The Phoenix Years

by Madeleine O'Dea

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Madeleine O’Dea 2016

  Excerpt from ‘The Answer’ by Bei Dao, translated by Bonnie S. McDougall, from The August Sleepwalker, copyright ©1988 by Bei Dao, translation copyright © 1988, 1990 by Bonnie S. McDougall. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and Carcanet Press Ltd.

  Excerpt from ‘I am a poet’ by Mang Ke, translated by Bruce Gordon Doar, from Today magazine, issue 1, 1978, copyright © 1978 by Mang Ke, translation copyright © 2016 by Bruce Gordon Doar. Reprinted by permission of Mang Ke.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760291259

  eISBN 9781952534812

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Philip Campbell Design

  Cover image: Sheng Qi, My Left Hand, Me (AKA Memories, Me), C-print, 2000.

  For John Brennan

  and

  Hugh O’Dea

  (1962–2003),

  with love

  CONTENTS

  A note on Chinese names

  ONE Beijing 1986

  TWO I do not believe!

  THREE The Stars

  FOUR Very heaven

  FIVE A terrible beauty

  SIX Nothing to my name

  SEVEN Whose Utopia?

  EIGHT Beijing welcomes you!

  NINE Isn’t something missing?

  TEN Amnesia and memory

  ELEVEN The people and the republic

  Dramatis personae

  Timeline

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  A NOTE ON CHINESE NAMES

  Chinese names consist of a family name and a personal name.

  The family name is placed before the personal name: thus Xi Jinping’s family name is Xi and his personal name is Jinping.

  In the index to this book, Chinese people’s names can be found by looking up the family name.

  A guide to the pronunciation of each significant Chinese name in the book can be found beside its listing in ‘Dramatis personae’.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BEIJING 1986

  The meeting had not been easy to arrange.

  I had told him I would call him, forgetting for a moment how hard that would be. Of course he didn’t have a private phone—who did in China back then? Wryly he gave me the number of one of the ‘public phones’ at the end of his street. They were flimsy handsets perched on rickety tables outside storefronts and kiosks. You could use them for a few cents, and if you were a local you could receive calls on them, too, as long as the person who answered was willing to go down the alley to fetch you. They were just as likely to hang up, though, especially if the caller was a foreigner.

  After a week of listening to the line go dead I was ready to give up, but on my final try I heard a grunt of assent and the sound of the phone clattering onto a table. Then, as I waited, the sounds of the street: random scraps of conversation I couldn’t understand, a bicycle bell, a tubercular cough. And then it was him. We arranged to meet in two days’ time.

  It was February 1986, the Year of the Tiger and the eighth year of China’s great experiment in ‘opening up and reform’. In December 1978 paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had begun liberalising the Chinese economy, loosening the chokehold of collective farming on the agricultural sector, allowing a few green shoots of private enterprise, and inching open the door to Western investment.

  It was an experiment that over succeeding decades would lift more than half a billion people out of poverty, transform lives and make China the second-largest economy in the world; but on Beijing’s bitterly cold streets that winter signs of change were still few. People hunkered down in padded army-surplus greatcoats and caps with the flaps turned down, like de-mobbed soldiers. The coats came in two colours, army green or navy blue, with brown fake fur trim and leather-look buttons. I chose the blue. I had bought a pink puffer jacket at Beijing’s state-run Friendship Store on my arrival in January 1986, but discarded it as soon as I could. China was embracing change, it was true, but out of doors people still practised the art of blending in.

  It was indoors that things were changing. Behind its age-old grey façade, Beijing was opening up.

  I first met him at a party at the Friendship Hotel, a sprawling compound in the west of the city where China housed what it liked to call its ‘foreign experts’. The place had been built for the Soviet advisers who poured into China after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. But the two Communist behemoths had quarrelled and split in the 1960s, and now the hotel buzzed with Westerners—French, Italian, American, Canadian, British, Australian, New Zealanders—drawn in by Deng Xiaoping’s open-door policy.

  The experts were people who had (or claimed to have) skills the country needed: teachers, technical specialists, business advisers, and a whole United Nations’ worth of ‘polishers’, who laboured to smooth out the clotted language of translated texts in foreign-language propaganda magazines like China Reconstructs, or in the mind-numbing ‘news’ items issued hourly from the New China News Agency (Xinhua). I was writing for The Australian Financial Review at the time, but, unlike other foreign journalists who were housed alongside diplomats in the centre of the city, I was lucky enough to be living with the experts, who worked side by side with Chinese colleagues and whose Friendship Hotel was just streets away from the country’s leading universities.

  In the 1980s the Chinese authorities did everything they could to keep foreigners and locals apart. The compounds for diplomats and journalists were strictly policed, and any Chinese person gaining entry had their identity card checked, recorded and passed back to the authorities—a big deterrent to casual contact. In theory, the same was true for the Friendship Hotel, but there was a whiff of anarchy about everything that happened there, and with the least bit of sangfroid a young Chinese walking arm in arm with a foreigner could enter the gates with anonymity intact. A Westerner in a taxi could ferry a whole carload of Chinese friends into the grounds without trouble.

