak to them about contributing outfits to the troupe. Cheng Lin clapped her hands in excitement.
‘Do remember the rules,’ Wang Kun cautioned. She held up a finger for each of the three ‘bu’s, or ‘nots’ as she recited them for me: ‘Bu tou, bu lou, bu shou.’ Nothing transparent, nothing revealing and nothing too tight. The anti-spiritual-pollution movement was losing steam, but you couldn’t be too careful.
In Hong Kong, my mates came good. The next time I returned to B
eijing, it was with a suitcase full of frocks. The designs were modest but contemporary, and made of good-quality fabrics. Wang Kun and Cheng Lin exclaimed with delight as they rifled through the dresses, mostly samples from new collections.
The moment I left the room, they turned to each other and shook their heads. What was I thinking? Where were the pretty lace and ruffles and girly things that they were craving? Where were the man-made fibres? Cheng Lin later told me that no one ever wore those outfits. ‘It’s a pity,’ she said, as we laughed at the absurdity of the whole exercise. ‘You meant well.’
Wang Kun helped arrange a three-room flat with kitchen and toilet— neither of which automatically came with housing in China—for Hou. The flat was in a United Front-run housing complex in Shuangyushu, ‘Double Elms’, near the Soviet-built Friendship Hotel and the university district in Beijing’s northwest. Winnie’s old editor, Luo Fu, who was serving his sentence under house arrest, was Hou’s neighbour.
Hou took the unusual step of inviting a foreigner to share his flat. Then again, Jaime (Jimi) FlorCruz was not your usual foreigner. Jimi had been president of the Philippines national association of university newspaper journalists and a left-leaning student activist in Manila in 1971 when he was invited to join a ‘friendship delegation’ for a three-week, all-expenses-paid trip to China. China was five years into the Cultural Revolution. Its doors opened infrequently to the outside world. It was a rare opportunity.
The Philippines did not have diplomatic relations with China, so the group kept their destination a secret until they reached Hong Kong. By coincidence, the day they arrived in China, 21 August 1971, a bomb exploded in Manila. President Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the police rounded up thousands of oppositionists, and thousands more were named on blacklists. Jimi was one. The Chinese extended his visa. He travelled some more and spent time labouring on a people’s commune. ‘I had this suspicion,’ he later told me, ‘that as soon as I left the fields each day, the peasants rushed back in to redo whatever I’d done.’ He studied Chinese and ended up completing a four-year course in Chinese history at Beijing University. Twelve years after he’d arrived in China for a three-week visit, the Philippines was still under martial law and he was still on a blacklist.
