by Linda Jaivin
‘Xiao Hou,’ Wang added, ‘not everything in China is as it ought to be. Don’t take it to heart.’
Hou Dejian ate with a renewed appetite. In his mind, he was already reviving plans for the Sound of the Orient studio. He’d set it up in Guangzhou. The Ministry of Culture didn’t have to be involved, either. He could swing it himself with Kim Wong’s help.
With New Shoes, Old Shoes selling well everywhere and the continued popularity of ‘Song of the Junkman’, royalties had begun to pour in. Over the seven years he was to remain in the mainland, Hou estimated his after-tax earnings to have well exceeded a million renminbi (US$460,000).
On the other hand, as Hou joked, ‘I was a big earner, but Cheng Lin was a big spender.’ The pair astonished everyone they knew with their lavish lifestyle. Yang Xianyi remarked to me, ‘Xiao Hou seems to be spending his money rather foolishly, yes.’ Kim told me that, at one point, Hou and Cheng were spending 20,000–30,000 yuan (US$9000– $15,000) a month—two to three hundred times the average wage in China. ‘It was incredible,’ Kim said. ‘When they were in Guangzhou, they’d eat at the White Swan every day, and it wasn’t just the two of them. Sometimes they’d invite a dozen people along.’ According to records kept by the Nanhai Acoustics Company, which paid Hou’s bills out of his royalties account for New Shoes, Old Shoes, between September 1984 and May 1986, he spent 80,500 renminbi (US$28,000) on taxis alone.
Rampant spending was a national trend. From the launch of full-scale economic reform in October 1984 to June the following year, China’s foreign reserves reportedly plunged from US$16.3 to US$7.3 billion. In July 1985, the Ministry of Finance admitted that the state had overshot its budget by 144 per cent.
Officially, Hou was employed by the Guangdong Province Cultural Affairs Department. His job title was ‘composer’ and his salary 340 yuan (US$117) a month, a sum that most mainland musicians would have regarded as a dream wage. Hou hadn’t wanted either the title or the wage, but his minders explained that without an official work unit, everything from his residence permit to the passport he would need when his Taiwan papers expired that year would become problematic.
Hou and Cheng Lin astonished everyone with their lavish lifestyle. They spent two to three hundred times what the average person in China earned in a month on meals, taxis, clothes and musical instruments.
Hou preferred to call himself a geti hu, an ‘individual entrepreneur’. China’s ‘individual entrepreneurs’ were the success stories of the reform era, a symbol both of freedom and self-advancement in a society that had previously offered its citizens little of the former and few possibilities for the latter.
Entrepreneurial Hou certainly was. Kim recalls him having ‘a new plan every month’, which Kim was expected to back. ‘I’d listen to everything he said,’ Kim told me, ‘but my attitude was okay, fine, you get it going and I’ll be right behind you. I knew most of his enthusiasms would blow over quickly enough.’
His ideas included setting up a Hou Dejian Arts Development Company with branches in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, importing western pop music cassettes to Guangzhou, producing films, writing a family history and organising a ‘unified China’ pop concert that would feature himself, Teddy Robin and Luo Dayou at New York’s Lincoln Center. He did participate in the making of a BBC documentary on qigong, and established a guitar correspondence school in Shenzhen, which folded after six months. He also began work on a script for an animated film based on the adventures of his favourite literary character, Monkey.
He scribbled in his diary that Monkey ‘liked to be the boss, the king, to have people flatter him and give him superficial indications of their love and respect. Refused to go through the polite rituals…loved fame and face.’ He called Monkey a ‘typical Chinese intellectual’. At the same time, he noted that Monkey had a ‘natural kindness’ and couldn’t bear ‘treachery or deceit of any kind’. The Sound of the Orient debacle still pained Hou more than he let on.
With a name that opened doors, a seemingly bottomless purse and his utter lack of reserve, Hou continued to attract all manner of people. I never knew who I’d meet through him. One day, it was the gymnast and Olympic silver medallist Tong Fei, another the young kungfu star Jet Li.
