by Linda Jaivin
Hou enjoyed stirring the committee members. They asked him to sing at a tea party. Before launching into ‘After Thirty’, Hou told them about the difficulties he’d experienced adapting to life and work on the mainland. Some of the guests clapped nervously, others looked displeased. Hou chuckled when he told me this story. As always, I got the sense that when he couldn’t validate himself through bouquets he’d settle for brickbats. So long as people reacted to him, he was happy.
The Party, meanwhile, more or less ended the struggle against bourgelib. Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang declared that ‘those matters which the Party and the government can’t really control should largely be left alone’.
Reflecting both the mood of relative freedom and the atmosphere of rebellion, the rock scene exploded with energy. Cui Jian, rebel in Red Army togs, unbanned earlier in the year, made a triumphant comeback. ‘Little Sister, Go Bravely Forward’, the lusty, testosteronal theme song of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, echoed through the hutongs of Beijing and the ‘northwest wind’ blew in gales.
The People’s Daily checked in with a special feature on ‘China’s Rock n Roll Tide’, calling the ‘two Jians’ the ‘leaders of the rock movement’. This was tantamount to a Party seal of approval. Remarkably, the paper even printed the lyrics to ‘Nothing to My Name’.
Beijing’s Number One Department Store now sold the kind of musical instruments once only seen at Hou’s flat. There were Japanese copies of Fender Stratocaster and Jazz Bass guitars selling for 2000 yuan (US$540) each, Yamaha drum machines and a range of amps. The music of western pop and rock artists became widely available over the counter as well. At seventeen yuan each, the cassettes were twice as expensive as the local product, but not wholly out of the range of many people either.
When the People’s Daily sponsored a competition for the ‘Best Songs of 1988 and of the Ten Year Period of the New Era’, Hou had four nominations in the mainland category and two in the Hong Kong/Taiwan section, the latter also including a handful of songs by Luo Dayou.
Luo Dayou’s 1988 album Comrade Lover (‘You’re like a beautiful slogan that can’t be erased…’) didn’t make it into the mainland’s music shops, but the album’s hit single ‘Love Song 1990’ went ballistic. For years afterwards you couldn’t walk into a karaoke bar in China without someone crooning the thing. I inflicted it on a few audiences myself.
Hong Kong and Taiwan pop remained more popular with the masses than mainland rock. One of the hottest songs of the time was the Taiwan tune ‘Go with Your Feelings’; its title soon entered the language and even became the punch line of a number of political jokes. Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic approach to economic reform, which he likened to ‘crossing the river by feeling for the stones’, was nicknamed the ‘go with your feelings’ school of reform.
It was difficult to get any idea what the Chinese leaders were like as people. And so, when Premier Li Peng made a state visit to Australia in late 1988, Geremie and I were delighted that, thanks to some fiddling on the part of an old friend of Geremie’s in the prime minister’s department, we ended up at the state banquet in his honour as extra translators for the top two tables.
I sat at Table Two with, among others, Gough and Margaret Whitlam, the president of the Senate, and the Chinese Minister for Metallurgy, who turned out to be a big fan of the new Chinese cinema. While the minister and I raved on about Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, Geremie sat between Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Li Peng. When Hawke, through Geremie, asked Li to pass on his best wishes to former Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and the current General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng frowned and picked his fingernails. Hawke tried to make small talk, but Li Peng responded to all questions with gruff, one-word answers and didn’t initiate any conversation himself. When the food came, Geremie and Hawke observed without comment Li’s manner of eating, which Geremie later described to me as frog-like, his tongue darting out for each new morsel.
Hawke was aware of Geremie’s knowledge of Chinese politics. Lowering his voice, he tilted his grey pompadour in Geremie’s direction and gestured discreetly towards Li with his thumb. He said he’d heard ‘this bloke’ was in a power struggle with his old mate Zhao Ziyang.
Geremie nodded. ‘Yup.’
