by Linda Jaivin
‘And?’
‘We exchanged a few polite words, that was about it. Then I went back to my table. Didn’t see him again.’
I wanted to show Hou the manuscript, so in February 2001, I made another trip to Taiwan. For the first time in half a century, the island was no longer under Nationalist rule. The Democratic Progressive Party candidate, former Taipei mayor Chen Shui-bien, had won the presidency in the 2000 elections—helped by the fact that James Soong, following a rancorous split with the Nationalist Party, ran as an independent, splitting the Nationalist vote. (James Soong went on to form a new party, the People First Party.) The result was so shocking for the old guard that no one told Chiang Kai-shek’s widow, Madame Soong Mei-ling, who lived in New York, anything about it for fear of spoiling her 103rd birthday.
The Communists were no more happy with the idea of a non-Nationalist government on Taiwan than Chiang’s widow would have been. Well aware of the DPP’s political leanings, they turned up the volume on their threats to attack the island militarily should they go so far as to declare independence; in fact, at one point, they’d threatened to go to war if Chen was elected. By 2000, the mainland’s population was 1.3 billion, compared with 22 million on the island, yet most military analysts concurred that China would have been hard pressed to mount a sustainable military attack on Taiwan. It wouldn’t be too long, however, before they’d have enough short-range missiles and submarines to enforce a blockade.
In June 2000, President Chen proposed a summit with Chinese President Jiang Zemin along the lines of the recent historic meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas. Jiang refused, saying that any negotiations had to be on the basis that there was only one China. On the other hand, by the end of the year, Beijing had grudgingly accepted a Taipei initiative for limited direct shipping links between the offshore islands of Jinmen and Matsu and the mainland. And the Taiwan cabinet formally ended the ban of more than fifty years on direct contacts with China, though that was really just a recognition of the status quo. Perhaps Hou was right in his predictions that 2001 would be the beginning of the ‘final stage’.
One day when I was there, Hou made his weekly appearance in the chat room of the Heirs, Inc. website—a website that, they told me, got thousands of hits a day. They’d put a ceiling of thirty people in the chatroom at any one time and it filled up instantly. ‘Should I get married?’ went one query. The chatter had flipped a coin six times. Hou glanced at the result, named the hexagram, gave a quick interpretation of its meaning but added, ‘If you need to ask me this, I’d say, not yet.’
After it was over, he looked at me with an expression of dismay, the corners of his lips tugged so far down they nearly reached his jawbone. He clearly wasn’t enjoying this anymore. That evening, we went to a little restaurant in his neighbourhood for dinner. ‘I’m closing down this fengshui business soon,’ he told me over a meal of stewed meatballs and cabbage stir-fried with chilli and bacon.
‘What’s your plan then?’
‘I’m working on a Chinese voice-recognition program that takes into account regional dialectical variations.’
‘I thought you were computer-illiterate.’
‘I am. But I’m going to have two assistants.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘You know how I grew up in the juancun, surrounded by all those old soldiers from everywhere in China? I heard all sorts of accents and dialects and yet, even as a kid, I never had any trouble understanding them, or even imitating them. What the guy in charge of the project has said is, work out how to give your ears to the computer.’
I had that feeling I often experienced with Hou of being surprised and slightly confused—how did he find these backers, these jobs? I realised that the surprise was more to do with my tendency, after years of describing Hou in a few words (‘pop songwriter, defector, dissident, fengshui master’), of putting him in a box. Why didn’t I ever say writer? If you count his fengshui guides, he’d written more books than I had. Or screenwriter and occasional actor? Entrepreneur, even?
He told me that he was still taking antidepressants for the panic attacks that had begun two years earlier. They had side effects, and he was feeling dispirited and listless.
‘What causes the panic attacks?’
‘Any kind of public appearance. Lots of things. I don’t know. I think they must have something to do with Tiananmen and what came afterwards.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘What do you think I should do? You know, after the software project. What do you see me doing next?’
I shrugged. ‘I honestly couldn’t say. But I expect you’ll surprise me.’
