by Linda Jaivin
Jimi went home for the first time in December 1983. Dissident Senator Benigno Aquino had been assassinated four months earlier. Jimi’s relatives took the precaution of mustering some friendly army officers to be on hand at the airport when he arrived just in case any unfriendly ones tried to make any trouble. After an emotional reunion with family and friends in Manila, he returned to Beijing.
When Hou met him, through Geremie, Jimi was a contract stringer for Time. At thirty-two, he was an attractive man with dark eyes, strong features and a quick smile. Though swarthier than most Chinese, he was often mistaken for a local. He spoke excellent Chinese, knew Beijing like the back of his hand and had a wry sense of humour.
Jimi and Hou hit it off instantly. They even liked all the same music. Jimi had a car but no housing; Hou had a flat but no wheels. It was a match made in heaven.
By day, Jimi worked for Time and Hou rehearsed with the Oriental Song and Dance Company. In the evening, they’d play the guitar and sing American and English rock and pop songs. Hou helped Jimi catch up on the seventies pop culture he’d missed in China. Other nights they’d cruise Beijing in Jimi’s car, dropping in on friends and trying, with not a lot of success as Jimi recalls, to pai pozi, pick up chicks. Beijing in 1984 was not the libertine capital of the world. They mocked themselves in a song they wrote to the tune of ‘Que Sera, Sera’: ‘You liangge lao guanggun, zai jieshang tiantian guihun…’ (‘There are these two single guys, hanging out on the streets day after day…’)
Among those who gathered at Hou’s and Jimi’s flat for food and conversation were photographers, writers, other musicians and even the original ‘hero of opportunism’ himself, the defector-pilot Huang Zhicheng. As in Taiwan, Hou ruled over the whole, eclectic scene in laid-back fashion, strumming a guitar and smiling benignly while drifting in and out of the conversation.
Jimi recalls coming home from work to find his flatmate ‘holding court with all the people he’d collected—followers, fans, fanatics. He’d talk about anything, and they’d listen. Computers. Accounting. Pink Floyd. If anyone noticed he didn’t always know what he was talking about, they didn’t seem to care. It reminded me of a big-city Filipino politician working the villages. This would go on till one or two in the morning. I had to wake up at seven to go to work. He, on the other hand, slept past lunchtime.’
Another friend of Hou’s, the music critic Jin Zhaojun, told me that he was convinced that Hou’s ability to get along so well in Beijing came from the fact that he was a Sichuanese. Both Sichuan and Beijing were home to the culture of conversation, whether you called it by the Beijing slang term of kan or the Sichuanese bai longmen zhen. ‘Hou could talk about anything,’ Jin marvelled, ‘anytime.’
The nightly revels aside, Jimi found Hou easy to live with, generous and undemanding. Although a celebrity, he was completely unaffected. He’d just as happily wear Jimi’s old clothes as buy new ones—at least while waiting for me to bring up more of his beloved polo-style shirts from Hong Kong. His biggest luxuries were two packs of Dunhill a day (despite another bout with TB in December 1983), good-quality Hangzhou tea, and perms for his hair.
With Jimi FlorCruz, 1985, Beijing. Hou entertaining local friends at their flat in Beijing reminded Jimi of a ‘big-city Filipino politician working the villages’.
Hou felt happy and settled, though he still couldn’t get over how hard it was to buy fruit in winter. He missed hot showers, Hollywood movies and newspapers that carried news, not just Party policy directives and bogus reports on over-fulfilled industrial quotas. He learned not to open the windows on windy days so the thick sand blowing down from the Gobi Desert wouldn’t infiltrate his musical instruments and sound system.
But those were minor complaints. Hou couldn’t believe how hard it was to get anything done in Beijing. He intensely disliked the way the old men and women of the Neighbourhood Committees snooped into everyone’s business, including his own, in order to report back to the Public Security Bureau. He despised the ‘compradore’ mentality that excluded Chinese citizens from the better foreigners’ hotels in Shanghai and Beijing—the sight of a peasant being served courteously at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou made him instantly like that southern city. He railed against the twin bogeymen of ‘bureaucratism and feudalism’. He hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.
