by Linda Jaivin
More than a hundred reporters attended Hou’s first press conference. The Taiwan press devoted pages of copy to his story, including summaries of his life and work, the lyrics to his songs and interviews with everyone from his mother to Captain You Yindi. Initially, the tone of the reports was sympathetic. ‘Seven years ago,’ one typical article began, ‘Hou Dejian went to the mainland in service of his ideals…’
Taiwan wasn’t the same place Hou had left seven years before. Much that had been taboo was now commonplace: an old acquaintance of Hou’s, the filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, had even directed a feature film, City of Sadness, with the 28 February Incident as the theme.
At the end of 1989, in the first election since the end of martial law, and the first in which the Democratic Progressive Party could legally field candidates, the oppositionists had captured one-third of the popular vote. Taiwan democracy wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than what was on offer across the Strait.
The island’s economy was booming. With per capita GNP at US$10,000, healthier foreign exchange reserves than many developed nations and a literacy rate of 93 per cent, the people of one of Asia’s most successful ‘little dragons’ could afford to be confident of the future. The Beijing massacre had dampened the enthusiasm of even the most ardent reunification advocates for speedy solutions. Familiarity with the mainland had bred in many people, if not horror or contempt, at least indifference. At the end of the day, by mid-1990, most of the people on Taiwan were proud to call the island home.
And that is why, when Hou was asked by a television reporter if he was happy to be back in Taiwan, and he replied that he’d return to Beijing the following day if he could, the tide of public opinion receded rapidly from his shore. He even managed to offend advocates of reunification when he said that he hated the word, that it made him think of the military conquests of historical tyrants like the first Qin emperor.
Within a week of his return, Hou could tell he was no longer welcome. Dailies twisted his words in order to demonise him. They didn’t even like the way he spoke—in his seven years away, he’d picked up a Beijing accent and used the language like a real mainlander. A popular weekly magazine titled their cover story on him ‘Political Chameleon’ and illustrated it with a photo of a model with a giant lizard on her arm.
Yuanzhen had remarried and was living with their eight-year-old son in the south of the island; she had no interest in seeing Hou. The hostile press eagerly revived her ordeal as well. For his part, Hou respected the fact that she’d made a new life for herself, and however much he might have wanted to, didn’t believe he had any right to ask to see his son.
He also understood that he’d unwittingly offended the new Taiwan pride. Yet he was deeply hurt by the media’s barbs. He found them even harder to take than the explosion of bile which he’d experienced less than a year earlier over the claim that he hadn’t seen anyone killed in the square. He tried without success to sue one of the major dailies for defamation.
His stomach ailments flared up and he spent some time in hospital.
Back in Beijing, the Public Security Bureau released its hostages. Zhou Duo appeared shaken when he met foreign reporters, though he insisted they’d treated him well. Gao Xin, tanned and relaxed, told the press he’d spent much of the time reading and fishing. The headline in the South China Morning Post declared, ‘Deportation of singer ends dissent for now.’
On 22 June, the spin doctors of the United Front Department called the pilot Huang Zhicheng and other Taiwan compatriots to a damage-control meeting. They claimed that Hou had always had an ‘attitude problem’ and insisted on making trouble. ‘We allowed him to return to Taiwan,’ they said, adding that the decision had been made at the ‘highest levels’. They stressed the word ‘allowed’, never hinting that there had been any coercion. ‘We don’t care what kind of fuss he makes there.’
When the government convened a national conference on United Front work in late July, Party Secretary-General Jiang Zemin reminded everyone present that ‘all tasks of the United Front must be subordinate to and serve the purpose of stability’.
In the months following his deportation, Hou busied himself writing a series of memoirs and reflections on life and politics. They were serialised in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the American Chinese-language press and published in book form as The True Story of a Troublemaker, the title a reference to Lu Xun’s famous ‘True Story of Ah Q’. He arranged some songs he’d been working on, including the bluesy ‘What’s the Weather?’ as well as ‘Get off the Stage’, ‘Carry On’, and ‘The Beautiful Chinese’ and recorded them together with a few old favourites, like ‘After Thirty’ and even ‘Heirs of the Dragon’, for a new album, also called Troublemaker.
In his book, he reflected that his reasons for going to China seven years earlier had to do with his search for ‘what it meant, in a positive, active sense, to be Chinese…But by the time I’d lived on the mainland for seven years, I’d recognised that the most serious problems of the Zhongguoren, the Chinese person, is not a lack of Chineseness but an excess of it. Because there’s so much stress on the Zhongguo, the China element, there’s a tendency to overlook the ren, the human one and the basic issues of self-respect, rights and freedoms that it involves.’
When the album Troublemaker came out, the broadcast media ignored it entirely. Hou heard that the government had issued what in Taiwan was called a shouyi and in the mainland a jingshen, an official order or ‘initiative’ for which no document would ever be found. The essence of the shouyi was that the broadcast media should not publicise Hou’s work. An editor at one of Taiwan’s major newspapers confirmed to me that this was the case. When I asked a government spokesman about this, however, he flatly denied that there was any such ban, or any policy at all on Hou. ‘Does the American government have a policy on Elizabeth Taylor?’ he asked in a derisive tone.