As in Taiwan, I felt entirely comfortable as part of Hou’s entourage. His friends, following Hou’s lead, treated me as one of the gang. When newcomers to his circle exclaimed over my supposedly amazing ability to handle chopsticks or speak Chinese—such astonishment grew very boring when you’d spent as much time in China as I had—Hou would cut them off, saying, ‘Linda is Chinese. Well, maybe not, but she probably knows more about China than you do. Stop treating her like a foreigner or she’ll start expecting special privileges.’
Hou remained close to the Yangs, taking them out to the theatre, buying them bottles of scotch and amusing them with his stories and the eternal, almost alien innocence that led them to call him by the nickname Geremie had given him: ET.
Occasionally, a relative from Dragon Village would arrive in town. Perching awkwardly on the sofa in their worn clothes, they waited patiently for the chance to petition Hou for help with some family crisis or another. He was loyal to his family, and no relative ever left Double Elms empty-handed. I met a number of them and was sometimes given the task of carrying letters out to Hong Kong to mail to Hou Guobang in Taiwan. They’d usually come with a polite cover letter. ‘Miss Jia Peilin,’ one began, ‘Ni hao! I’m Hou Dejian’s father’s sister’s husband. Could I trouble you to send the enclosed letter to Hou Guobang, and send his reply back to me…’
If Hou’s natural generosity and enthusiasm won him many friends, he was also an easy target for tricksters, opportunists and conmen, to the perennial dismay of Kim Wong and Cheng Lin. ‘Hou Dejian has no defences,’ Kim remarked to me. ‘He takes everyone at face value, and so he’s constantly being had.’ The actor and comedian Hou Yaohua (no relation) found Hou’s naivety so ‘un-Chinese’ that he nicknamed him yang erliuzi, clumsily translatable as a ‘foreign wastrel’.
In August 1985, I took my annual leave and stayed with Hou and Cheng in Beijing. Cheng Lin’s fourteen-year-old brother Cheng Yu was living with them as well. I liked Cheng Yu. He was cute and very enthusiastic about everything. He had got hold of the video First Blood and we watched it together.
‘Man!’ he exclaimed, when in one of the chase scenes a car took a corner on two wheels. ‘American cars are so cool. Chinese cars would never do that.’
It was a wonderful holiday. We went swimming in the pool at the nearby Friendship Hotel, and bowling at the Lidu Holiday Inn. Hou loved bowling and snooker. We suspected one of his bowling pals of being a spy for the security organs—he claimed to be both a star athlete and an underground artist, but had too much time and money to be credibly either. Hou didn’t care. He knew that the state kept an eye on him, but didn’t have anything to hide.
It was hard to believe that Cheng Lin had scandalised people a few years earlier just by strutting around on stage. Performers now regularly got away with what People’s Music disparagingly called ‘the flying rope trick’ (waving the mike), ‘pulling up shallots’ (jerking it up and down) and the ‘rolling earth dragon’ (falling to the stage and twisting about). While just a year earlier, a reporter had found ridiculous Hou’s suggestion to Wang Kun that Brother and Sister Reclaim the Wasteland should go pop, disco versions of revolutionary model operas were now the hottest fad in music.
The authorities still didn’t know much about pop but they knew what they liked: Zhang Mingming, a twenty-nine-year-old singer from Hong Kong with a squeaky clean image and an extremely corny hit song called ‘My Chinese Heart’. The climax of Zhang Mingming’s concerts would come when midway through ‘My Chinese Heart’, he’d rip off his western suit jacket to reveal a Mao suit underneath. Cheng Lin appeared as a special guest at one of Zhang’s concerts in Guangzhou.
Abroad, 1985 was the year of Bob Geldof’s ‘Band Aid’. The song ‘We Are the World’ was soon top o
f the pops with China’s young people as well. China even hosted its first foreign rock concert in 1985. It is to my eternal regret that I didn’t get a ticket to see Wham! in Beijing. Overnight, George Michael became an idol to young people who hadn’t yet heard of Mick Jagger. At the concert itself, the police ordered everyone to stay in their seats, hauling away those who insisted on standing up to dance.