Back in Taiwan, the Nationalists, struggling to keep tabs on Hou’s activities, noted inaccurately in their files that Hou had moved in with ‘Linda’s boyfriend, a foreign photographer’. They’d read my interview with him, surmising that I’d done it partly as a ruse to cover up my involvement in his defection. They continued to knock back my visa applications.
Luckily for me, Luo Dayou, Edward Yang and other Taiwan friends were becoming frequent visitors to Hong Kong. As I passed on Hou’s news, our initial panic at his move seemed quite ridiculous.
ANOTHER session of the Sino-British negotiations was scheduled for February 1984. Before leaving for Beijing, I got a call from Hou’s mother, Luo Yingwen, in Taipei. As there were no mail or phone connections between Taiwan and China, I was one of the main links between Hou and his family. Luo Yingwen asked me to persuade her son to return home.
When I relayed the message, Hou’s face screwed up with dismay. He asked me to explain to her as best I could all about his new life and why he was staying. I promised to try.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been so productive here, I’ve already got enough songs for a new album.’ He sounded very excited. ‘The Oriental Song and Dance Company has some performances coming up in Guangzhou. From there, I’ll go to Hong Kong to record.’
‘What’s happening with the Sound of the Orient studio?’
‘I’ve asked Kim Wong to rustle up some investment capital. But it’s going to take a while. Wang Kun’s keen on the project,’ he said. ‘It’ll be great to work with her. I admire her so much and trust her completely. She’s perfectly placed to handle the red tape, too.’
‘That’s great. Are you going to play me some songs, then?’ Hou had been strumming his guitar as we spoke.
He started to play, then paused. ‘By the way, don’t tell anyone I’m going to Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘I want to spend my time there working, not dealing with the press.’
I gave my word. I had a favour to ask of him as well. US President Ronald Reagan was due to visit China at the end of April. He was bringing an entourage of three hundred journalists, one hundred secret-service personnel, two armour-plated limousines, a helicopter and a microwave communications van. Asiaweek wanted me to cover the visit but all the hotels in the capital were booked out and my friend Ted Chan had to put up colleagues from the US. Could I bunk at his place? I had no other Chinese friend who could so easily accommodate a foreigner; Hou’s special status gave him some immunity from the system of social control the other billion had to put up with.
‘I’ll give you the key,’ Hou said. ‘I’ll be down south by then.’
‘Are you nervous? About leaving China? Going to Hong Kong?’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘What’s there to be nervous about?’ He neglected to mention that on the off chance that the Nationalists tried to kidnap or assassinate him he’d composed his last will and testament and handed it to the Ministry of Culture for safekeeping.
At 3 p.m. on 26 April, I stood with the ‘masses’ outside Tiananmen waiting for Reagan’s official motorcade to pass. The stars and stripes snapped in the gusty Siberian wind alongside the five-star flag of the People’s Republic. ‘Why are you here?’ I asked one of the shivering factory workers standing next to me. ‘To further the great cause of deepening the friendship of the Chinese and the American peoples,’ he deadpanned, and sardonic laughter rippled through the crowd. Most of them had been bussed in for the event. The motorcade passed, the workers waved listlessly, a twenty-one-gun salute echoed across Tiananmen Square, and the former star of Bedtime for Bonzo and his hosts began ‘friendly and businesslike discussions on a wide range of international and bilater
al issues’.
While the American media swarmed around Beijing ‘discovering’ the newest edition of Communism’s New China, another, smaller media circus was taking place down south. A slew of Hong Kong reporters, having heard that Hou would be performing in Guangzhou, crossed the border to chase him down.
After his interview with me six months earlier, Hou had largely shunned the press. Hong Kong and Taiwan media continued to publish wild rumours about him. Depending which report you read, he’d been kicked out of a palatial suite in the Beijing Hotel and demoted to a workers’ dormitory, had no freedom of movement, cried constantly for his wife and child, collected a reward of a million US dollars, or remarried.