‘I feel like a soldier without a battlefield. I need something to fight for. I don’t care if I get beat up as a result.’
‘What war do you want to fight?’
‘That,’ Hou sighed, drawing on a cigarette, ‘is exactly the problem. I don’t know what to fight for anymore.’
‘Do you think you’ll write more songs?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not banned here anymore, but there’s a new problem—Taiwan music’s biggest marketplace is the mainland. So as long as I’m still banned there, no one here wants to know about me.’ We laughed at the irony. ‘Besides, pop music is for younger people. I’m too old. I don’t even know what’s going on anymore. You know,’ he continued, ‘I think I’ve figured out what one of my problems is. Because I’ve always insisted on being the person I wanted to be, I never got around to doing the things I wanted to do.’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Now? Produce television programs.’
Of course.
Every day, I went to Hou’s office at one or two in the afternoon—just after he’d got up. Working sometimes till eleven at night, with a break for dinner, I verbally translated the entire draft of this book into Chinese for him. He updated me on his family’s situation. His mother had moved to Sichuan province with her second husband, and his brother Junjun was continuing his medical studies in Guangzhou. Dewei had remarried and was happy, and his sister Xiaoling was travelling the world as a tour guide, independent as ever.
Following the death of waipo, his grandfather, Luo Bingqian, had been very lonely. In the early nineties he moved back to his home province of Hunan, where he was reunited with his brother, who spent thirty years in Communist prisons for having served, like Luo, in the Nationalist Air Force. When Luo Bingqian returns to Taiwan to collect his military pension, the ninety-two-year-old still talks to his grandson about overthrowing Communism.
I asked him about old friends as well. Most people were doing well. Shu Kuo-chih, whom I saw a lot of on that trip, was writing a travel book on the mainland. Sylvia Chang was living in Hong Kong and directing films. She’d had a starring role in Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman. When I was in Taipei, the Taiwan papers were full of news about Ang Lee’s many Oscar nominations for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and my old flatmate, Fang, told me he once shared a place with Ang Lee in the States. The director of Papa Can You Hear Me Sing, Yu Kanping, who’d commissioned ‘Song of the Junkman’ from Hou in 1983, had moved to an Aboriginal community in the east of Taiwan to devote himself to making documentaries about Aboriginal life and culture. Edward Yang had taken the prize for best director at Cannes in 2000 for his film A One and a Two, which had been produced by Hou’s old manager, Yu Weiyan.
Yu had since moved to Shanghai to do business, and another friend of Hou’s in Taiwan, Yan—‘what are you, a foreigner?’—Zhuang, had bought a house there in the hope he could move there one day with his family as well. In fact, so many Taiwan Chinese were living in Shanghai by 2001 that there were plans to open a school for their children there. Another member of the old Chaozhou Street gang was living in Beijing.
It was bizarre. When Hou went to the mainland in 1983, it was an unthinkable act, and many of the friends who’d been shocked to the core now lived there themselves. Hou wondered if he’d ever be allowed back. He h
ad a funny, I Ching-ish feeling about the year 2002. ‘It might happen then,’ he said.
As we went through his remarkable life and times, Hou visibly lightened up. It seemed to be acting as a catharsis. When we got to the end, he quoted a Chinese joke, in which there is a pun based on the fact that the phrase zhile can indicate either ‘straightened out’ or ‘worth it’. ‘I feel like the hunchback who was run over by a bus,’ Hou quipped. ‘Even if it kills me—zhile!’
The sole thing he asked to be removed from the book was an anecdote about Luo Dayou—what I’d considered a fairly harmless story from the wild old days of our early acquaintance, one Dayou and I had always told and retold ourselves—because he thought it might harm Dayou’s image. ‘Dayou cares about his image, you know,’ Hou said, seriously. I looked at Hou. Though still clearly tired and heavy in both body and soul, there was still that ethical core to him that not everyone had always been able to see. I agreed to remove the anecdote.
