by Linda Jaivin
‘It beats more slowly than is reasonable even for someone at middle age,’ he assured me.
Devising his own system of fengshui based in part, like most systems of fengshui, on the I Ching, Hou tested his theories on friends’ homes in New Zealand, using a ‘southern hemisphere variation’, and was pleased with the results. He took to wearing a special compass on his wrist so that he could practise his divinations wherever he went.
We kept in touch. Hou passed on the news that You Yindi, the captain of the fishing boat on which he’d returned to Taiwan, had been arrested for smuggling goods across the Taiwan Strait. ‘That might explain why the fridge didn’t have any fish in it,’ Hou laughed.
He arrived in Australia for a visit in mid-1992. I took Hou to a dinner party at the sharehouse of one of my friends in Canberra. Hou had never met my friend, his housemates or any of the other people at the party; nor did I tell him much about them beforehand.
Consulting his compass, he made some extraordinarily accurate comments about the personality and general luck of an absent house-mate.
In 1992 Xiaobo won an international award for promoting freedom of expression and Luo Dayou made his first visit to the mainland. New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, in which Geremie and I called Hou one of the great ‘unbound feet’ of contemporary Chinese life, was published and attracted glowing reviews from such luminaries of the Chinese studies world as Jonathan Spence of Yale University and Andrew J. Nathan of Columbia. It sold so few copies, however, that Geremie and I never even made enough royalties to cover the publisher’s advance.
I finished my book about Hou Dejian but failed to find a publisher for it. Looking back, I’m glad, because it was a different book from this one, obsessively footnoted and striving for an impossible objectivity. At the time, I was deeply disappointed.
Translating the subtitles for Chen Kaige’s film Farewell, My Concubine gave me enough money to move to Sydney in early 1993, after my split with Geremie. There, I shared a flat with Renata Atkin, the ex-girlfriend of the journalist Robert Thompson, at whose Beijing home Geremie and I had our wedding party. The flat was owned by Robert— who was eventually to become editor-in-chief of the American edition of the Financial Times—and his generosity as a landlord, charging us below-market rent, helped me survive in the city as a freelance writer. I wrote for a number of publications, usually on subjects related to China.
There was plenty to write about. Chinese films were gaining new audiences in film festivals and arthouse cinemas around the world, exhibitions like Mao Goes Pop showcased the exciting new developments in Chinese art, and the rock scene had well and truly blossomed in Beijing and a number of other cities. I curated a program of ‘underground’ and independent Chinese film called ‘Beijing Bastards Take Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in 1993 which included a film by young ‘sixth generation’ director Zhang Yuan about China’s rock scene called Beijing Bastards as well as several of Cui Jian’s music videos.
My punk friend He Yong had a surprise hit, a super-hit in fact, with his ballad ‘Bell and Drum Towers’, a nostalgic look at his neighbourhood in Beijing’s old city. The music video for the song even screened on Central Television and the word ‘peng-ke’ (punk) appeared in booster-ish articles on him in the official press. When I met up with him on a trip to China in 1994, he appeared more self-conscious than I’d ever seen him, simultaneously pleased with and disconcerted by his mainstream success.
Less than ten years after the publication of How to Recognise Pornographic Music, a publishing house in Beijing put out Three Hundred Songs from Jazz and Rock and, not long after that, the official magazine People’s Music introduced 200 of the world’s top rock albums, beginning with Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash and working their way up to AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and ‘Oizy Osburne’, whose ‘crazy sense of humour’ they illustrated with the line, reprinted in English, ‘Finished with my woman cause she couldn’t help me with my mind…Duhdhuhhhhhh!’
Few of the younger generation of music fans recognised Hou’s name; fewer still had any idea of his contribution to the history of Chinese pop. But ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ had its own life. In October 1992, the New York Times reported that, when the Party announced the lineup of its new Politburo Standing Committee on Central Television, ‘Heirs’ played in the background. When I told this to Geremie, he remarked, ‘“Heirs” is like the hat in the opening section of Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting. After Hou’s purge, it was all that was left.’
