The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  I stopped socialising with everyone except foreigners and those Chinese who, like Hou Dejian, Wu Zuguang, Auntie Fengxia, Miaozi and Yu Feng and the Yangs, insisted that they weren’t the least bit concerned about the surveillance.

  One day, as I bicycled miserably to the post office, I spotted one of my usual tails behind me, a pudgy middle-aged man with black spectacles and a poker face. Something in me snapped. I pulled a sharp u-ee, oblivious to the curses of the other cyclists and charged straight at him. Shocked, he too turned around. Adrenalin pumping, I chased him at high speed the wrong way down the bicycle lane, a sea of astonished cyclists parting hastily before us. He reached the intersection first. It was a red light. He looked at the light, looked at me, looked at the light, looked at me. As I closed in on him, I reached out. I don’t know what I was thinking. He took off straight into the traffic. He only just made it to the other side. He looked back. I flipped him the bird. But I was shaken, both by the possibility that he might have been killed and by the intensity of my own rage. It really was time to get out.

  Our photocopied wedding invitations, a piss-take of both the Sino-British agreement over Hong Kong and official Communist Party documents and slogans, read:

  No 1 Communiqué

  Questions left over from history have been solved, the five principles of peaceful coexistence have been agreed upon and the Long Wedding March is about to begin for Linda and Geremie. To celebrate the signing of the letter of intent and memo of understanding between G. Barmé-Jaivin and L. Jaivin-Barmé, and in the spirit of the Four Cardinal Principles, Three Hot Loves and Two Countries One System, please come to a party at Renata and Robert’s, QJY 10-72, on July 5, anytime after eight.

  Ah Xian and his girlfriend Ma Li got married the same weekend, as did another Australian friend of ours and her Chinese boyfriend. We partied for three days.

  We intended to spend a few months in Hong Kong, where Geremie was working with John Minford on the path-breaking anthology Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience. We were also jointly translating a Chinese novel for Xianyi and Gladys to publish with the Foreign Languages Press.

  We hadn’t been in Hong Kong long when the news came through that John Burns, the Beijing correspondent for the New York Times, had been accused of spying and kicked out of China. He’d taken a motorcycle trip through China in which he visited places off-limits to foreigners. Much was made in the foreign press of the plight of the journalist, who was briefly detained and expelled, and of the difficulties in general of being a foreign correspondent in China. The fact that the Chinese national who’d travelled with Burns himself faced an uncertain term in prison was treated by many reports almost as a footnote.

  It wasn’t a footnote to us. The imprisoned Chinese was a friend. Outraged, I wrote an article for the Far Eastern Economic Review in which I discussed what I saw as the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities of being a foreign correspondent in China. In conclusion, I stated that you could become a ‘friendly’ reporter, ‘forever giving the government the benefit of the doubt and receiving the warm handshake of solidarity in return’. Alternatively, you could ‘play strictly by the rules, mix mainly with “authorised” Chinese and write thoughtful articles based on analyses of the People’s Daily and briefings by foreign diplomats’, an unexciting option. Another option was to ‘go for the good story at whatever cost, even if it might mean sacrificing a Chinese friend or two. Or,’ I concluded, ‘you can get out.’

  In August, Geremie and I went to Tibet for our honeymoon. It was a time of relative peace in that sad and beautiful land. We were there for the Yoghurt Festival, which the Tibetans had been permitted to celebrate for the first time in twenty years; with thousands of Tibetans, we sat at dawn on a hillside next to a monastery as monks, blowing horns that were perhaps ten metres long, unrolled a giant tapestry of the Buddha down the opposite slope. As the sun rose, its rays hit the golden threads of the tapestry, which sparkled with a magical intensity.

  After we returned to Hong Kong, I flew to Manila for Jimi’s wedding to a lovely Filipina, Ana, whom he’d met in Beijing. After the People’s Revolution deposed President Marcos in February that year, Jimi was able to return to the Philippines without any stress or danger. But by now he was settled in Beijing, working as a full-time correspondent for Time. At the old Manila cathedral where the wedding took place, I was pointedly shunned by nearly all the other Beijing correspondents present on account of my article in the Review.

