The Monkey and the Dragon Read online

  THE MONKEY AND THE DRAGON

  Linda Jaivin worked and studied in Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China before settling in Sydney. Her novels include Eat Me, Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space, Miles Walker, You’re Dead and Dead Sexy. Together with Geremie Barmé she co-edited New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. Her other non fiction includes Confessions of an S & M Virgin, a collection of her journalism and essays.

  THE

  Monkey

  AND THE

  Dragon

  A TRUE STORY

  ABOUT FRIENDSHIP,

  MUSIC, POLITICS

  AND LIFE

  ON THE EDGE

  LINDA

  JAIVIN

  ILLUSTRATION SOURCES

  Every effort has been made to trace the owners of the original material quoted in this book. Where the attempt has been unsuccessful, the publishers would be pleased to hear from the author/publisher to rectify any omission. Most of the photographic material used here has come from Hou Dejian’s personal collection and grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce the following illustrations: calligraphy by Huang Miaozi; calligraphy by Geremie Barmé; Linda Jaivin; The Oriental Song and Dance Company 1962–1982; An Ge; AAP.

  The Text Publishing Company

  171 La Trobe Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Linda Jaivin 2001

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 2001

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Designed by Chong Weng-Ho

  Typeset in 12/17 Minion by Midland Typesetters

  Map by Tony Fankhauser

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Jaivin, Linda.

  The monkey and the dragon.

  Bibliography.

  ISBN 1 876485 91 4 (pbk.).

  1. Hou, Dejian. 2. Male singers - Taiwan - Biography. 3. Political activists - China - Biography. 4. Hou, Dejian - Exile - Taiwan. 5. Jaivin, Linda. 6. China - History - Tiananmen Square Incident, 1989. 7. China - Politics and government - 1976- . I. Title.

  782.42163092

  The author wishes to thank the Australia Council for its assistance with this project.

  Lovingly dedicated

  to

  Yang Xianyi

  Wu Zuguang

  Huang Miaozi

  and

  Yu Feng

  And the memory

  of

  Gladys Yang

  (1919–99)

  and

  Xin Fengxia

  (1931–98)

  CONTENTS

  MAP

  BROKEN CHINA

  RECOVERING THE MAINLAND

  TIANANMEN

  BOOK OF CHANGES

  •

  NOTES

  FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  And Harlequin…The Harlequin…

  the arch-improviser, the zany,

  trickster, master of the volteface…

  would forever strut in his

  variegated plumage, grin through

  his orange mask, tiptoe into

  bedrooms, sell nappies for the

  children of the Grand Eunuch,

  dance in the teeth of catastrophe…

  Mr Chameleon himself!

  BRUCE CHATWIN, Utz

  BROKEN

  CHINA

  THERE are many songs in this story. The one we were singing at the time of the accident was ‘Knock Three Times’ (on the ceiling if you want me). Hou Dejian, my new best friend, had just told me that it was the first western pop song he had ever learned, before anything by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. It was September 1981. We were in his car, inching along in one of Taipei’s infamous traffic jams.

  You could blame the traffic jam on the official myth that Taipei was only the temporary capital of the Republic of China. Once the Nationalist government on Taiwan overthrew the ‘Commie bandits’ on the mainland, it would re-settle there. If the Nationalists invested in major infrastructure like the metro Taipei so badly needed, that might imply that, after more than three decades of waiting to ‘recover the mainland’, they might be staying in Taiwan after all.

  So commuters in this humid and polluted city of more than two million people sweated in crowded buses, fanned themselves in the backs of taxis, or drummed their fingers on the dashboards of their cars. The brave manoeuvred their way through the chaos on motorbikes; the foolhardy rode pushbikes. Occasionally, a car or motorbike would break loose from the slow lane, mount the pavement and, scattering pedestrians, motor ahead for a while before plunging back onto the street.

  Hou and I were singing at the top of our lungs when we crunched into the side of an expensive sedan. ‘Shit!’ he exclaimed. ‘How much cash have you got?’