  By the time I arrived in January 1986, the Friendship Hotel was at the centre of Beijing’s burgeoning bohemia: there were no rules about who could talk to whom; there were no off-limit topics; and a Chinese person who hung around after the sun went down on a Saturday could be drawn into the hotel’s most celebrated attraction: a Western-style party. You didn’t need an invitation, you just shouldered your way into the room, along with aspiring artists, writers, poets, musicians, students, teachers, experts, journalists and diplomats, to drink Beijing Beer and brightly coloured alcoholic punch, to dance to eclectic mix tapes on a Sony Walkman hooked up to cheap speakers, and to discuss anything from the ‘necessity of Nietzsche’ to the sexiness of the Chinese women’s volleyball team, while falling quickly and sometimes falling hard for whoev
er you found yourself drinking with.

  We were at the halfway mark of a decade that would take us from the dawn of Open China to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989, but at that moment no one knew where the limits would be or where this heady road was taking us.

  On that Saturday at the Friendship Hotel, it was his girlfriend I noticed first. She caught my eye with an abbreviated striptease that took her from army greatcoat to skinny black ski-suit to mini dress in just two fluid movements. She wore the only kind of stockings available in China back then, the ones that stopped disappointingly at the knee—but the black stilettos she took out of her bag made up for that.

  Her boyfriend wore his bag with the strap diagonally across his body and held tightly to his side. He was carrying something more precious to him than a change of shoes: it was a collection of photographic slides. He was a painter, and these were images of his work.

  This was how I got to see Chinese contemporary art for the first time, on transparencies drawn one by one from a battered plastic sleeve and held up to a dim ceiling light at the Friendship Hotel. I remember peering at the first image, preparing to be kind. Within the tiny cardboard frame figures floated free—male and female, naked, untethered from ground and sky. These weren’t recycled classical images or the socialist realism of Chinese official art, but something personal to the man in front of me, with his longish hair and weathered skin, in his early twenties like me, yet seeming much older and younger at the same time. People were dancing to Talking Heads’ ‘Life During Wartime’. It was our anthem that year, but as I looked at these images I seemed to hear the words for the first time: as David Byrnes said, this wasn’t just a party and we weren’t just fooling around. I could see dozens of strange groupings around the room, discussing The Interpretation of Dreams, and Bob Dylan, Astro Boy and Kurosawa, ‘Misty Poetry’, and the banned ideas of a Taiwanese writer called Bo Yang who had skewered what he called ‘The Ugly Chinaman’.

  You could see the young diplomat falling for the aspiring punk rocker, the Californian gym instructor captivating the seemingly stitched-up cadre from the think tank, the poet looking on indulgently as his wife schemed her escape to the West with the foreign expert she’d just met, the scholar gratefully slipping into his bag a still-banned book about Western economics. You could see how the ground was shifting under Chinese society, how changes were beginning to play out that the country’s leaders had never planned for and might not be able to control, no matter how desperately they tried.

  But on the afternoon I arranged to meet him, as my taxi carried me along Chang’an (the Avenue of Eternal Peace), the capital’s main artery, the city seemed as placid as ever. Around us streams of bicycles flowed along, and as I passed the Minzu Hotel, its clock tower blared out, as it did on the hour every day, a plaintive, synthesised version of ‘The East is Red’, the hymn of praise to Chairman Mao that every Chinese citizen knew:

  The east is red, the sun rises.

  From China arises Mao Zedong.

  He strives for the people’s happiness,

  Hurrah! He is the people’s great saviour!

  We passed directly under the eyes of Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen gate, before turning south into unknown territory and stopping on the fringe of the old neighbourhood of Xuanwumen where he waited for me.

  He led me along a dog-legging route through the fifteenth-century alleyways that were the lacework holding old Beijing together. Hutongs, as they were called, defined China’s old capital, their grey stone walls pierced at intervals by weathered wooden doors that opened onto four-sided courtyard houses. Each of these once housed a single extended family, but now they were run by Communist Party neighbourhood committees who allocated every square metre with relentless efficiency.

  We walked past all the signs of the communal life of his neighbourhood—heaps of cabbages preserved under quilts in the winter cold, the public bathhouse with its smell damped by the chill air, a man selling tomatoes and scallions from a cloth spread on the ground.