  After a brief visit to the States, Geremie and I arrived in Australia in October 1986. Though I missed my Chinese friends and the excitement of China, I loved Australia immediately—the laid-back atmosphere, the dry Australian humour, the fresh air, the big sky and the wide open spaces, not to mention the easy accessibility of news, art and literature from around the world.

  For his part, by late 1986, Hou confessed to a Hong Kong reporter that he was feeling:

  like a hero without a battlefield. It’s like being stuck in a traffic jam, hemmed in back and front. Even if you had the best racing car in the world, it would be no use, you still couldn’t move. You couldn’t even crash and burn if you wanted to. All you can do is inch forward. Having been driving like this for three and some years now, I feel like I’d rather speed to my death than sit here slowly withering away. To wither and die is a terrible fate. And the young people here on the mainland feel a hundred times more repressed than I do.

  So they did. At the end of the year, a wave of student protests erupted in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province. The demonstrations spread to Wuhan, then Shanghai, where they brought the city to a standstill, and finally to Beijing. The students were angry about official corruption and wanted political reform. When the Beijing Daily condemned the demonstrations, saying they were led by Nationalist agents and anti-socialist troublemakers, outraged students threw copies of the newspaper onto a bonfire, shouting ‘Burn, burn, burn!’ while playing ‘We Are the World’ on a ghetto blaster in the background.

  The writer Nicholas (Nick) Jose, who was teaching in Beijing and who would later become Australia’s cultural counsellor in China, followed the demos with interest. They provided the climax for his novel Avenue of Eternal Peace.

  The blame for letting the students get out of control was dumped on Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. Hu’s real crime was suggesting earlier that year that the older leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and himself, retire in order to let a younger generation take over. In January 1987, he was forced to step down from his post at the head of the 44-million-member Party and was replaced by Zhao Ziyang. Madame Deng Yingchao’s adopted son, Li Peng, rose to the post of premier.

  The student demos gave Party ideologues the excuse they were looking for to launch a new campaign. This one was officially to combat ‘bourgeois liberalisation’. As usual, the full force of the blow fell on cultural and intellectual circles. The Party proscribed the works of writers, harassed artists, and closed down journals and newspapers which had shown even a skerrick of independent thinking. Cui Jian, who’d further provoked the old ideologues with a fantastic rock version of the revolutionary song Nanniwan, was banned from television and large-scale concerts, and sacked by the Beijing Philharmonic.

  North of the border, Mikhail Gorbachev met Yoko Ono, and confessed he was a great fan of the Beatles. By 1986, there were more than 70,000 pop and rock groups in the USSR. Would, as Mao’s 1950s slogan had promised, the Soviet Union’s today really be China’s tomorrow? China’s fledgling rock community could only hope.

  IT had been three years since Cheng Lin had released her debut album and two since she’d left the Oriental Song and Dance Company. When I arrived in Guangzhou for a visit in March 1987, Hou was producing her second album. As their savings had been wiped out by ministerial fiat, they couldn’t afford to record in Hong Kong, but Guangzhou now offered studios of a reasonable standard. Hou had invited a session drummer and a guitarist from Hong Kong to join them there. The album contained several songs he’d writte
n for Cheng Lin, as well as tracks by other songwriters including Luo Dayou, Liu Sola and Sola’s husband, the avant-garde composer Qu Xiaosong.

  Hou enjoyed the technical aspects of recording and producing, and even took the cover photograph himself, in which Cheng Lin moved towards a more glam image with a pout and a forties-style headscarf.

  From Guangzhou, I took a train to Xi’an to catch up with friends at the film studio there, including Zhang Yimou, who was making his debut feature Red Sorghum, and then on to Beijing, where I stayed with the Yangs. To my immense relief, now that I was no longer a foreign correspondent, no one seemed to be getting into trouble as a result of associating with me. I had a much diminished ‘sense of security’, to borrow the ironic title of one of Ah Xian’s series of paintings, and life was better for it.

  For my thirty-second birthday, some friends took me to a restaurant for Mongolian hotpot. After dinner, they brought out a cake. They said they’d tried to get the cake shop to write ‘oppose bourgeois liberalisation’ in icing but the comrade cake-maker refused, no doubt sensing that it was a piss-take. So my friends simply wrote out some slogans on strips of paper and placed them on the cake.