  Insurance wasn’t a regular feature of Taiwan life. It certainly wasn’t a feature of Hou’s. Neither was money. As he pulled over, I scrabbled in my purse. The fellow whose car we’d dented, thinking we were trying to get away, jumped out and ran towards us through the perilous traffic, his face choleric.

  ‘Got the money?’ Hou whispered.

  I waved a fistful of colourful Taiwan dollars at him.

  Apprehensively, we both stepped out of the car. Wrapping his right fist in his left hand and raising it in the traditional Chinese gesture of goodwill and reconciliation, Hou bobbed up and down as the man approached. ‘Duibuqi,’ Hou said nervously, an ingratiating, toothy smile stretched across his thin face. ‘I’m so sorry. Duibuqi, duibuqi, duibuqi. We’ll pay for the damage.’

  ‘Damn straight you’ll pay.’ No sooner had the man spoken than he did a double-take. His eyes widened, his jaw dropped. ‘You’re… you’re…you’re Hou Dejian!’ he cried.

  ‘Yes. I’m so sorry about your car. However much it costs.’ Hou snapped his fingers at me. ‘Linda. Money.’ I ignored him, mesmerised by the man’s transformation. His face was now wreathed in smiles, his eyes alight with excitement.

  ‘It really is you! Hou Dejian!’

  ‘Yes, and it’s all my fault. I’ll…’

  The man flapped his hand dismissively in the direction of his damaged car. ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it. It’s such an honour to meet you. Such an honour.’ He shook his head, as though amazed by his incredible luck. Then he whipped out his wallet. For a surreal moment, I thought he was going to pay us. ‘Here’s my card. Please call me sometime. I’d love to take you out for a meal.’ He looked at me as if he’d just noticed my presence. ‘Your friend too, of course.’

  When we were back on the road, Hou turned to me, his black eyebrows dancing. ‘How do you like that? We dent his car and he offers us a free meal.’

  We laughed so hard I thought we’d have another accident. When I caught my breath, I said accusingly, ‘You nearly cost me all my money, you know.’

  ‘What’s yours is mine. What’s mine is yours. Too bad I don’t have anything but my name.’ He smirked. ‘You have to admit, though, the name’s worth a bit.’

  I’d met Hou the previous month. The Taiwan pop song ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ was the soundtrack to Chinese life in the early eighties. In Hong Kong, where I worked for Asiaweek magazine, it played constantly on the radio, people chorused it at political demonstrations, and the Cantonese pals with whom I practised speaking Mandarin never tired of singin
g it. I’d even heard it broadcast over the loudspeakers on trains in the mainland, a welcome if surprising break in the program of self-congratulatory bulletins on the new economic reforms and patriotic tunes dedicated to the heroes of China’s recent border war with Vietnam.

  In the late seventies, when I was studying in Taiwan, the unofficial anthem had been the sentimental and soporific ‘Plum Blossoms’, sung by Taiwan’s queen of pop, Teresa Teng. ‘Plum Blossoms’ was supposed to evoke a national spirit which, like the winter-flowering plum tree, bloomed in adversity. All that flowered in me when I heard it was boredom.

  ‘Heirs of the Dragon’, by contrast, intrigued me. The lyrics were evocative and a little mysterious, the tune unusual but easy to sing. When I heard, in August 1981, that its composer was coming to Hong Kong for a concert, I tried to get a ticket, but the show was sold out. Then I learned that he would be giving a talk at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, and went along. I was interested to see that Hou Dejian was about my age (I was twenty-six, he was a year younger). He had lively dark eyes, an almost comically animated expression, thick messy black hair and a quirky, irreverent sense of humour. Throughout the session, he refused to play the tortured patriot, bemusing his earnest Hong Kong audience, who seemed fixated on the song’s nationalist theme, a theme I thought was a touch ambivalent. He made jokes that only I seemed to laugh at. He reminded me of the friends I hung out with when I lived in Taiwan a few years earlier.

