by Linda Jaivin
Later, Dayou privately conceded to me that perhaps he’d gone a bit ‘overboard’. Yet publicly he maintained that Hou had lied, and had done so for opportunistic reasons.
An agent of the Public Security Bureau visited Hou’s place with a sheaf of Hong Kong and Taiwan press clippings. Hou flipped through them and shrugged. ‘They’ve got a lot of nerve,’ he remarked casually. ‘But, you know, I respect them for that. And I certainly envy the freedom of press they enjoy, even if it can mean the freedom to vilify anyone they want to.’ He refused to let the Chinese authorities see it, but he was in fact devastated. He sounded wounded and furious when he phoned me in Australia soon afterwards to talk about it.
‘There I was, out on the front line. I look back for support and where are they? Hiding out of the line of fire, cursing and calling out, hey, you, hold your head up a little higher so it makes a better target!’ He asked me, ‘You know the story in the Bible where Jesus comes upon the people about to stone the prostitute? When Jesus dared the one who was without sin to cast the first stone, that saved her. It wouldn’t have worked in China. She’d have been dead in minutes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No Chinese ever wants to admit they’ve sinned because they’ll lose face. So they’re all happy to cast the first stone.’
‘How are people there treating you?’
‘Interestingly enough, most people I run into in Beijing are sympathetic. They ask me if I was telling the truth. I say yes, and they say, fine, we believe you.’
For my part, I told anyone who would listen, and some who wouldn’t, that I knew Hou was telling the truth—he had said the same thing to me on 4 June.
Less than a week after the 17 August broadcast, the Chinese authorities circulated a videotape entitled The Documentary on the Turmoil in Beijing. In it, Liu Xiaobo, speaking from prison, also said he hadn’t seen anyone killed on Tiananmen Square. Supporters of the movement were surprised. They were willing to forgive Xiaobo, however, because he was in no position to resist. When Hou’s eyewitness account ‘My Personal Experience at the Time of the Evacuation of Tiananmen Square’ was finally published in the Hong Kong Economic Daily on 24 August, appearing simultaneously in the English-language South China Morning Post and Taiwan’s China Times, it talked about how he’d heard numerous eyewitness reports of the killing and saw many horrifically wounded people in hospital. Some observers took note, but the damage was done.
On 26 August, Hong Kong television reported that the student leader Chai Ling had been arrested in Beijing. Though it turned out not to be true, the thought of this young heroine in the clutches of the evil state only inflamed the outrage at Hou’s imagined perfidy.
The continuing usefulness of his remarks to the Communist authorities was illustrated in September when Alain Peyrefitte of the French Academy became one of the first western scholars to be received by Premier Li Peng since 4 June. When the Frenchman tried to get Li to admit there had been a massacre, Li Peng countered, ‘I’m not sure if you know the Taiwan singer Hou Dejian, author of “Heirs of the Dragon”…when he was interviewed he confirmed that no protesters died on Tiananmen Square.’
The government issued a news bulletin dated 18 September alleging that the foreign, Hong Kong and Taiwan press had fabricated a great myth about the ‘bloodletting on Tiananmen’. The article began by quoting Hou, then Zhou Duo, Gao Xin and Liu Xiaobo, as well as seven other witnesses, including students and doctors, who agreed that no massacre had been committed on the square. Zhou and Gao had been interviewed individually in their prison cells. The overseas media didn’t jump to condemn them. Yet the issue remained highly emotive for a long time, and the attacks on Hou over this issue would continue for years.
The foreign press clamoured for Hou to speak with them. He turned down most requests; when he did talk, he refused to be drawn on this subject. He couldn’t speak about why he’d agreed to appear on Chinese television without mentioning the incriminating declaration; he chose to cop the flak rather than risk his friends’ lives. He understood that only his celebrity status as famous singer and Taiwan defector, and the accident of having been in the Australian embassy when they were rounding up his mates, had kept him from sharing their fate.