Hawke leaned in closer and asked Geremie who he thought would win.
Geremie flickered his eyes in Li’s direction.
‘Aw, shit,’ Hawke blurted.
It was too good a story not to tell one or thirty of our closest friends. One of Cheng Lin’s old pals from her navy days, Xie Yunpeng, was becoming a fixture at their Double Elms home. Xie was an amateur ethnomusicologist who played a traditional wind instrument called the sheng. He was from Harbin, in China’s north, and was one year younger than Hou. As round as Hou was thin, with a fretful, money-conscious and practical nature that balanced Hou’s breezy, idealistic approach to life, Xie decided that Hou needed a manager and that he would be it. Xie once told me he considered Hou a ‘great genius’ for whom he’d happily sacrifice his ‘smaller talent’. Passionately devoted to Hou, Xie served him like a feudal retainer, though when they were alone he never baulked at speaking his mind. Nor was he shy about taking his cut.
Xie organised a series of concerts around the country at which Hou, Cheng and some of their friends would perform. During the tour, which took place over the Chinese New Year, Hou presented all the participants with generous cash bonuses in traditional red envelopes as compensation for being apart from their families over the holidays. Another time, he played to tens of thousands of factory workers in Inner Mongolia for free because he was moved by their poverty.
Xie told me that Cheng Lin fought bitterly with Hou over incidents like these. This ferocity with which she argued over money matters with Hou struck Xie as unnecessary. For his part Hou couldn’t understand what the problem was. In 1988, the royalties from ‘Song of the Junkman’ alone amounted to over US$25,000. He’d heard that the court case was likely to go his way, which meant that he should be seeing his 196,000 yuan again before long. And there seemed to be no end to commissions for film scores and even advertising jingles should he choose.
Hou Dejian maintained there was a fine line between enjoying privilege and assuming that it was your birthright. For all his celebrity, he was still the barefoot boy from the juancun. His Benz parked nearby, he could often be found squatting by the side of the road like a peasant, having a smoke and a chat with street vendors or traffic cops. As his friend, the actor and comedian Hou Yaohua put it, ‘Hou had this irresistible passion for life, for people.’
If Hou was happy sampling the cheap delights of the crowded night markets, Cheng Lin shunned them as unhygienic. While Hou dressed as he’d always done, in jeans and polo shirts, she bought designer fashions from Hong Kong and never went out without makeup, even applying plastic crescents to her upper eyelids to give her naturally pretty eyes a double-lidded look. Of course, it was easier for Hou to get away with not caring about his looks; pop culture in China, as elsewhere, demands more of women that way. Praised for her appearance, Cheng Lin worked hard at keeping it up.
Hou Yaohua emceed several of their concerts. Hou Dejian, he said, was the ‘ultimate professional’, showing up on time, never complaining about conditions or losing his temper or demanding special treatment. ‘He respected his audience.’ But even Guangzhou’s Southern Daily noticed that Cheng was turning into a prima donna. The paper reported that in a fit of pique over the awkward placement of some sound equipment on the stage, she’d dashed her microphone to the ground mid-performance.
Though he blamed himself for ‘spoiling’ her, Hou was uncomfortable with her behaviour. ‘She went around as though she deserved more than other people, as though she were inherently superior,’ he told me disapprovingly.
On the other hand, he tended to put any immaturity down to her age and credited her frivolity and pettiness to her being female. My efforts at converting him to feminism clearly hadn’t had any effect—he never se
emed to realise how much his being male privileged him in China’s patriarchal society.
It never occurred to Hou to argue with Cheng Lin about their growing differences. But he grew bored. He began to stray. His affairs, though not particularly serious, further strained their relationship.
ON 7 April 1989, I arrived back in Beijing from Sydney for an extended visit. I was working as a consultant on a television miniseries, ‘Crackers’, based on Nick Jose’s novel Avenue of Eternal Peace. My job was to talk to film studios and lay the basis for a co-production deal. The assistant producer and art director would be joining me in May for further talks and to check out locations, and then in June, the executive producers would fly up to sign the contract. That’s how it was supposed to go, anyway.