This was a good chance to clear the air and Hou took it. He had a knack for playing the media to his own advantage. Over yum cha in Guangzhou’s best restaurants, he charmed the Hong Kong reporters, dishing up anecdotes and insights, all the while insisting, ‘Whatever you do, don’t write about me—there’s nothing I fear more than seeing my name in the papers. I’m a musician, not a politician.’
As if. Even his enthusings over a chicken dish in a Guangzhou restaurant became the subject of a Hong Kong ‘news’ report.
A few days later, travelling on papers issued by the Chinese authorities, Hou discreetly passed across the border to Hong Kong, along with Wang Kun, Cheng Lin and two other singers from the troupe. He was thrilled to be back in Hong Kong, reading the free press, seeing foreign films and stocking up on international rock and pop music cassettes. He called his family in Taiwan—it was a huge relief to speak to his mother after nearly a year of fraught, mediated communications.
In Hong Kong, the talk was all about the island’s future. The two years of secret negotiations were drawing to an end. Deng declared that the resolution of the Hong Kong question would ‘set an example for settling other questions left over from history’, i.e. Taiwan.
Though Taiwan boasted of a booming economy and healthy trade with the rest of the world, the list of countries with which it enjoyed diplomatic relations had by now shrunk to about twenty. James Soong’s announcement that the Nationalists were establishing a committee to study ways of preventing Hong Kong from falling under communist rule only reinforced the impression that the Nationalists lived in lala land.
In the recording studio, Hou Dejian sang:
About the Opium Wars and the imperialist invasions
About 1840 and 1997
About having been too left and therefore too right
Or too right and therefore too left…
Again and again, forever and ever,
The same story plays, over and over,
Again and again, forever and ever,
With the same exhortations we warn one another.
At the end of August 1984, Hou released New Shoes, Old Shoes. It was an amalgam of Taiwan style, mainland content and Hong Kong technology or, as Hou joked, ‘a mini-reunification of China’. One of its most popular songs was the mawkish ‘Mimi the Panda’. A song about the world’s cutest animal sung by seventeen-year-old Cheng Lin in her most girlish voice, ‘Mimi’ was an instant hit.
The bamboo is in flower
Mimi counts the stars in her mother’s arms
The stars, the stars, the lovely stars
But what’ll she eat tomorrow?
Mimi, Mimi, please believe me
We haven’t forgotten you…
Let me care for you
Like I care for myself
And how beautiful the world will be.
Hey, sailor! Cheng Lin’s photo on the cassette of New Shoes, Old Shoes.
Together with ‘New Shoes, Old Shoes’, ‘Mimi the Panda’ made Cheng Lin a star in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. The publicity for the album played heavily on her youthful image. She appeared in photos in a white skirt and sailor top surrounded by oversize notebooks and pencils, her short hair and neat fringe framed by a sailor’s beret— a schoolgirl fetishist’s dream.
In addition to the new songs, Cheng Lin covered ‘Song of the Junkman’, the movie theme which Hou had dashed off so reluctantly twelve months earlier and had proven one of the year’s top Chinese pop songs, earning him royalties of HK$180,000 (US$23,000) from sales in Hong Kong alone. Even the Japanese composer Kitaro (who later scored Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and Earth with Randy Newman) had done an arrangement of it. With the release of New Shoes, Old Shoes in the mainland, ‘Song of the Junkman’ became an instant hit there as well. The ratbag critic Liu Xiaobo, who’d hated ‘Heirs of the Dragon’, adored ‘Song of the Junkman’. Other tracks on New Shoes, Old Shoes included ‘Return’, to which Hou restored lyrics banned in Taiwan, ‘Our Tomorrow’, ‘We Were All Young Once’, an odd little number in English called ‘Well I Need to Be Alone’ as well as a tribute to Hangzhou’s famous West Lake.
No one quite knew what to make of the long poetic monologue ‘A Song of 1983’, which included the meditation on ‘1840 and 1997’ quoted above. A reviewer in Singapore did note that its ‘overpowering sense of uncertainty’ about the future ‘overwhelms all the hope, optimism and cheerfulness expressed in earlier tracks’. Hou told me: ‘That song was the real me.’