Hou was miserable. He suffered from insomnia and nightmares. He felt more isolated than ever before in his life. He had no plans. He thought about visiting Cheng Lin, who was still in Australia, but the United Front Department informed him he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country. It would be ‘inconvenient’, they said, for him to travel even as far as Guangzhou. Security agents visited him once a week, as though he were on parole.
He continued to see the Yangs, presenting them with a giant box of mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival and taking them out on excursions into the countryside.
Driving his Benz towards the Lidu Holiday Inn for a bowling session in October, he was startled by the sight in the rear-view mirror of police cars in hot pursuit. The Lidu was just off the airport road. They thought he was trying to flee the country. Another time, he encountered one of the many roadblocks set up in the city as part of martial law. He had more passengers in the car than allowed by law. The police hauled the whole group into the nearest cop shop and interrogated everyone except Hou. ‘They were hoping they’d all be dissidents so they could hang some sort of conspiracy on me, but these friends weren’t political at all. In the end, they concluded I was just a decadent playboy and that was fine with me. All I wanted was for them to leave me alone.’
Hou rediscovered the blues, listening over and over to tapes of great artists like B. B. King. Struck by the power and simplicity of the blues, he began to see his own work as overly orchestrated and lyrically bloated by comparison.
His career was at a standstill. The authorities had banned his albums from sale. Performing was out of the question. The mainland record companies withheld the royalties they’d owed him, either because they were afraid to contact him for political reasons or simply because they were taking advantage of his situation. For cash, he sold off his musical equipment, including six of his seven guitars. Yet he gave away much of the money he did have to the families of jailed activists as well as to other former participants in the protest movement who, though out of jail, were going through hard times.
In the evenings, he sampled the city’s night life, flourishing despite martial law. Rock bands were springing up everywhere. The new, outrageously named group 1989 covered the song by the English band, The Police—‘every step you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you’—to wild applause at clubs and performed a Jimi Hendrix-style cover of the Chinese national anthem.
Xie Yunpeng had resurfaced and was again Hou’s constant companion. On the morning of 4 June, Xie had bid Hou good luck as he set off to negotiate with the troops. When he tried to return to the tent, student pickets barred his way. He evacuated the square with the students, but when the group he was with reached the Beijing Concert Hall at Liubukou, just west of the square, tanks rolled up and sprayed them with automatic weapons fire. Xie fled into the doorway of a walled courtyard house on the side of the street. When the sound of gunfire died down, he crept outside again, only to see badly wounded students groaning and writhing in pools of blood. Six or seven corpses lay nearby. He helped pull one wounded student, overcome with tear gas, to safety.
Xie figured he’d be safe with his family in the country’s northeast, though when he got there his mother told him the Public Security Bureau had already come looking for him. Returning to Beijing, he was promptly picked up for questioning. The police wanted to know all about Hou Dejian’s motives for being on Tiananmen, and about his relationships with certain people including Xiaobo, Geremie, Nick and me. When they transferred Xie in the middle of the night to another police station, his escort called out as they arrived, ‘He’s not a rioter. Don’t beat him up. Give him a bed.’
One of the martial law troops guarding his cell fooled around with his gun in a way that
set Xie’s teeth chattering. The soldier, a country lad, said accusingly, ‘You Beijing people. You’ve got it all, tall buildings, everything. And you still make trouble.’ He asked Xie what he did.
‘I’m in the arts.’
‘Ah,’ replied the soldier. ‘We’ve seen quite a lot of artists.’
The police released him the next day with instructions to call them if he heard from Hou or found out where he’d got to. Unable to bear the thought of betraying his friend, he went back to the northeast, only returning to Beijing after Hou appeared on television.
Within China, the public mood had settled into one of passive resistance. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times observed as early as August that the ‘peculiar thing’ about Beijing was ‘how normal life seems to be’. Beneath the surface, of course, things were far from normal. As Kristof reported, all it would take would be for someone to mention the events of June and people would break down weeping.
