by Linda Jaivin
‘Unless you’re Aboriginal,’ I pointed out, ‘your ancestors came here from China. If your ancestors were part of Koxinga’s mob, then your family has been here for only four hundred years.’ You can say ‘only four hundred years’ to people with a five-thousand-year history.
‘That’s history,’ he snapped. ‘It’s irrelevant. We’re no longer Chinese.’
‘Don’t you read and write Chinese characters? Isn’t Taiwanese a dialect of Chinese?’ I persisted.
‘We loved being occupied by the Japanese,’ he shot back. ‘They’re polite, they’re nice. Not like the Chinese. I hate the Chinese.’
Taking a break from writing this chapter, I open the Sydney Morning Herald. There’s a story about architects that apply fengshui principles in their work and the Sydneysiders who commission them. The article offers tips like: ‘A curtain creates a barrier against traffic, excessive sun and cold.’ Another tip, illustrated by a picture of sixties retro-inspired table and chairs, suggests that ‘Rounded symmetrical furniture allows for a smooth flow of chi.’
Among her many other accomplishments, my old friend Nancy Berliner is an expert on Chinese furniture. She curated the stunning exhibition ‘Beyond the Screen: Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries’ at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I looked through the detailed exhibition catalogue. With the exception of the odd incense table or stool, most of the furniture was square or rectangular.
On Saturday, Hou taught a master class in fengshui to about half a dozen private students, including a beautician, a businessman and a lawyer. The students’ kit included one of Hou’s books on fengshui reading, photocopied hexagrams and a compass. His lecture ranged from Babylonian astronomy, to physics, to the dangers of living too near to radio transmitters towers, and Confucius’s injunctions against incest. Like the rest of the class, I was swept away in the flow of Hou’s words, only occasionally wondering at his logic.
Then, the fax machine pinged and trilled. Hou stopped talking and we all looked over at it. My flatmate had finally gotten around to sending through the map of our flat.
‘How’s that for timing?’ I joked.
‘Good, good. Really good,’ Hou answered. He made a few quick calculations and showed the map to the class. My bed was in the right place for health, wealth and happiness. No worries there. The position of my flatmate’s bed, however, was potentially disastrous for his career and love life. His bed ought to be, hmm, where our bathroom was. But all was not lost on the fengshui front: Hou declared that if my flatmate kept the bathroom clean, airy and bright, everything would be fine. If he didn’t, in addition to jobs and relationships mucking up, he’d get respiratory problems and people would talk about him behind his back. It occurred to me to get this in writing.
THE road to Dragon Village was not an easy one even in the year 2000. The tiny white van with its bald front tyres and rag-tied axles slipped and slid up the narrow and only partially paved mountain road from Wushan, now on the right-hand side, now on the left. It veered to avoid trucks laden with coal and braked for old women with bamboo poles balanced on their shoulders, as well as for the occasional ox. I dug my fingernails into my boyfriend Tim’s arm every time we seemed to be in danger of careering right off the edge and down what in some places was a thousand-metre drop. There were no guard rails. An Ge, Hou Dejian’s photographer friend who’d accompanied him and Hou Guobang to the village in 1988, laughed at my nervousness. ‘The road’s much improved from that time,’ he assured me.
In his early fifties, An Ge retained a boyish enthusiasm for life that was infectious. His stories, the amused patience with which he taught Tim to sing the first verse of ‘The East Is Red’, his lovely way with people we met on the road and his tipsy renderings of arias from the revolutionary model opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy made him a superb travelling companion for the ten days we were together. He told us how as a young boy he’d been chosen to hand a bouquet of flowers to the visiting Vietcong leader Ho Chi Minh but was so shy he ran off immediately afterwards. I could see why he and Hou had got along so brilliantly.
Our party also included two of Hou Dejian’s relatives, a middle-aged woman called Hou Deying and a younger woman Xiaoyin. Xiaoyin was the younger sister of Xiaoyan, whom I’d known when she worked as Hou’s maid in Beijing in 1984, after he first moved to Double Elms. Xiaoyan hadn’t slept for two nights out of excitement at seeing me again. I felt humbled by this, as by many other expressions of hospitality and generosity that we were to experience with the Hou clan.