Even with publicity, the album might not have done all that well. Hou had long been superseded by a host of younger talents like the homely Zhao Chuan, whose signature tune was ‘I May Be Ugly, But I’m Tender’, as well as Luo Dayou, whose appeal to and grasp of the market only seemed to increase with age.
Hou with his brothers Dewei, left, and Junjun, right, and ‘Tiger’, in Taipei, 1990.
Some people still approached Hou on the street for autographs, but he was just as likely to cop hostile stares. He chopped off his trademark perm and grew a mullet, the standard haircut of the Taiwan working-class man. Once, when I was visiting him, we got into a lift with a woman who couldn’t stop staring at him. Finally she blurted out, ‘Your face seems so familiar to me!’
Hou smiled. ‘It’s pretty familiar to me as well.’ She laughed and stepped out at the next floor. ‘I’m enjoying my new anonymity,’ he said to me.
His old friends Sun Weimang, his university teacher Dai Hongxuan and the crowd from the Chaozhou Street days, including Yan—‘What are you, a foreigner?’—Zhuang, the writer Shu Kuo-chih and his onetime manager Yu Weiyan stood staunchly by him. He took much comfort from this. They helped him out financially while times were tough and got work for him when they could.
A reporter for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post who visited Hou in August 1990 wrote, ‘These days he whiles away the days sleeping till mid-afternoon, plucking the strings on his electric guitar and reacquainting himself with his forgiving father, mother and brothers. The visitor is struck by his casual demeanour: it is hard to believe that this chain-smoking, bespectacled musician is the same man who managed to infuriate rival governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.’
At the end of July, Geremie and I travelled to Taiwan to meet up with the filmmakers Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon. Carma, Richard and Geremie were working on what was to be a major film and archival project, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, for which they wanted to interview Hou Dejian. I stayed on to begin work on this book.
One day, Yu Weiyan asked Hou and me if we wanted to see Oliver Stone’s The Doors.
Just as we were about to enter the theatre, Yu Weiyan halted, fixing Hou with a gimlet stare. ‘Just tell me one thing, and tell me right now,’ he demanded, thinking of that time back in 1982. ‘Are you going to stand up for the national anthem? If not, I’m not sitting with you, is that clear?’
Hou laughed. ‘I’ll stand, I’ll stand,’ he said. When the anthem came on, we all stood. Hou nudged me, rolled his eyes and whispered, ‘Can you believe it? Nothing’s changed.’
BOOK
OF
CHANGES
THANKS to the fact that it was now possible to direct-dial the mainland from Taiwan, Hou kept in close touch with Sun Yanmei, his young Beijing girlfriend. When he’d been taken away by the police, she was devastated. Her family, who thought Hou too old and politically dangerous for their daughter, tried to set her up with more suitable boyfriends, but she wasn’t interested. She was determined to see him again. Even if she managed to get a passport, it wouldn’t be easy. Mainland citizens were only allowed to visit Taiwan if they’d lived elsewhere for five years.
In September 1990, the Taiwan government pressed criminal charges of illegal entry against Hou. The crime carried a maximum penalty of three years with hard labour or a fine equal to more than a thousand American dollars or both. It was a tricky case. He hadn’t intended to enter Taiwan illegally. Besides, it was the place of his birth. And despite the fact that he had committed a crime of sedition by defecting, travelling to China was no longer considered a crime. In the end, the court convicted him, but commuted his sentence of seven months hard labour.
As for getting a Taiwan passport, they told him he didn’t qualify. According to Taiwan laws, people who spent more than seven years on the mainland automatically forfeited their citizenship. The authorities considered sending him back to China.
China didn’t want him back. The Public Security Bureau told Xie that there was ‘absolutely no way’ that Hou would be allowed to return. ‘Zhou Duo and I wrote to the leaders of the Communist Party to plead his case,’ Xie wrote to me, ‘and we nearly landed in jail for our efforts.’
‘You know, Linda,’ Hou told me over the phone, ‘I’m so sick of trying to live as a Chinese. I just want to live as a human being.’ Looking for the answers to the many questions of his life, he began to read and reread the I Ching, the ancient classic of divination known in English as the Book of Changes.
In January 1991, Liu Xiaobo was finally released from prison. He broke down the first time he saw Tiananmen Square again. Geremie, who met up with him the following month in Beijing, felt he was suffering from a bad case of survivors’ guilt, but was relieved that prison hadn’t destroyed Xiaobo’s spirit. He wrote that they’d enjoyed a great chat over a meal, and added that Xiaobo ‘was his usual slurping, grunting self’. Xiaobo, who’d moved into Hou’s old place with Xie Yunpeng, gave Geremie a letter to pass on to me. It contained the poem he’d written about our farewell.
On that same trip, Geremie learned that the Ministry of State Security had questioned many people regarding himself, Richard Rigby, Nick Jose, and me. The ke-ge-bo were particularly interested in my Taiwan connections. In their strange and paranoid world view, we were all credibly part of a US-Australia-Taiwan plot to overthrow socialism in China. My taking Australian citizenship the year before only added fuel to the fire of their suspicions.