In Auckland, John Minford, overcome with all sorts of pressures, pulled out of New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. Geremie and I were sad, as the project had been very much the three of ours.
Around the same time, travel agencies began offering cut-rate China tours. When John’s share of the advance money fell into our hands, and we saw a package deal to Beijing including airfare and six nights in a hotel for A$900 each, we decided to go and experience martial law for ourselves, buy all the books that weren’t yet burnt and see what we could find out about friends. We figured we’d have a better shot at getting visas through joining a group. Since the massacre, we’d both appeared on Australian television numerous times denouncing the Chinese government’s actions, and calling for people to put pressure on Beijing over the cases of Liu Xiaobo and others.
Shortly before we were scheduled to go, Nick called from Beijing. In the coded way we’d developed for communicating through his bugged telephone, he told us that Geremie and I had been the subject of a major investigation. The Party had stacks of photos of us throughout the April–June period and had questioned everyone we knew, including Yang Xianyi and the other old folk, about our motives for being in China then. Everyone told them the truth—unbelievable as this may have seemed to more Machiavellian minds—that it was a coincidence. We began to worry that they’d issued us visas so they could arrest and interrogate us in turn about our friends.
We consulted with another friend at the embassy. He thought we’d actually help our friends by going, buying books, not looking them up and going home again. We prevaricated up till a few hours before the flight on 9 December 1989. We unpacked, repacked, took anti-stress vitamins and headed off for Sydney airport in a grim mood. The vitamins didn’t work. On the plane, I suffered an anxiety attack. I was shaking and could hardly breathe.
We passed through customs in Beijing without incident and checked into our hotel. I was plunged immediately into the feeling of surrealism that I often had in China when I opened the bar fridge only to find that it had been packed with bags of raw meat. The room attendant later took them away without explanation. The following morning, we walked into the hotel’s coffee shop at ten to nine only to be told that we were too late for coffee. Oddly, it still felt good to be back.
Beijing seemed to be in hiding from itself. The crowds were sparse, the traffic light and when we had dinner at what had always been a popular restaurant in the Beijing Hotel, the room felt cavernously empty, with only six other tables occupied, one by a foreign businessman dining with a Chinese prostitute. He was one of only four other foreigners we saw that entire day.
Once, when we were having a bowl of beef noodles at a little Muslim eatery, an old man approached us and said softly in English, ‘Victory will be ours.’ He flashed the V-sign and I flashed one back, feeling teary.
Nick suggested that we go to a club that Hou Dejian frequented, a disco run by the once-staid People’s Theatre. That way, we’d avoid calling him on his phone, which was definitely bugged, and if he were questioned about meeting us, he could honestly say he had no idea we were coming. Geremie and I exchanged glances as, riding up the Avenue of Eternal Peace, our taxi juddered over the places where tank treads had made great gouges in the bitumen.
Spotting us arrive at the club, Hou did a double take and raced over to embrace us. He was overjoyed that we were there and not the least bit concerned about associating with us, so we planned dinners and an excursion a few days later to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in the Western Hills outside the city.
One night, after dinner at the Yangs, Hou, Geremie and I met Nick at a karaoke bar. While we were there, six police armed with cattle prods swaggered in, accepted drinks and cigarettes from the owner and swaggered out again. ‘Martial law with Chinese characteristics,’ we joked, playing on the official term ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
I later wrote to a friend that Hou was ‘pissed off at the government for calling him a “so-called songwriter” in their public denunciations of his and Liu Xiaobo’s hunger strike—“I am a songwriter!”—but seems to be taking everything else in stride.’
He told us that, not long before, he’d been chatting to his old friend Jimi FlorCruz. Hou had launched into a tirade about the government, the movement, everything. Jimi told him that the foreign press corps was finding it hard to keep their editors interested in what was going on in China. Few Chinese dared speak to foreign journalists. ‘How about saying all that on the record?’ Jimi proposed. ‘You’re probably the only person in Beijing who could speak his mind and get away with it. Besides,’ he pointed out, ‘it would help clear up any misunderstandings from that television broadcast.’