  At the end of the session, I hovered uncertainly by the table where he was signing autographs. Not wanting to be one of those embarrassing people who assume that the affinity they feel for a public figure has to be mutual, I decided to leave. Just then, Hou looked up and caught my eye.

  ‘I really enjoyed your talk,’ I mumbled in Mandarin. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Guixing?’ He asked me my name, using the standard polite formula which literally translates as ‘your honourable surname?’

  My Chinese name was Jia Peilin. The expected answer is ‘Xing Jia,’ ‘my surname is Jia’. I folded my palm over my fist, and held it up in front of my face. ‘Bixing jia,’ I answered impishly, in the manner of an old-style gentleman. ‘My very humble surname is Jia.’

  Hou chuckled. ‘Don’t go,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll be finished soon.’ He went back to his fans, who stared at me, slack-jawed with envy.

  Sitting in the stairwell of the Arts Centre, Hou and I talked for hours. I can’t remember why we didn’t go and find a coffee shop. It was like we couldn’t wait to start talking. Once we did, it was as though we’d known each other forever. Finally, it was time for him to get ready for the concert. ‘Are you going to be there?’ he asked.

  ‘Couldn’t get a ticket.’

  It was Hou’s first trip to Hong Kong. He didn’t have a clue who to call to get me in. ‘Maybe we can meet later,’ he suggested.

  ‘Sure. Where are you staying?’

  ‘Some boring hotel. Where do you live?’

  The next day, Hou collected his gear, checked out of the hotel and moved into my flat. It seemed entirely natural to have one of the most famous Chinese singer-songwriters in the world, whom I’d just met, bunking down on the floor of my room.

  Hou and I were chatting at my place a few days later when I recalled something I’d heard at work. ‘You know the Taiwan air force pilot who defected to China last week?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear? This guy Huang Zhicheng was on a routine training mission over the Taiwan Strait when he ejected his co-pilot and flew to a military base in Fujian Province. Taiwan frogmen had to rescue the co-pilot from the sea.’

  Hou laughed. ‘He defected to China?’ People tended to flee communism, not the other way round.

  ‘Yeah, and he took one of those F-5F fighter planes with him. The Chinese authorities are over the moon. They get both a real-life defector and a brand-new, American-designed fighter plane to play with. I mentioned it because Huang Zhicheng has now appeared on Chinese TV singing “Heirs of the Dragon”.’

  Hou Dejian bared his teeth and scrunched up his eyes in a cartoon expression of dismay. ‘That song is out of control.’

  I ferreted through a pile of Chinese newspapers and passed one to Hou. There was a photo of the twenty-eight-year-old pilot standing in front of his plane.

  Hou at my flat in Hong Kong, 1981: ‘He defected to China?’ He laughed. People tended to flee communism, not the other way round.

  Hou stared at the photo with a look of disbelief.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He pointed at the caption. ‘You said “Huang Zhicheng”.’ Hou stressed the syllable ‘zhi’, giving it the punched-down fourth tone of Mandarin. ‘It’s “zhi”.’ He now pronounced it in the second, rising tone.

  ‘Oops, yeah, I fuck up my tones sometimes.’

  ‘Huang Zhicheng,’ Hou said again.

  ‘Huang Zhicheng,’ I repeated after him, thinking he was giving me a language lesson.

  ‘Fucking hell.’ Hou shook his head. ‘I grew up with that guy.’

  They didn’t paste Brenda Starr, Ace Reporter comic strips on my office door for nothing. The 28 August issue of Asiaweek featured a two-page spread on Huang Zhicheng’s background and his odd connection with Hou.

  The Communist press had quoted Huang saying that ‘there was no freedom’ in Taiwan. The Nationalists, outraged, denied that Huang had even defected. They insisted that mechanical trouble had forced him to land and accused the Communists of turning him into a ‘propaganda tool’. Hou’s vivid portrait of Huang as a loud-mouthed attention-seeker who, despite not being very tall, dreamed of becoming a basketball star, added a human dimension to the story.