  My younger friends weren’t the only ones who found it hard to take the campaign seriously. When the elderly calligrapher Miaozi was diagnosed with gout, he was tickled pink—gout, he told everyone, was way beyond bourgeois. It was the disease of kings.

  The playwright Wu Zuguang, a member of the Communist Party since 1980, thought the campaign was ridiculous and said so. It wasn’t the first time Zuguang had spoken out; the year before he said some Chinese leaders ‘treat the masses like dirt, see them as slaves and fools’. The Party was furious, and a Politburo member visited Zuguang at his home to demand he resign his Party membership or face expulsion. Zuguang quit, writing a delightfully sardonic account of the experience for the Hong Kong press, saying one reason he agreed to resign was respect for the aged, as the Politburo member who’d come to see him, Hu Qiaomu, was a man ‘rich in years and frail of health. To be the humble object of his magnanimous attention, indeed to be the cause of such exertion on his part—he had to climb up the four flights of stairs to reach my unworthy hovel—caused me the greatest unease.’

  When Cheng Lin: New Songs for 1987 came out, the Guangzhou Daily News and Guangzhou Youth News both published complimentary features. People’s Music, however, took a dim view of Qu Xiaosong and Liu Sola’s contribution, ‘Silver Dreams’, which, it said, with its ‘inattention to melodic beauty’, represented the ‘weakening of collective consciousness and the social functions of art’.

  The album’s biggest hit was ‘Xintianyou’. The ancient phrase, which may be loosely translated as ‘to wander in accordance with heaven’s will’, describes a genre of folk song from Shaanxi Province with thousands of years of history, and which is characterised by simple melodies, drawn-out notes and a free rhythm. The Guangzhou rocker Xie Chengqiang composed the melody while Hou wrote the lyrics and did the arrangement. Blending a rock beat with the northwestern folk tradition, Hou brought in the suona, the traditional horn he’d used in Heirs, Cont’d. A number of critics later named ‘Xintianyou’ as one of the first authentically Chinese rock songs. It was also a precursor to the mega-fad for Shaanxi-influenced rock music (nicknamed the ‘northwest wind’) that swept the mainland not long after.

  The album didn’t do too badly in China, but it wasn’t a great hit overseas. As one Southeast Asian critic put it, it was ‘just your average pop music’. Still, it padded out their bank account by several hundred thousand yuan. Cheng, who knew how to make the right sort of political gesture, donated tapes to PLA soldiers serving on the volatile border with Vietnam, to centres for the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders and to the traffic police as well, because, she said, they ‘worked so hard and in all kinds of weather’!

  Hou and Cheng announced they’d be getting married in May. Cheng Lin had turned twenty, the legal age for marriage, in March. Hou told me that there was nothing that would make him happier than to be married to Cheng Lin.

  The wedding still hadn’t happened by June, when the pair visited Hong Kong to promote the album. Asked why not by reporters, the couple said that they were having trouble negotiating the bureaucratic procedures. Official permission didn’t seem to be forthcoming. They had their suspicions as to why not.

  After a while, all talk of the wedding was dropped, but Hou and Cheng referred to each other as husband and wife anyway. They planned a China-wide tour, but the higher authorities never came through with permission. When they held a Beijing launch for the album, which had already sold 200,000 copies nationwide, reporters told the pair that they probably wouldn’t be able to write it up—there seemed to be some prohibition on promoting Hou’s work.

  It looked less like a traffic jam than gridlock.

  On Taiwan, in June 1987, the Nationalists declared an end to martial law. They also lifted the ban on forming new political parties. At last, people could speak openly about sensitive political issues—including Taiwan–mainland relations. The new Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) demanded that the ‘no contact with commies’ policy be abolished on humanitarian grounds so that the old soldiers could go home and see their families after forty years of exile. Taiwan’s business community, too, was itching to cross the strait. The mainland economy was booming, and with a common language and culture, Taiwan was better placed than most to take advantage of the investment and trade opportunities China offered.