In China, the market economy was booming and private enterprise, once highly controversial, was now the order of the day. People I knew who’d once been passionate about politics and culture were now mainly interested in money and material goods. Given that the whole society had been so severely punished for the keen interest of some in political reform, you could hardly blame them for switching off. I also realised, of course, how much it meant for people who’d lived with such severe material deprivation for so long to have a chance to enjoy a better life (even if a better life wasn’t in reach of everyone in China), and was thrilled that my friends’ standards of living had improved so dramatically. Friends who’d never had home phones in the eighties all had pagers or mobiles in the nineties. But now that their conversation, which had once been about books and films and ideals, revolved around cars, business plans and renovations, I found myself bored shitless.
To cap it off, the early nineties saw the growth of a particularly virulent strain of nationalism in China which Geremie summarised in an article titled ‘To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic’. If, on any aspect of Chinese history, politics or culture, you held a different opinion from one of the new proto-fascist bullies of China’s intellectual scene, you were labelled an ‘anti-Chinese element’.
I visited China as regularly as possible, but on a visit there in 1994, it occurred to me that I was no longer as interested or as enthusiastic as before. By the following year, I just didn’t feel like going back. Geremie remembers me saying to him that in China all anyone wanted to talk about was money, whereas in Australia, cultural and intellectual issues—the debates in 1995, for instance, surrounding Helen Garner’s The First Stone and Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper—were all over the front pages of the papers. My new home had begun to capture most of my attention.
Many of my closest Chinese friends left China not long after the 1989 massacre. Some went to the US or Europe. Ah Xian, his brother Xiao Xian and Guan Wei all emigrated to Australia, where they achieved considerable recognition for their work. The MCA dedicated the first show (which opened, significantly, on 4 June 1999) in their fourth-floor Artists’ Project Space to Guan Wei, who has also been named one of Australia’s fifty most collectable artists. Ah Xian is producing exquisite ceramic sculptures that sell for tens of thousands of Australian dollars; Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum put on an exhibition of his work in early 2001. Xiao Xian, who worked for years as a Sydney cab driver, has become an award-winning photographer, whose work, like his brother’s, has been shown at the Australian National Gallery.
I’ve been thrilled by their collective success. I haven’t seen as much of them in Sydney as I used to in Beijing—but that’s my fault. I went through a long post-Tiananmen phase of not wanting anything to do with China. Every time I thought about the place, I felt exhausted emotionally. I wondered why I hadn’t chosen to involve myself with a country like France, where your friends didn’t always end up in exile or in prison and the food was almost as good.
Fiction has always been my passion. My life changed in 1995 when my first novel, the comic-erotic Eat Me, was published. I began a new career as a novelist and was very happy.
It was with a feeling of numbness that I read in the papers in May 1995 that Xiaobo had been detained again. This time, it was for collecting signatures for a petition calling for human rights guarantees. Held without trial, he was released in January 1996. In October that year, he was re-a
rrested following a new petition for freedom of expression, the recognition of the rights of Tibetans and the right to form independent political parties. He was sentenced by an administrative tribunal to three years of ‘re-education through labour’ and shipped off to the gulag. It seemed deeply incongruous that while some of his peers were now able to send their children to summer camp, Liu Xiaobo was still in labour camp. Economic reform had taken off like a rocket; political reform remained grounded.
By then, Xiaobo had divorced Tao Li and married Liu Xia, the ex-wife of another close friend.
In 1994, Hou Dejian co-authored a very curious book. He and his co-author Wang Taiquan wrote 2001: The Final Stage in response to another oddity 1995, Second August. (‘Second August’, run bayue, is the term given to a kind of ‘leap month’ which occurs in the traditional lunar calendar.) That book’s pseudonymous author had predicted that the mainland would stage a military attack on Taiwan in ‘Second August’ 1995. Hou and Wang refuted this on several grounds, questioning not just the author’s interpretation of Chinese history and understanding of the motivations of the Chinese Communist leadership, but referring as well to the I Ching.