An Ge, Tim and I had met up with Hou Deying, Xiaoyin and Xiaoyan in the ancient walled Yangtze-side city of Jingzhou, in Hubei Province, the one to which Hou Guobang had hoped to move in 1989. After a day of touring Jingzhou, we boarded a boat heading up the Yangtze. Third-class was a roiling stew of sweaty bodies, eight-person cabins, floors slippery with spit and fruit peel and a pervasive stench of urine. There was no access to the bow or to the moderately hygienic dining room that served the more expensive end of the boat. I upgraded our entire party to second-class.
After two nights sailing up a latte-coloured river through some of the most magnificent gorges in the world, we arrived at Wushan. The following morning we set out in our hired van, whose driver was another distant relation. As the van struggled up the mountain, Hou Deying recalled the poverty of her youth in the village, fighting back tears. Xiaoyin, the most self-effacing woman I’d ever met, seemed only to concentrate on making herself small so that the rest of us could feel comfortable in the cramped confines of the vehicle, pressed up against each other and our bags.
The mountain was steep and yet thickly planted with crops wherever there was a square centimetre or two of arable land. There were corn, sweet potato, tomato, peanuts, beans, pumpkins, tea, sunflowers, chilli peppers, cabbage and tobacco.
We were nearly six hours on the perilous, boulder-strewn road. Coming around one corner on the right side of the road, we met a motorcycle head on. The driver jerked the wheel, the motorcyclist swerved and we avoided a collision. We goggled as the motorcyclist, thrown off balance, fell over into a ditch. ‘Ting che! Ting che!’ I cried. ‘Stop the car!’ But we sailed on. Tim and I were horrified, then furious with the others for not stopping to see that the motorcyclist was all right. They insisted it was better to drive on, because, as the driver put it, ‘if we stopped, there’d have been no end to it. He’d have wanted money. He’d have wanted us to take him to hospital.’
‘But what if he needed to go to hospital?’ I exploded.
‘He’s okay. He stood up,’ Hou Deying pointed out.
I blew out my cheeks with exasperation and translated the discussion for Tim, who was still flabbergasted that we hadn’t stopped.
The debate continued until, like the motorcyclist, it wobbled and fell into a ditch of cross-cultural misunderstanding and we moved on to other, more neutral topics.
I wondered what Hou would have done. I’d like to think that the humanist and activist in Hou would have insisted on them stopping. Yet Chinese reality had a way of over-riding such principles. I made a note to myself to ask Hou when I saw him next.
The village announced itself unceremoniously with a scattering of houses alongside the dirt road and up and down the mountainside. Facing the magnificent view of majestic, rugged peaks were a tiny, dusty shop, and a small centre for the collection and weighing of tobacco leaves for sale to the government, to which peasants came walking in ones and twos with overflowing baskets of leaf strapped to their bent and straining backs. The vegetation was thick and lush, deciduous trees and bamboo growing everywhere.
The van stopped in front of a simple two-storey concrete house with a primitive noodle factory occupying the ground floor. We passed through the room with the flour mill and noodle press, fragrant with the ribbons of drying noodles that caught the dim light in an improbably romantic manner. The stairs led to the lounge, makeshift kitchen and bedrooms. The house and noodle factory belonged to Wang Anping and Hou
Yongming, who lived there with their young son. Wang and Hou gave up their room to Tim and me, and the others— including the driver and An Ge—were given other rooms. It was unclear where the family would sleep—I think they took cot beds up to the roof.
Hou’s grandfather Hou Shangmei’s old house in Dragon Village, where his father Hou Guobang was born and raised.
The scenery was so beautiful and the village so isolated that it was hard to imagine how the terrors of revolution and land reform, when Hou Dejian’s grandfather was killed and his grandmother tortured, had even reached it. I stood for a long while in front of the house where Hou Shangmei and his family had lived, the house where Hou Guobang was born. It was occupied by another family now, but they kindly invited us in to have a look around. I marvelled that this modest house, only slightly grander than the others around it, and hardly more luxurious, with its tamped-dirt and concrete floors and dimly lit rooms, had helped to qualify Hou Shangmei’s widow, Hou’s grandmother, as an enemy of the people. As with all the other houses we visited in the village, dried corn and strings of chilli hung from the eaves and piled up on the slate tiles of the roof. Squealing piglets ran about, scattering the chickens in the dusty courtyard, and an old woman sat quietly in one of the back rooms next to her coffin (her insurance for a proper burial). The toilet, as with all the houses of the village, was a pit dug into the floor of the pigsty, over which you squatted while the pigs snorted and grunted just over the low mudbrick wall.