Granting Jimi an extensive interview, Hou agreed to wait for Time to publish the story before talking to anyone else. The story would be appearing soon. ‘What can they do to me?’ Hou shrugged.
Before we left Beijing, I told Hou that we had a scheme for which we needed his help. We wanted to send Xiaobo a message in prison. I’d grown secretly obsessed with Xiaobo and was devoted to him in a way that I didn’t fully understand myself.
In Canberra, we’d bought a thick brown woollen jumper with a ‘made in Australia’ label. If we could get it to him in prison, I thought, he’d take comfort, and know that we were thinking of him. Yet not even his family had been allowed to visit him. He wasn’t allowed to receive any mail or packages.
We came up with a plan. Hou would give the jumper to a friend, who’d take it to Xiaobo’s wife, Tao Li, and ask her to take it to him if she had a chance.
By coincidence, shortly after she received the jumper, Tao Li was allowed her one visit to him. She was told not to give him any gifts. She wore the jumper herself, slipping it off when the guard’s attention was diverted and passing it to him. He quickly put it on. Later, back in his cell, he took off the jumper and studied it. Seeing the ‘hand-made in Australia’ label, he immediately knew it was from us. Over a year later, when he was finally released after eighteen months in prison, most of that in solitary, he told me he knew that it had been my idea. He said he’d been thinking a lot about me too. He even wrote a poem about our strange farewell.
LATE in December 1989, Gao Xin turned up on Hou’s doorstep. He’d just been released from jail. Hou was shocked to see how gaunt, pale and aged he looked. Nick later described him in a letter to us as ‘literally changed beyond recognition’. Held at a jail at Banbuqiao (‘Half Step Bridge’) in a crowded cell with common criminals, murderers and rapists, Gao had seen sunlight twice in six months. He’d been handcuffed for thirty-five days straight, unable to go to the toilet without help, and the manacles had so damaged the nerves in his hands that they still shook uncontrollably. He’d been held without charge or trial, denied contact with his family, not allowed to read books or newspapers and forbidden to listen to even official broadcasts. They told him that the reason they’d arrested him was that he’d hidden out in the foreign compound with us. The Party was determined to pin the ‘turmoil’ on foreign instigation.
Thinking about what Xiaobo and Zhou must still be going through, Hou felt sick.
There was some good news in the world. On 9 November, even as the repression continued in China, the Berlin Wall fell down and socialism in Eastern Europe came tumbling after. The Chinese media censored much of the news but Hou, like many other Chinese people, kept his ears glued to the short-wave radio. Following the fall of the Romanian dictator Ceausescu in late December, Cui Jian played at a party at which ecstatic Romanian exchange students and their Chinese friends partied the night away under the pretence of celebrating Christmas.
The Chinese government, alarmed by the news that gave hope to so many of its people, put its army and security forces on red alert. The Party particularly feared an uprising by workers. It also closely monitored the activities of democracy activists who’d fled overseas— whose ranks now included both Chai Ling and Wuer Kaixi. They’d formed a federation to continue the fight for democracy in China from abroad and elected Wuer Kaixi vice-chairman.
The Chinese government took some comfort from the fact that the democracy movement in exile was rocked by factionalism and corruption scandals. The Chinese media gleefully reprinted reports from the overseas press alleging, among other things, that Wuer Kaixi was supporting a luxurious lifestyle with donated funds.
It seemed they’d finally quashed dissent. Then, on 8 January 1990, Jimi’s interview with Hou came out in Time. ‘Everyone is just sitting around,’ Hou complained, ‘whining and cursing, waiting for the authorities to make fools of themselves, for something to happen or someone to die…We must do something before it’s too late to do anything.’