Geremie had also earned the displeasure of the mainland authorities for the Chinese-language satirical essays and cultural commentaries he’d been writing for the Hong Kong press since the mid-1980s. So when he discovered he’d grown a tail, he was dismayed but unsurprised. One evening, he, Xiaobo and Xie had dinner at the Yangs. An Australian diplomat stopped by as well. At the end of the evening, the guests emerged from the Foreign Languages Press compound to find three cars full of security spooks waiting to follow them home—one for Geremie, one for Xiaobo and Xie, and one for the Australian diplomat.
Soon after Geremie’s return to Australia, I set off on a trip to Hong Kong, the mainland and Taiwan to research this book. In Hong Kong, I interviewed Winnie Yeung and others, and spent hours combing the stacks of the library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I had dinner with Dayou twice. He told me he did not want to be interviewed for the book. I was disappointed, but couldn’t get him to reconsider.
During our second meal, he abused me, and Geremie in absentia, for supposedly only knowing China through books, for thinking Hou Dejian was worth writing about and, as the evening wore on, a whole list of other sins including my inability to speak Cantonese as fluently as I spoke Mandarin. Though I thought him full of shit and told him so, I couldn’t help but feel hurt. We gave each other a big hug at the end of the night, but I felt that the friendship was in a hard place, and that my decision to write a book about Hou Dejian was at the heart of the problem.
Arriving in Beijing on 5 June 1991, I hightailed it over to Hou’s old flat. I needed to interview both Xie and Xiaobo for the book, but there was something else propelling me there which I was reluctant to admit. I tried to convince myself that the churning excitement I felt at seeing Xiaobo again was due solely to the fact that I was one of the last people to see him before his arrest, and that he’d been in prison for so long.
But this time, when he kissed me, I kissed him back. We had an on-again, off-again affair that wasn’t to end until the following March, and which was one of the catalysts for the breakup of my marriage to Geremie. I’m not proud of what happened, especially in light of the fact that Xiaobo was also married. Nor was I his only lover. I’d like to blame it all on post-traumatic stress, but I take responsibility for my actions.
By 1991, the mainland had become Taiwan’s fourth-largest trading partner. Taiwan had also become the fourth-largest source of investment for the mainland after the US, Japan and Hong Kong. That year, Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui formally declared the end of the civil war. The government in Beijing was wary, however, of the rise of pro-independence politicians in Taiwan. ‘Splitting the motherland,’ the Communists warned, ‘means going to war.’
In February 1991, Hou Dejian wrote to me to say that the Taiwan government still refused to issue him travel documents. ‘I’m going to apply to come to Australia as a refugee,’ he declared. The government relented and by the end of the year he got his passport. His Beijing girlfriend Sun Yanmei, whose brother lived in Auckland, meanwhile, overcame her family’s objections and made it out to New Zealand. The pair were reunited in Auckland after nearly two years apart and married there in May 1992.
For a number of years after this, Hou travelled between Auckland and Taipei. In Taipei, his old mates organised commissions for television and film theme songs for him. He wrote a few pop hits under assumed names and played a bit part in a film produced by Yu Weiyan and directed by Edward Yang, called A Brighter Tomorrow. He also acted in, helped to write and compose the music for Yu Weiyan’s own 1994 film Moonlight Boy.
Hou and Yanmei at home in New Zealand, mid-nineties. ‘I realised I didn’t need to live in China to be Chinese.’
But it was in New Zealand that Hou finally found peace of mind. He loved the house in the Auckland suburb of Mission Bay where he and Yanmei lived. ‘I’d read lots of western books and seen western movies but this was my first experience of living in the west. It was so comfortable. No one treated us like outsiders, like foreigners. I realised I didn’t need to live in China to be Chinese.’ Hou, he of the non-stop plans and schemes and projects, discovered he was happy just knocking a tennis ball against the side of the house. He’d build a fire in the fireplace and sit and watch the flames for hours, content as a cat.
In New Zealand, Hou continued his intense study of the I Ching, which consists of sixty-four hexagrams, groupings of lines which are either broken (yin) or unbroken (yang) and layers of commentary, some of which is quite obscure. The Chinese have used the I Ching for nearly three thousand years as a tool for divining the future, typically by throwing a coin or a bamboo marker six times and using the results (heads = y
ang, tails = yin) to find the appropriate hexagram for the situation. ‘I’d always thought that I was in control of my own fate,’ he told me. ‘Studying the I Ching, I realised that much more of our fate than we realise is predetermined.’
Yet Hou had reservations about the inherent conservatism of any sort of fortune-telling. ‘The whole emphasis is on avoiding mistakes. It’s a system for self-protection. That means no risk-taking.’
‘That doesn’t sound like you,’ I agreed.
‘My whole life I stuck my neck out. I took more risks and made more mistakes than anyone. Sticking your neck out is a young person’s right and a young person’s duty. Every society needs the strength and vitality that comes from young people’s risk-taking. But I’m exhausted. I need to protect myself now. The I Ching has even helped me tame my passions and desires. When I see a beautiful woman, my heart beats much more slowly than it used to.’
‘That could just be middle age,’ I suggested.