By the mid-eighties, China’s cities were crawling with foreigners: tourists, investors, journalists, diplomats and students. The unofficial artists and poets, China’s self-conscious bohemians, cultivated foreign and overseas Chinese friends, contacts and lovers with increasing insouciance, and these became the channels through which flowed every sort of otherwise unobtainable import. No longer was I asked to tote up green vegetables and soap from Hong Kong. My shopping lists now consisted of catalogues of Italian Neo-Expressionist art, copies of Vogue, a video of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and albums by Madonna, Tina Turner and Luo Dayou.
Not all of this sort of thing penetrated through to the provinces. A survey on the subject of western pop culture conducted in the northwestern city of Xi’an in 1986 showed that only seven per cent of those interviewed even knew who Madonna was; one respondent thought she owned all the fast-food restaurants in America. Someone else identified Prince as the son of Queen Elizabeth.
Then, China’s own ‘atom bomb of rock’, Cui Jian, exploded on the scene. A homely young trumpeter with the Beijing Philharmonic with a penchant for old PLA uniforms, Cui Jian became China’s first homegrown rock star. His song ‘Nothing to My Name’ was the new anthem of a generation:
I want to give you my hope
I want to help make you free
But all you ever do is laugh at me, ’cause
I’ve got nothing to my name.
When will you come away with me?
‘From this time forward,’ a Hong Kong reporter declared, ‘the mainland pop scene was dominated by the “two Jians” [Cui Jian and Hou Dejian].’ The ‘two Jians’ didn’t actually meet until 1986, when Cui told Hou he was a fan of ‘Song of the Junkman’ and Hou told Cui he loved ‘Nothing to My Name’. They got along well enough, but would never become close friends.
Performing ‘Nothing to My Name’ on national TV, Cui Jian was soon attacked by the official media as ‘excessively individualistic’, lacking in seriousness and having a ‘negative attitude’. ‘How can young people sing that they have “nothing to their name”,’ fulminated one Party official, ‘when they have socialism!’
DURING that same holiday in August 1985, I went with the poet Yang Lian and some other friends to the new disco at the Great Wall Sheraton, where we were told in no uncertain terms that I could go in but my Chinese friends couldn’t. ‘Dogs and Chinese not admitted,’ Yang Lian spat in disgust, quoting the infamous though possibly apocryphal pre-revolution sign in a Shanghai park. China was changing and not at all. We left together.
The next day, Yang Lian and I embarked on a long-planned trip to Sichuan. To celebrate our arrival in Chengdu, his friends took us to their favourite club. We’d just started to dance when the security people grabbed me by the arms and marched me out—here, Chinese were welcome, but not foreigners. One of our group, a People’s Liberation Army soldier, cursed and yelled at the security guy. We pulled him away and walked back to the house of the friend where we were staying, fuming about what a fucked-up world it was.
The next day, our host’s brother, who worked at the Public Security Bureau, came to see him. ‘Have you gone completely insane?’ he accused. ‘Having a foreigner stay at your house?’
Our host was indignant. ‘Why can’t I invite anyone I like to stay? What does it matter what colour their skin is?’ I didn’t want to cause him any trouble though, so I moved into a hotel. The whole gang followed me up to my room to have showers, jump on the bed, take silly photos and bask in the air-conditioning.
The group of us planned to drive in an army jeep to a beautiful lake district, Jiuzhaigou, several hours outside Chengdu. Now it’s a tourist destination with its own airport, but then it was closed to any foreigner without a travel permit from the Public Security Bureau. Daily, we trundled over to the cop shop to check on my application. Finally, after stringing me along for almost a week, they told me I couldn’t go. No reason given. My outraged friends proposed to smuggle me along anyway. I had dyed my hair black and was fairly short; if I kept a cap low over my face, it could work. That’s when Yang Lian spotted the security men who, it turned out, were trailing us everywhere, clumsily ducking behind trees or telegraph poles whenever we turned and stared them down.
Why were they there? The friends asked around. It seemed that the problem lay with me. Was it my association with Yang Lian, me a foreign journalist and him an ‘underground’ poet whose works had been attacked during the anti-spiritual-pollution campaign? Was it the even more subversive combo of journalist and PLA soldier? Or had my friendship with Hou Dejian made me a surveillance target? Our source couldn’t reveal any more than that. My ‘case’, it seems, was in the hands of the relatively new Ministry of National Security, which was charged with ensuring ‘the security of the state through effective measures against enemy agents, spies, and counter-revolutionary activities designed to sabotage or overthrow China’s socialist system’. I felt like I’d swallowed a concrete dumpling.