  In the article, ‘The Bantam and the Dragon’, I quoted Hou as saying, ‘When I wrote “Heirs of the Dragon”, I had no ulterior motive. I just wanted to get off my chest all the feelings…that the word “China” has inspired in me from the time I was a little kid listening to my father telling stories of life in Sichuan before the revolution.’ As for Huang’s actions, Hou insisted that defections ‘only widened the gap between China and Taiwan’. He labelled Huang and his counterpart ‘freedom fighters’ from the mainland ‘heroes of opportunism’.

  Several days after the issue was out on the stands, I received a memo from Asiaweek’s editor-in-chief.

  Re: The Bantam & the Dragon

  For this excellent story, in which you showed both personal initiative and a fine sense of the politically bizarre, a [HK]$500 bonus, by unanimous decision of the bonus junta…

  I couldn’t wait to show it to Hou. ‘I think we ought to share this,’ I offered. Hou’s fame, I’d learned, hadn’t come with riches. Never imagining that ‘Heirs’ would become such a megahit, he sold it to a record company for the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty American dollars. He was only a student at the time and thought that a terrific deal. The record company got another singer, Li Jianfu, to record it. It was Li’s version, released in April 1980, that was selling in the millions, a fact that Hou considered rather a good joke on himself. ‘Let’s do the town.’

  Hou—whom I now called by his nickname Houzi (Monkey)—was returning to Taiwan soon afterwards. He wrote his address and phone number in Taipei on the back of that memo and made me promise to keep in touch.

  Two years later, in October 1983, I knocked on the door of a hotel room in Beijing. I was there to do an interview. Despite intense interest and many requests by other media both Chinese and foreign, the elusive subject had refused to speak at length to anyone else. Entering the room, I put my tape recorder on the table and switched it on. I grimaced. ‘Sorry,’ I apologised, turning it off again and sinking into an overstuffed armchair with my hands over my eyes. ‘Do you have an aspirin? I’m feeling really seedy.’

  I’d come to Beijing to report on the Sino-British negotiations over the future of Hong Kong. At a banquet the night before, the Hong Kong journalists, including me, challenged our Communist minders from the official Journ
alists Association to a drinking contest. After nineteen shots of maotai, the popular Hong Kong newsreader with whom I’d been leading the charge keeled over and had to be carried out. The one upright cadre signalled that he’d had enough. ‘It’s a draw,’ he slurred.

  ‘No it’s not,’ I insisted, picking up my twentieth shot glass of the 106 proof liquor and throwing it back. ‘Hong Kong wins.’

  My colleagues applauded. Two of them insisted on escorting me back to the flat where I was staying, despite my vigorous protests that I was fine. When we got there, the key somehow became too big for the lock. My fellow reporters got it under control. ‘You sure you’re all right?’ they asked, as they opened the door.

  ‘Oh yeah, I’m f…fine. Sh…shee you guys!’ Cheerily, I waved them off, stepped into the flat, closed the door behind me and fell on my face. I won’t go into the sordid details of the rest of the night except to say that I woke up with the impression of a toilet seat rim on my cheek, and for a few frightening hours saw everything in black and white, like I was in an old movie. I was just beginning to recover a small spectrum of colour when, professional that I was, I showered, dressed and spent forty-five minutes searching for the tape recorder which was in my bag the whole time, forced down a cup of coffee and hurtled across town to the interview.

  The headache tablet began to kick in. Colour returned. I swallowed some tea and switched the recorder back on. ‘Okay, Monkey,’ I asked the latest and most prized defector from Taiwan, whose pop celebrity status had made his crossover an enormous publicity coup for the Communists, ‘who’s a hero of opportunism now?’

  HOU Dejian and I stayed friends and he stayed newsworthy. In fact, interviewing Hou became something of a habit. My notebooks from my years as a reporter for Asiaweek are filled with quotes from Hou on every conceivable subject, though only a small number ever made it into my articles. It first occurred to me sometime in the mid-eighties that I might one day write a book about him. I kept every letter he ever sent me and even hoarded scraps of paper like the Asiaweek memo with his Taipei phone number on the back.