The year had begun with wildcat strikes among the workers, grain riots in the countryside, bank runs in the cities and an upsurge of crime. The army even had to march into the Daqing oilfields, one of the great models of socialist enterprise in the Maoist era, to quell worker unrest.
The campuses, one year on from the shoeshine protests, seethed with discontent. ‘Crisis consciousness’ had spilled out of the academy and into public awareness in mid-1988 with the screening on national TV of the mini-series River Elegy. As part of their attack on Chinese cultural and political complacency, the presenters played ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ and asked, ‘Is there any Chinese who does not know this song? Can you hear the deep sigh within the song? But what’s the use of sighing?’
The astrophysicist, popular university lecturer and outspoken advocate of political reform, Professor Fang Lizhi put a match to the kindling when he petitioned Deng Xiaoping for the release of Wei Jingsheng, still languishing in prison. Professor Fang suggested that the release of Wei would be an appropriate gesture to mark the fortieth anniversary of the People’s Republic, the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement (when thousands of Beijing university students demonstrated in front of Tiananmen Gate against imperialist aggression), the tenth year of Wei’s imprisonment and—why not?—the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Soon, scholars, writers and scientists in China and abroad followed up with similar petitions, which were signed by tens of thousands of people.
I asked Hou Dejian if he’d signed any petitions for Wei’s release. He grimaced. ‘No one’s asked me yet.’
‘You would, though,’ I insisted. Hou had been delighted when I told him, years before, how I’d found myself sharing a cab with one of the chief editors of the People’s Daily and had spent the whole trip haranguing him about Wei Jingsheng. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I did promise the authorities when I came here in 1983 that I’d never raise the issue of Wei’s imprisonment.’
‘Since when did they ever keep their promises to you?’
Hou didn’t sign any petitions. But he did pen his first protest song, ‘Get off the Stage!’ Beijing audiences had a habit of shouting out xiaqu bu!—get off the stage!—the instant they were bored by a performance.
The song, obviously directed at China’s geriatric leadership, required audience participation—punters were to shout xiaqu bu! after every line:
I’m getting old and a little senile too
This stage seems to belong not to me but you
You were applauding me only yesterday
What’s turned you against me today?
I’m not sure what I still can do
I’m not sure what I still can say.
I sing and play for all of you
But what you want I’ve not a clue.
No one’s said what’s on their mind for years
But there’s a fire in their guts that sears
You hate him, and he hates you and me
But we haven’t done anything wrong, really.
It’s just that we’re not doing as well as we’d hoped.
Still that’s not your fault, or his and don’t blame me
I still want to sing for a few more years—
Why isn’t the applause ringing in my ears?
One night, Hou sang the song to a gathering of artists and musicians. In the audience were participants in the 1978–79 Democracy Wall movement, including a number of artists who’d been living abroad. The crowd loved the song, laughing and applauding and shouting ‘Get off the stage!’ with relish. Hou felt freer than he had in years, and was delighted by his symbolic acceptance into the ‘unofficial’ culture scene. ‘I’d been carrying so much weight on my back that I didn’t know where my back ended and the weight began anymore,’ he told me afterwards.
I stayed with Nick Jose, then Australia’s cultural counsellor, for much of the time I was in Beijing. One night, he invited a visitor from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra to dinner. Nick had just introduced us when the man barked, ‘I know who you are. You’re married to that Barmé person. There are people in Foreign Affairs who think your husband ought to be put in concrete booties and tossed into Lake Burley Griffin.’
Auntie Xin Fengxia, the opera singer, and Geremie Barmé, mid-eighties, Beijing.
‘Ah,’ I replied, trying to figure out if he was kidding. ‘That’s nice. Why, if I might ask?’