I waved off my mates in their jeep full of tents and hunting rifles and prepared to return to Beijing. The PLA soldier, who was also a poet, couldn’t go to Jiuzhaigou either. He’d had his leave cancelled at the last moment when one of his poems turned up in a Taiwan anthology. Some American had read it at the house of one of his friends in Chongqing and, without asking the author’s permission, entered it in a poetry competition in Taipei. The mainland authorities might promote direct contacts with the island, but any citizens who tried it on their own had to deal with the consequences.
Back in Beijing, I moped around Hou and Cheng’s place. I asked them if they felt okay about me staying with them while the security apparatus was watching me. They assured me they weren’t the least bit worried about my having grown a ‘tail’. ‘After all, I was once a political prisoner in Taiwan,’ Hou declared. ‘What are they going to do to me here?’ I smiled. Hou wasn’t always in complete touch with reality, but I liked his irrepressible spirit. Besides, we shared the naive belief that if we weren’t doing anything illegal we had nothing to worry about.
About a month later, on another visit, I hired a van and driver with Ah Xian, Yang Lian and half a dozen other friends so that we could have a picnic in a valley outside Beijing. Ah Xian’s younger brother, the photographer Xiao Xian, hadn’t ridden in many cars. He spent most of the trip with his head out the window, fertilising the road.
Leaving the van, we hiked into the heart of the beautiful, stark valley. There was no one else for kilometres around. We had heaps of food and beer and a guitar or two. Our conversation was loud, raucous, naughty. Mocking the fact that the Communists had formal ‘associations’ for everything, like the All-China Musicians Association which had given Hou his welcoming tea party, we decided to call ourselves the ‘Spouting Association’, pen xie, using a word that Cheng Lin had told us was slang from her hometown of Luoyang meaning ‘the art of bullshit’. Yang Lian named me chairwoman, but we felt no one should be without a title, so we designated a ‘Director of the Women’s Division’, ‘Head of Security’ and so on, parodying the self-importance of China’s all-encompassing bureaucracy.
At the end of an excellent day, we piled back into the van. It was getting dark and the driver took a wrong turn. Before we knew it we were in a tiny village. Pulling over, he got out to ask directions back to the main road. It was then that someone noticed an army-green motorcycle with two people on it parked at a discreet distance behind us. Xiao Xian gasped. ‘They were behind us coming out today, too,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it.’ He had, after all, been looking backwards most of the trip out. The realisation dawned on us all. We’d been followe
d. ‘Ke-ge-bo,’ someone whispered, the Chinese pronunciation of KGB—a not exactly fond nickname for China’s own security forces.
Sure enough, when we hit the road, the motorcycle stayed right behind us. Our perfect day was turning into a perfect nightmare. We nervously organised for people to be dropped off in groups at major intersections, instead of door-to-door as we’d planned, making it harder for them to follow everyone home. We didn’t know exactly who or what they were after—our group was full of ‘underground’ poets and artists—but I had an idea. The concrete dumpling was back.
Beijing was becoming more open and cosmopolitan with every passing day. It was easy to forget that, even as China acquired some of the trappings of capitalism, it never disassembled the structure of Communism.
Asiaweek decided to open a bureau in Beijing and I was going to be it. In September 1985 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued me with my accreditation, a small laminated document encased in a blue plastic cover decorated with a gold star. I was terribly excited—for years it had been my dream to report from Beijing. Though my recent misadventures with the security forces worried me, I told myself that two incidents didn’t make a pattern. If they really thought I was a spy, they wouldn’t have given me my accreditation. I moved up to Beijing in November.
My flat in the Qijiayuan foreigners’ compound seemed huge compared with the cramped Hong Kong apartments I was used to. It was going to take over a week to get my belongings from where they were sitting in a container in the port city of Tianjin. All I had for the moment was a mattress, a stereo, a few chairs, a desk and a phone.