Here and there we’d come across a black buffalo being led into the fields or tethered to a tree. The crops grew richly here, and another relative, Hou Dejiao, showed us how they’d planted flowers too— ‘just for their beauty’—a luxurious use of land indeed. The village had grown more prosperous in the ten years since Hou Dejian’s last visit, everyone agreed, once the economic reforms had truly settled in.
My question if Hou Dejian’s relationship to the village had helped them met with shrugs, though Hou Deying claimed that part of the paved section of the road up to the village had been laid in his honour. Still, the village was not a wealthy place—people had enough to eat, and the children all went to school, but the villagers remained cash poor. Later, Hou Yongming would take us to Hou Shangmei’s grave, with the new and elaborate stone paid for by Hou’s brother Dewei, who had made several trips to the village in recent years.
Dragon Village. It’s hard to imagine the terrors of revolution and land reform, when Hou’s grandfather was killed and his grandmother tortured, reaching this beautiful and isolated place.
Hou Dekang, ‘Old Man Kang’ was the family elder. Shrunken, brown and leathery, with small, bright eyes, he was also a chain-smoker who seemed to have smoked a hole right through his stained teeth where he clamped his cigarettes and whose tar-and-nicotine-stained lungs rattled with every breath he took. Old Man Kang wore a worn Mao suit and the traditional wraparound headgear. His house was a short walk from Hou Yongming’s place, down a narrow path through crops and bush. Old Man Kang was nearly deaf and spoke with a thick Sichuanese accent, so my conversations with him were conducted with Xiaoyin as intermediary.
‘Please tell me the story about Hou Shangmei and the bandits,’ I said. The old man turned to Xiaoyin.
‘TELL HER ABOUT HOU SHANGMEI AND THE BANDITS!’ she shouted into his ear.
He replied something that sounded to me like ‘Hou Shangmei was the king of the bandits.’ Xiaoyin turned to me and shouted in my ear, ‘HOU SHANGMEI WAS THE KING OF THE BANDITS!’ Then she realised what she’d done and giggled.
According to Old Man Kang, Hou Dejian’s grandfather had gone to the temple, not to run away from the spirit warriors, but to practise his kungfu as well as black magic so that he could be a bigger, badder bandit than the rest. The story completely contradicted Hou’s father’s account. Later, gazing across at the mountain opposite where the temple had been, I considered the fact that Hou Shangmei, in Hou Guobang’s version, was supposed to have hidden out there because he couldn’t run as fast as his brothers who worked in the fields. I figured it would take a whole day to get there if you went down the mountain we were on to the valley, crossed the river and then climbed up the slope with the temple; if you went the long way, it would be, well, even longer. I put my money on Old Man Kang’s version.
There was another question I needed to clear up. Dragon Village, Long Cun (‘loong tswoon’), sounds in Chinese, particularly to Sichuanese ears, just like nong cun, the generic term for rural village. I cottoned onto the fact that something was getting lost in translation when someone answered my question about Dragon Village by saying ‘Which Dragon Village? There are so many Dragon Villages’ or rather ‘Which village? There are so many villages.’ I picked up a stick and wrote the character for dragon in the dirt. ‘The long,’ I said, ‘of Longde chuanren, Heirs of the Dragon.’
‘Ah.’
‘Er, isn’t this Dragon Village?’
‘This is Moon-in-Pond Village.’
All this way and I’d come to the wrong village. But hold on. Hou Yongming had taken me to the house in which Hou Guobang was born and to Hou Shangmei’s grave. There were Hous everywhere. It had to be the right village. I have often had the sense in China of the slipperiness of facts. I needed to grasp this one. Old Man Kang, when he finally understood the question—‘Nong cun?’ ‘Long cun.’ ‘Nong cun?’ ‘LONG CUN!’ ‘Oh, Long cun’—explained that Moon-in-Pond Village is the post-revolutionary name for what used to be called Dragon Village. Phew.