‘The story about what Hawkie said at dinner. Your husband wasn’t very discreet. I think the whole bloody world knows about it by now.’
‘Heh heh. It was pretty funny, you have to admit.’
‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘It was. But that’s not the point.’
As if the whole world knew anyway. I’d almost forgotten this conversation when, a few nights later, I was visiting the Yangs. Their lounge room, as usual, was full of people, mostly Chinese, some of whom I was meeting for the first time.
On hearing my name, a Chinese man exclaimed, ‘You’re married to Bai Jieming, aren’t you?’ Bai Jieming was Geremie’s Chinese name.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Only by reputation.’
He turned to the room, and told the entire story of the state dinner, with hand gestures to indicate the way Li Peng picked at his nails when Hawke asked about Hu Yaobang, and concluded with Hawke crying, ‘Cao ta ma!’—‘Fuck your mother!’
Nick was amused when I told him what happened at the Yangs. It was in Nick’s nature to be amused by almost everything. He collected anecdotes, rumours and macabre news stories like the one about the Chinese couple who murdered itinerants and sold dumplings made with their flesh at the markets. He also collected interesting people. One day, he told me he was about to collect an English rock star and asked if I wanted to come along.
‘Rock star? You mean, like, entourage-toting, hotel-room-trashing, drug-taking prima donna who’ll want to do the wild thing with half the local female population?’ I groaned. Foreigners behaving badly in China could be excruciating. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Billy Bragg. Ever hear of him?’
‘Nup. And you?’
‘Nup.’ Nick laughed. ‘But his manager, Pete Jenner, is Bill Jenner’s brother.’ Bill was Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University and a mutual friend.
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it then. If he’s too horrible, we can bail.’
And so it was that on Saturday, 15 April 1989, I was hanging out in Beijing with the infinitely charming, intelligent and witty Billy Bragg.
The painter Ah Xian had introduced me several years before to another artist, a high school teacher by the name of Guan Wei. Guan Wei produced marvellous and whimsical paintings that played on the idea of acupuncture points. He was having his very first exhibition that morning in the French embassy’s cultural centre, and Nick and I were keen to go. We took our guests along and Billy liked Guan Wei’s work so much he bought one of the paintings.
Afterwards, we went back to Nick’s place. The phone rang. It was our friend Wu Zuguang, the elderly playwright, with the news that Hu Yaobang had died of a heart attack, supposedly on the toilet and following a heated exchange with some colleagues in the
Politburo. It was hard to feel much sorrow when the old bastards running the country finally kicked the bucket, even if Hu had been, compared to the rest, a reasonably all right old bastard.
That evening, we organised a meal with a filmmaker friend, Wang Ziyin, and some Chinese musicians, including Hou Dejian and Cheng Lin. Billy’s most recent album had featured Cultural Revolution graphics and a song with the title ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forward’. Though he used these ironically, he did consider himself a socialist. One of the musicians asked Billy why. It clearly struck him as incomprehensible. Why be a socialist if you weren’t forced to be one? Billy launched into a long and articulate explanation of his progressive socialist views which I translated into Chinese. When he finished, everyone sat as though stunned.
Finally, one of the musicians broke the silence. ‘So,’ he said, ‘when you’re performing, what sort of amp do you use?’
Over dinner, it came up in conversation that the official statistics bureau had just announced that China’s population had reached 1.1 billion.
‘That’s way too many people,’ someone sighed.
Hou Dejian waved his chopsticks. ‘Well, if nothing else,’ he joked, ‘Hu Yaobang has done his bit for population control.’ We all enjoyed a rude chuckle. No one at the table seemed the least bit distressed by Hu’s death.
Later that evening, Hou took Billy, Ziyin and me to a rock club. There we watched some truly shite bands, and then were blown away by the performance of the punk He Yong and his band May Day. He Yong spat beer all over the audience, and threw a punch at his bass player before launching into his first song.