When I told him about the accident with the motorcycle on the road to Dragon Village, and that I’d wondered what he would have done, he replied without hesitation, ‘I’d have made them stop. Of course. And if the guy wanted money from us, well, I’d find it from somewhere. I always do.’ I smiled. I could picture him there with us, turning to me urgently. ‘Linda. How much cash do you have?’
In Taiwan in 2001, one of the hottest singers was a young man who’d grown up in New York called Wang Lihong (Lee Hom Wang). He had a number of hits. One of these, released the year before, was a cover of a song originally recorded by his uncle in 1980, when Wang Lihong was just an infant. His uncle, Li Jianfu, was in 2001 the CEO of Yahoo! in Asia. Wang Lihong added to the song a rap in English about a young Taiwan couple in love in New York, changed the last verse to include references to growing up abroad, and put a funky spin on the arrangements. The song took off like a rocket, and in some karaoke bars in Taiwan, had reached No. 1 in the ‘most requested’ list. It was called ‘Heirs of the Dragon’.
NOTES
1 ‘…an oppressed hero.’ Condensed and translated by the author from Hou Dejian, Huotouzi zhengzhuan, (The True Story of a Troublemaker), Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, Taipei, 1990, pp. 28–29.
2 ‘…come away with me?’ Translated in Geremie Barmé and John Minford eds, Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, Hill & Wang, New York, 1988, p. 400.
3 ‘…the greatest unease.’ Translated in Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, pp. 368–72.
4 ‘…a range of amps.’ See Paul David Friedlander, ‘Rocking the Yangtze: Impressions of Chinese Popular Music and Technology’, Popular Music and Society, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 1990.
5 ‘…tens of thousands.’ According to some reports, at times the crowds exceeded 100,000 people during that first week.
6 ‘…towards such repentance.’ Translated by Geremie Barmé in ‘Confession, Redemption, and Death: Liu Xiaobo and the Protest Movement of 1989’, in The Broken Mirror: China after Tiananmen, George Hicks ed., Longman, London, 1990, p. 71. Xu Wenli, who was paroled in 1993 after twelve years in prison, was sentenced again in 1998 to thirteen years in prison for his role in forming a new, democratic political party and ‘subverting state power’.
7 ‘…to no good.’ Many of the details in the account that follows are borrowed from Geremie Barmé’s ‘Beijing Days, Beijing Nights’, in The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces, Jonathan Unger ed., M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 1991, pp. 35–58.
8 ‘…Tiananmen Square itself.’ Translated in Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, Times Books, New York, 1992, pp. 68–69.
9 ‘…and no burial.’ See Zhang Liang, The Tiananmen Papers, Public Affairs, New York, 2001, p. 357. It is difficult to say whether the documents published in The Tiananmen Papers are entirely authentic, but the quote attributed to Wang Zhen probably isn’t too far off the mark—after all, they did send in the troops.
10 ‘…over ten-fold.’ Most observers credited the strike with reinvigorating the movement, though some reliable accounts— like Michael Fathers and Andrew Higgins’ Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking, the Independent in association with Doubleday, London, 1989—downplayed its effect.
11 ‘…“far off east” itself.’ The text of Jimmy Ngai’s ‘Tiananmen Days’ is translated in New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, pp. 74–97.
12 ‘…out to Hong Kong.’ The Avenue of Eternal Peace, the mini-series based on Nick’s novel that we were going to make in China, was later shot in Australia, the story re-set against the background of the 1989 protests. In it, a singer-student is shot on (a re-created) Tiananmen Square in front of his gay foreign lover after singing ‘Heirs of the Dragon’. (‘Ai ya!’ was Hou’s response to this.)
13 ‘…for Hou’s understanding.’ Hou gave this letter to an Australian diplomat for safekeeping. The diplomat, who was fluent in Chinese, and had read it himself, verified its existence to me but couldn’t remember where he’d put it.
14 ‘…the Australian embassy.’ Rashomon is a 1950 film by Akira Kurosawa in which four different versions of a crime are presented by four different narrators.