They concluded that August 1995 would pass without incident, but there’d be the danger of conflict soon after, that 1999 would be full of ‘blunders’ and the final stage of China–Taiwan relations would begin in 2001. I couldn’t make head or tail of the text, which ranged esoterically over issues of Daoism, the enjoyment of ancient texts at middle age, and Chinese astrological analysis of the careers of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, among other things. Occasionally bold-typeface questions popped out of the text: ‘We respectfully ask every reader: what is your attitude towards the ability of the I Ching to predict the future? Do you believe? Or are you sceptical?’
Of all the wacky things that Hou had done, this struck me as the wackiest, particularly when I read Wang’s brief bio and learned from it that he described himself as a ‘prophet of the end of the millennium and observer of the new human species’. It made me wonder about the company that Hou was keeping and reminded me that there were many things about Hou I simply didn’t get, and probably never would. If friendship is about accepting these mysteries and biography about penetrating them, I was, in this instance anyway, a more competent friend than biographer.
I did come away with one important insight: I began to see Hou’s obsession with the I Ching as part of his search for understanding of the dramatic, often painful and sometimes inexplicable events of his own life, which had always been tied, one way or another, to the history of Taiwan and China.
A number of Hou’s and Wang’s predictions came true. In March 1996, on the eve of an island-wide election, China conducted missile ‘exercises’ in the Strait. One M9 missile landed only sixty clicks off Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s largest port. The US took the threat seriously enough to deploy two carrier battle groups in the Strait.
Deng Xiaoping died in February 1997, only months before the handover of Hong Kong to China, his dream of seeing China reunited in his lifetime only half-fulfilled. At one of the official events celebrating the handover, they played ‘Heirs of the Dragon’.
That same year, a memorial concert for the massacre took place in New York on 4 June. The avant garde musician and former member of the Velvet Underground, John Cale, as well as Patti Smith and Tibetan musicians all performed. Chai Ling, the former ‘commander-in-chief of the Protect Tiananmen Headquarters’, spoke, as did prominent human rights activists. The organisers had invited Hou Dejian to perform but he turned down the invitation. ‘I didn’t want to get mixed up with the dissident scene there. It hasn’t been easy for me to achieve any kind of peace and quiet in my life. The last thing I wanted was people asking me all over again to explain my statement about not seeing anyone killed on the square.’
Taiwan had become something of a mainland dissident-magnet. Hou was to discover there was absolutely no escaping from the dissident scene. By the time Hou and Yanmei moved back to Taiwan in 1997—both holding New Zealand passports—the former student activist Wuer Kaixi, whose affair with Cheng Lin had been short-lived, had married a Taiwan woman and was living there as well.
Hou ran into Wuer from time to time but made no attempt to stay in touch. But when the former Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng, whose unfair trial in 1979 had inspired Hou to dedicate a song to him, arrived in Taiwan, Hou was interested to meet him.
Wei had been released from prison in 1993, six months short of his fifteen-year sentence, and not long before the Olympic Committee was due to choose the host for the 2000 Olympics, for which Beijing was bidding. A physically broken but spiritually unbowed Wei continued to speak out for democracy and human rights. In April 1994, the authorities arrested him again for ‘engaging in activities in an attempt to overthrow the government’ and sent him to a labour camp where guards stood by as he was bashed by other prisoners. In 1997, the Chinese government released Wei on ‘medical parole’ and put him on a plane for the US.
‘He was one of the most clear-thinking Chinese I’ve ever met,’ Hou said afterwards. ‘On the other hand, he kept talking about the politics of the democracy movement overseas. Who hates whom, who’s cooperating with the Communists, that sort of thing. I understood where he was coming from, but I was still a little disappointed.’
Hou himself was not interested in joining any dissident organisations. He participated in a petition movement calling on the Beijing government to reverse the verdict on 4 June. But he had decided to focus most of his energy on his new enterprise, Heirs, Inc., a company devoted to fortune-telling based on the I Ching and fengshui.