I found most of the songs on the album overwrought and sentimental. I missed the old Hou Dejian style, weird, esoteric and gutsy. I also disliked Cheng Lin’s cutesy interpretation of ‘Junkman’, which I thought lacked the emotional wallop of Julie Su Jui’s version. I told Hou all this. ‘I’m not doing this for foreigners,’ he replied.
In China the producers received orders for a million cassettes. It was predicted that sales could reach five million. A dozen Southeast Asian record companies competed for regional distribution rights. By September, the title track topped the charts in Singapore, staying at number one for over a month, despite the fact that the government there banned three of the other songs from radio play. The same week that ‘Shoes’ hit the top spot, ‘Mimi the Panda’ entered the Singapore charts at number six. By the end of the month, the album was the second best-selling Chinese language album in Malaysia and the third biggest seller in Singapore. In Hong Kong, where Mandarin songs generally had a hard time competing with Cantonese, ‘Shoes’ also made it into the top ten. Hou Dejian sent some money to his family in Taipei, and repaid his loan from the Ministry of Culture, with interest. They refused the interest.
One Singaporean critic placed the album third in a list of the year’s five best—just ahead of Luo Dayou’s third album, Home. Music writers tended to mention Hou and Dayou in the same breathless breath: ‘When you’re listening to Luo Dayou’s songs,’ one Singaporean critic wrote, ‘you don’t just look for ordinary aural enjoyment, but rather, as with Hou Dejian’s songs, you have to appreciate them from a number of angles. Literature! Music! Politics! An outcry!’
Hou openly visited Hong Kong again in September, together with Cheng Lin and Wang Kun, to publicise the album and collect a Hong Kong Film Award for best movie theme song (‘Song of the Junkman’). Over the six-day visit, they held a press conference and gave fifteen radio, magazine and newspaper interviews, performed on a popular television entertainment program and were royally wined and dined. With a few breaks for Cheng Lin to go shopping and them both to get their hair done, they kept going from morning to night.
I missed them in Hong Kong. I was in Beijing, covering the end of the Sino-British negotiations. At 10 a.m. on 26 September 1984, inside the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square, British Ambassador Richard Evans and Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Zhou Nan put their pens to a pair of massive, red-bound documents. They exchanged volumes, and shook hands. Zhou reached out and embraced the British ambassador. Hong Kong’s fate was signed, sealed and delivered.
Having devoted most of the last two years to covering the negotiations, patiently testing diplomats for leaks as if they were bicycle tyres, trying to make sensible articles out of mountains of rumours and molehills of facts, and enjoying the camaraderie of the Hong Kong press corps but detesting the competitivenes
s of some of its members (I once slapped a Hong Kong reporter after he lied to me and sneaked off in our shared car to get a scoop), I was ready to party.
So was Beijing. October 1 was Communist China’s thirty-fifth birthday. The country had chalked up another year of record economic growth, the Hong Kong question was resolved, and Beijing hadn’t had a good parade since 1971. The celebrations began with a two-kilometre stretch of People’s Liberation Army soldiers marching in twenty-four armoured columns, followed by 500 tanks, personnel carriers and trucks hauling intercontinental, sea-launched and other Chinese-made missiles and artillery. Planes screamed in formation through the polluted haze. Peasants in stylised farm clothes marched behind massive busts of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai, and other dead Communist luminaries. Floats in the shape of giant wristwatches and electric fans celebrated China’s achievements in industrial modernisation and the whole extravaganza wound up with 23,000 red-scarved ‘Young Pioneers’ chanting ‘Long live the motherland! Long live the Communist Party!’
Someone told me that if I could be at a specific spot on the edge of Tiananmen Square at eight that evening, he’d hand me a pass. And so I danced the night away with steel workers in the square as fireworks exploded overhead.
On the same day, Hou turned twenty-eight. He appeared on Sichuan television, along with Olympic medallists, model soldiers, workers and scientists. He performed the inevitable ‘Heirs’ as well as ‘Return’ and ‘Masters of the Future’. ‘It was great,’ he later told me. ‘I got to sing songs that had been banned in Taiwan.’