15 ‘…chief dissident back.’ Fang and his wife didn’t leave the US embassy until the summer of 1990, when they were sent into exile by the Chinese government.
16 ‘…interview Hou Dejian.’ The documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace opened the New York Film Festival in 1995 to enormous critical acclaim. It sparked controversy as well. Some student leaders, who’d spent their years in the west promoting themselves and the movement as uncomplicatedly heroic, were furious at the more complex and disturbing vision of events presented in the film. The Chinese government was equally displeased and tried—without success—to get the festival’s organisers to remove it from the program. Some other international festivals bowed to pressure, and cancelled screenings of the film.
17 ‘…“To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic”.’ A revised version of the article appears as a chapter in Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999, pp. 255–80.
18 ‘…of a finance company.’ Not their real names.
19 ‘…a younger woman Xiaoyin.’ I’m sure her name was Hou Deying. That’s what An Ge called her as well. Hou Dejian insists that the cousin with whom we travelled to Dragon Village is called Hou Dechen. If he’s right, I apologise!
FURTHER READING
Barmé, Geremie R., In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, 1999.
Barmé, Geremie R. and Jaivin, Linda eds, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, Times Books, New York, 1992.
Barmé, Geremie R. and Minford, John eds, Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, Hill & Wang, New York, 1988.
Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, trans. by Don J. Cohn and Jing Qing, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992.
Cao Xuegin, The Story of the Stone: The Dream of the Red Chamber vols 1–5, trans. by David Hawkes and John Minford, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973–86.
Deng Xiaoping, Fundamental Issues in Present-Day China, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1987.
Fathers, Michael and Higgins, Andrew, Tiananmen: The Rape of Peking, the Independent in association with Doubleday, London, 1989.
Hicks, George ed., The Broken Mirror: China after Tiananmen, Longman, London, 1990.
Jenner, W. J. F., The Tyranny of History: The Root of China’s Crisis, Allen Lane/Penguin Press, London, 1992.
Jones, Andrew F., Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music, Cornell University East Asia Program, Ithaca, New York, 1992.
Jose, Nicholas, Chinese Whispers: Cultural Essays, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, South Australia, 1995.
Kahn, Joseph F., ‘Better Fed than Red’, Esquire, September 1990.
Leys, Simon, The Burning Forest: Essays on Culture and Politics in Contemporary China, Paladin, London, 198
8.
Leys, Simon, Chinese Shadows, Viking Press, New York, 1977.
Liu Sola, Chaos and All That, trans. by Richard King, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1994.
Nathan, Andrew J., Chinese Democracy: The Individual and the State in Twentieth Century China, I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, London, 1986.
Rigger, Shelley, Politics in Taiwan, Routledge, New York, 1999.
Ryback, Timothy W., Rock around the Block: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990.
Sang Ye with Jose, Nicholas and Trevaskes, Sue, The Finish Line: A Long March by Bicycle through China and Australia, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1994.
Shen Tong with Yen, Marianne, Almost a Revolution, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1990.
Terzani, Tiziano, Behind the Forbidden Door, Allen & Unwin, London, 1986.
Unger, Jonathan ed., The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces, M. E. Sharpe, New York, 1991.
Wong, Jan, China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Anchor Books, Toronto, 1996.
Wu Cheng’en, Monkey, trans. by Arthur Waley, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970.
Zhang Liang, Nathan, Andrew J. and Link, Perry eds, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force against Their Own People—in Their Own Words, PublicAffairs, New York, 2001.
Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye, Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, Macmillan, London, 1987.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Australia Council provided me with a fellowship that enabled me to visit Dragon Village and to conduct my final series of interviews with Hou Dejian in Taiwan, as well as giving me time to focus on writing the book. I am extremely grateful for this support.
I also had the invaluable assistance of a residency at Varuna Writers’ Centre granted by the Eleanor Dark Foundation. The Varuna Writers’ Centre is my haven away from home and the director, Peter Bishop, has been unstinting in his support of this and all my previous books.