  Defending their long-term stance, the Nationalists seized on the example of Hou Dejian. Revisiting the many public complaints he’d made about life on the mainland, Taipei’s Nationalist-run Youth News remarked that despite Hou’s fame, he’d run into all sorts of difficulties. ‘What would be the fate of others? You don’t need to ask to know! Hou Dejian is a mirror into which we should all look!’ A commentator for the Taiwan Daily News called Hou ‘the greatest argument against the DPP’s “return to the homeland” movement’. If Hou’s experience was anything to go by, he said, the old soldiers would ‘walk straight into a dead-end and an abyss of suffering’. Taiwan’s military radio station repeatedly broadcast a special program on Hou’s ‘tragic situation’. Countless listeners called in to express their sympathy and regrets for Hou. The word ‘tragedy’ was a running theme in the articles and essays published on Hou Dejian at the time, including one which poked fun at the notion of an ‘heir of the dragon’ searching for the mythical beast in the land of dialectical materialism.

  Then, in August, the Nationalist Party’s Secretary-General, Li Huan, said he didn’t see anything wrong with people visiting relatives or even staying on in the mainland if that’s what they wanted. Other Nationalist leaders grudgingly acknowledged that direct experience of the mainland could lead to a stronger anti-Communism in Taiwan. As one member of parliament declared, ‘Our people are full of confidence; it’s the Chinese Communist Party that ought to be afraid.’

  In September, the government announced a new policy, dubbed the ‘Three Nos’: ‘no encouragement, no help, no prohibitions’. It was a perfect illustration, as one newspaper editorial commented ironically, of the Daoist principle of ruling through inaction.

  Soon, Taipei’s United Daily News was publishing advisory columns on travelling to the mainland. It warned that mainlanders had little sense of ‘civic responsibility’, spitting and littering with an abandon that Taiwan people would find repulsive. Traditional morality had fallen by the wayside. The younger generation showed scant respect for elders and human relations were cancerous with mistrust. Be prepared, it advised, for the heartbreak of greeting long-lost relatives only to find that they cared less for you than the gifts and cash you carried. On a happier note, the paper observed that, as a result of the United Front policies, the phrase ‘Taiwan compatriot’ was a password to privilege. Don’t down your anti-Communist resolve, the writers counselled, but be sure to get that 30 per cent hotel discount. Oh, and buy your maps in Hong Kong—sin
ce the Nationalists refused to acknowledge any of the changes that had occurred since 1949, including new provincial boundaries, city or street names, Taiwan-produced maps of the mainland were about as useful to the traveller as a swimming costume in the Gobi Desert.

  The Taiwan government still forbade its citizens to travel to China purely for sightseeing. Public servants, officials, legislators and the media were not to go at all. Two reporters from Taipei’s Independent Evening News defied the ban, flying via Japan to Shanghai. Their dispatches from China had the island mesmerised. They wrote of the appalling state of Shanghai’s airport, saying the surveillance cameras were the most modern facilities in the entire waiting area. They were more impressed by Beijing, but concluded that the capital was still about ‘thirty years behind Taipei’.

  They sought out Hou Dejian and other members of the oddball Taiwan community on the mainland. Hou Dejian, they noted approvingly, was one of the few who didn’t try to convert them to the United Front. Hearing the Party line from mainland Chinese was one thing, they wrote. Being fed Communist propaganda by erstwhile compatriots from ‘Free China’ aroused only pity and revulsion.

  When they returned, the pair were tried and found not guilty of any crime. By October that year, Taiwan was in the grip of ‘mainland fever’. Gallery owners brought over exhibitions by mainland artists. Chic hostesses imported maotai to serve at parties. Literary magazines and publishers competed to introduce the work of contemporary mainland authors as well as those of earlier banned writers like Hou’s much loved Lu Xun. When the Taiwan Red Cross began processing applications for people to visit relatives on the mainland, the queues began to form at 3 a.m. on the first day of registration.

  All the rules of the game seemed to be changing at once. The Nationalist Party lifted its ban on privately run newspapers. The new journals carried, among other things, the first public discussions of the ‘28 February Incident’ of 1947. Unimpressed with ‘mainland fever’, some Taiwanese turned even more militantly towards their historical and cultural roots. The most radical nativists went so far as to call mainlanders waiguoren—‘foreigners’—and suggested that now that they could, they should all go home.