Interviewing Old Man Kang was a challenge and a half. I realised that I didn’t really need to pin down all the details of Hou Guobang’s Dragon Village tales—their importance to Hou Dejian, and therefore to me, transcended mere factuality.
Gladys and Xianyi. Of all Hou’s mainland friends, he missed them and An Ge the most.
Besides, Old Man Kang had a mission of his own. He’d seen Tim sketch the driver and Hou Dejiao after dinner at Hou Yongming’s place the evening before. He wanted Tim to do a portrait of him, large format, in charcoal. Hou Dejiao’s family cleared their table and weighted down the sheets of paper with cobs of corn and Hou Dejiao’s wife squatted in the dirt outside to burn sticks for charcoal. As Tim sketched with charcoal, pencil and pastels, everyone gathered round to watch. Hou Deying whispered to me that this would be the old man’s funeral portrait. It was a tradition to use such a drawing instead of a photograph. Tim felt very honoured and moved to be asked to do this. Afterwards, we followed Old Man Kang home in a small procession, carrying the portrait.
We’d have liked to stay longer in the village. It was so enjoyable getting to know these lovely people. We admired their crops, tasted their delicious homemade bacon, and squatted outside the yellow mud huts over games scratched in the dirt with sticks and played with kernels of corn, watermelon seeds or stones as markers. Flat baskets of chillies and peanuts dried next to us in the sun.
After another night in Wushan, An Ge, Tim and I took our leave from Hou Deying and Xiaoyin and boarded another boat up the Yangtze. We spent a few more days on the river, admiring scenic spots which would be flooded once the giant Yangtze dam began its first stage of operation in 2003. At the Nationalists’ old wartime capital of Chongqing, we said a fond goodbye to An Ge, and flew on to Shanghai and Beijing.
Gladys Yang passed away in November 1999 at the age of eighty. When we visited Yang Xianyi in Beijing, I was filled with sadness to see him looking much diminished, his mischievous sparkle dimmed. Still drinking heartily, he hardly touched his food. I had a glimpse of the old Xianyi when he challenged Tim to an arm wrestling contest; Xianyi won, helped by his standing position and Tim’s terror that if he tried too hard he might break the old man’s bones.
By 2000, Beijing and Shanghai boasted a number of live music venues, as well as numerous dance clubs with DJs and even an underground, ecstasy-based rave scene. There were many new names among the top bands and singers—but a few old familiars as well. We were passing a CD shop in Beijing when I stopped
to listen to the song pumping out onto the street. Tim wrinkled his nose. ‘God, what is that music?’
I said, ‘That’s Luo Dayou.’
He looked at me in disbelief. ‘But I thought you said he was good. And that he was rock. That’s not rock.’
I shrugged. It was the music I listened to in my twenties. It was music made by a friend. Even if it was daggy, I loved it. I went into the shop and bought the CD.
‘Luo Dayou just played a stadium concert in Shanghai, did you know?’ the shop attendant mentioned indifferently.
We heard Cheng Lin was back in Beijing and performing. Ah Xian had told me that on a visit he’d recently made to Beijing, he saw Cheng Lin on a television talk show, discussing her latest home decorations.
Tim and I went to Double Elms to have a look at Hou’s old flat. I was curious to know who was living there now. Not only couldn’t we find the flat, but we could barely find Double Elms. The whole United Front compound had been demolished and a new shopping-residential-office complex erected on the site.
Back in Australia, I called Hou in Taipei to chat and tell him about the trip. We talked about how delightful An Ge was. Hou said he missed him and Yang Xianyi most of all his mainland friends.
Remembering Tim’s reaction to Luo Dayou’s music, I mentioned it to Hou.
‘I saw Dayou the other day,’ he told me. ‘First time in years.’
‘Really?’ I think that some perverse part of me was hoping for a climactic reunion, or argument that would provide a final, thrilling anecdote. ‘What happened?’
‘Not much,’ Hou said. ‘It was at a friend’s wedding banquet. I walked across the room to speak to someone at another table, and while I was talking to him, I suddenly noticed Dayou sitting next to him.’
‘And?’
‘Oh, we said hello.’