  We stepped through a wooden entranceway into a cramped courtyard. Tucked into the far corner was his home, a single undivided space where he could cook, sleep, and paint. Water came from the public bathhouse up the street. For warmth there was a coal-burning black metal stove which flued to the outside. At the right of the room was a tiny kitchen area, just a bench with two gas burners. Two large enamel basins stood on the floor, one filled with water, the other with dishes, both decorated with the symbol for Double Happiness. The single light, a bulb on a wire strung across the ceiling from the outside, was already on. The bed was pushed up against the far wall, converted by a coloured cloth into a day sofa, and flanked by a high shelf on which stood a pile of art books and newspapers, a stuffed toy and a small Italian flag. A finished canvas hung above the bed, while a stack of others leant against the wall under a shelf. Beside them stood a table crowded with tubes of oil paint, brushes in a jar, and a piece of board serving as a palette.

  A minute after we arrived, his girlfriend returned with two bottles of Beijing Beer and a pocket-sized bottle of the lethal Chinese spirit called Erguotou. We drank our beer from glasses emblazoned with the logo of the Coca-Cola Company and with the ideograms for its Chinese name: Kekou-Kele. Every foreign brand that launches in China seeks name characters that are the perfect blend of euphony and good fortune, and Coca-Cola had nailed it: It’s tasty, said the name, and it’s fun.

  I sat in one of the two chairs and faced the bed, studying the canvas on the wall. It showed three elongated figures, rising through the painting, their pale backs to us, their dark heads bowed. They seemed to have just left the ground, and were half climbing, half floating up a wall of russet-red paint. They were caught in the act of breaking free from Earth, but seemed lost, too, as if drifting into outer space. My friend sat smoking with his left hand under his right to catch the ash, while his girlfriend shared their single ashtray with me.

  Thirty years have passed since that evening but I can still feel the warmth of that room, smell the coal dust and oil paint, taste the watery beer and strong cigarettes, remember the excitement of being somewhere that, as a journalist, I wasn’t expected to be. By the end of that evening I knew I had stumbled upon something that would be important to me, something that had previously been no more than an interesting sidelight to what I had come to China to write about.

  I was there for the ‘big story’: how the opening up of China was revolutionising its economy; the growth of free enterprise; the smashing of the ‘iron rice bowl’ of assigned jobs and a home for life that had previously protected workers; and, most of all, the super-charged Chinese version of the Industrial Revolution which was transforming the lives and landscapes of hundreds of millions of people.

  As development picked up speed, I was at times breathless at the scope and scale of the changes I was privileged to witness. Looking back, though, it is obvious that what was happening beneath the surface, in people’s private lives, was just as revolutionary.

  My two new friends were bohemians, but they were also pioneers. They had chosen to live the most marginal of existences. By dropping out of school and work they had cast themselves adrift from the web of support systems that came with a designated ‘work unit’—housing, healthcare, pensions, a recognised place in the world. And they were unmarried, living in what was then an almost unheard-of arrangement that drew official disapproval and a measure of real risk. Just a few years before, in 1983, elements of the Communist Party, spooked by the bourgeois notions that were slipping through the economic open door, had launched an official campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’. It was mercifully short but brutal, arbitrary and frightening while it lasted. One never knew when another deadly ideological outburst like it might occur again, turning lovers into criminals and artists into saboteurs. And yet here were my friends, determined to make a big life for themselves in this tiny room.

  They weren’t alone. All across the city there were rooms like this, some more co
mfortable, some less; brightly coloured private worlds where people drank and discussed, read, painted and wrote poetry, and dreamt up ways to burrow into the cracks that were opening up in society, in pursuit of a new world.

  The economic transformation I was following was momentous. But what was happening in those small rooms was momentous, too. It may have seemed just personal, a choice to drop out of school and paint pictures about feelings, or to wear a miniskirt and take up smoking, or to set up together as an unmarried couple and stake a claim to a private life away from the meddling of China’s byzantine systems of social control, but the sum of such individual choices can drive group politics more effectively than public propaganda, just as the architects of the anti-spiritual pollution campaign feared. Three years after I sat in their home drinking beer and Erguotou, one of my two new friends would be helping wheel a plaster replica of the Statue of Liberty into Tiananmen Square at the height of the 1989 democracy protests, while the other watched events unfold from self-imposed exile in Australia.

  When that moment came, China’s government seemed perched on a precipice. How had it come to this? The truth is, Deng’s reforms were a calculated gamble driven by dire necessity. In 1978, 30 years after the founding of the People’s Republic, China was still mired in poverty. Early economic gains by the new Communist government were destroyed by Mao’s fantasy of a Great Leap Forward in industrial production, which plunged the country into a famine that killed between 36 and 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. Then, still staggering from this blow, Chinese society was torn apart by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when the economy was all but paralysed, universities closed, millions were forcibly displaced, and at least 1.7 million people died, either directly through persecution or by starvation. By 1978 China’s per capita GDP was no bigger than Afghanistan’s and one sixth that of Brazil. Most galling of all, Japan, which had humiliated China for 40 years and invaded it in 1937 before crashing to a defeat that left it a smoking ruin in 1945, was now the world’s second-largest economy.