This, I had to see.
Arriving into the chaos of Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Airport in early 1998, I pushed my luggage trolley down the ramp and waved excitedly at a man who, I realised a split second later, looked like Hou Dejian circa 1981. Shaking my head to dislodge the phantom, I continued to search the crowded arrivals hall for him without success. A young woman asked if I needed help, pointing me to the paging desk. I hesitated, nervous about the stir it might create if they announced Hou’s name over the p.a. After another twenty minutes, it seemed like I’d no other choice. As it turned out, the woman at the paging desk didn’t bat an eye at his name, and no one in the crowd turned to stare when he and Yanmei came hurrying over.
Hou laughed when I told him about not wanting to page him. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ he said. ‘No one recognises me anymore.’
I almost didn’t recognise him myself. He still had the same matchstick legs and skinny arms, but in the years since I’d seen him, his face had filled out and so had his waist. With his polo shirt tucked into his belted jeans, and his shoulders hunched forward over his newly rounded tummy, he looked well on the way to becoming one of those elderly men with beach-ball middles who wear their belt buckles for bow ties. Middle age had drained some of his old energy and darkened and lined his face.
‘Have the two of you ever got it on?’ We laughed. ‘Nah,’ Hou said. ‘She was too fat.’ ‘Nah,’ I confirmed. ‘He was too skinny.’
At twenty-nine Yanmei still had the look of a teenager, with her youthful clothes, pigtails and bouncy manner. Laughing, she told me that she was sometimes mistaken for a high school student. They’d borrowed a friend’s car to collect me. Hou Dejian and Yanmei owned no car of their own. They lived frugally, in a large room that was part of the office of Heirs, Inc.
They drove me to a hotel near to where they lived. The hotel was on the same street where Hou and I had had our little accident so many years before.
The following day, I made my first visit to Heirs, Inc. The office was on the seventh floor of an undistinguished building on Heping East Road, in the city’s south. As in Taiwan homes and smaller offices, they followed the Japanese custom of not wearing shoes inside. I placed my shoes in the shoe cupboard and slipped on a pair of flat, red rubber mules. Immediately, I found myself shuffling along in that slatternly, loose-hipped, slipper-dragging walk
that for me is one of those things, like oyster omelettes, betelnut stands and whole buildings covered in small tiles, which simply is Taiwan.
My eye was drawn to a corkboard by the door. It was covered in clippings from the entertainment sections of Taiwan papers. Most featured publicity shots of starlets or pop singers; someone had texta-ed wavy red lines alongside the stars’ testimony as to how accurately Hou Dejian had read their fengshui. Some of the reports referred to him as ‘Heir of the I Ching’.
One side of the large room was the general office, with desks and computers, stacks of cartons, and paper, paper everywhere—advertisements for Hou’s fengshui master class, house plans, business plans, newspapers. On the other side, around the dividing wall, was Hou’s desk. Then there was a kitchen and his and Yanmei’s room.
Hanging off a bar next to Hou’s desk, acting as a privacy screen, was a beautiful Tibetan rug. ‘That’s from the Dalai Lama’s own workshop,’ Hou informed me. ‘His nephew gave it to me.’ Hou may not be the celebrity he once was, but he could still drop an impressive name or two. He told me he’d advised the Dalai Lama’s nephew and his Taiwan Chinese fiancee where they should position their marital bed.
Hou drilled me about the last few years: when were my novels published? When did I split with Geremie? How long had I been living in Sydney? And what day in March exactly was my birthday? As I answered his questions, he scribbled Chinese characters and numbers on a piece of paper. He studied these for a moment, nodded, got out a Chinese writing pad printed with vertical rows of faintly outlined squares, and filled this one as well, all the while chain-smoking Mild Sevens. Turning to the bookshelf behind him, he pulled out a huge volume with a yin-yang symbol on the cover and looked something up. Scribbling some more, he finally raised his eyes with a look of triumph. ‘Linda,’ he asked, ‘did you consider marriage at the end of last year?’
