The Monkey and the Dragon Read online

  I enjoyed Hou’s company tremendously. I thought him charismatic, amusing, and refreshingly free-thinking in a culture that generally valued conformism. In his twenties and thirties he was prone to getting himself into the most fascinating sort of trouble, and proved himself capable of breathtaking heroism. Over the twenty years of our friendship, Hou has frequently landed himself in controversy, and has been alternately adored and reviled by a fickle public. One of Hou’s university lecturers once described him to me as a classic example of fangu, the small patch of scales on the dragon’s back that face in the opposite direction to the rest.

  His story encapsulates everything that intrigued me most about China—its popular culture, the politics of dissent, and the uneasy, evolving relationship between the mainland and Taiwan. And it was inseparable from my own, intense experience of the place. For his part, Hou has told me that he values me as the only person in his life whose friendship extends unbroken from Taiwan in the early eighties, to Hong Kong, the mainland and beyond. We’ve been through a lot together, and while we’ve had our misunderstandings, I’d like to believe they were never greater than our understanding.

  When I asked him, at the beginning of the nineties, if he would agree to my writing a book about him, he did so readily. Yet he never demanded any kind of control over what I was writing or even for the right to scrutinise my work before publication. He offered me unlimited access to himself, his journals, unpublished manuscripts and letters. He asked his family, friends, colleagues and teachers to co-operate with me and even provided me with the unlisted phone numbers of his enemies.

  My quest to understand his life well enough to write about it would test the limits of some old friendships, and lead to the forging of new ones. It took me to some places that were painful to revisit, and others that were a joy. It took me back to Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, where I’d lived for nine years from 1977, first as a student and then a journalist.

  On one sultry night in mid-1992, it took me to a creek not far from the outskirts of Taipei, where I stood knee-deep in the flow, holding a torch and a scoop net. I’d come there on the back of a flatbed truck with Hou’s two younger brothers, their friends and neighbours, to catch shrimp for a late-night feast. When everyone paired off to fan down the creek, I ended up with Hou’s youngest brother, Hou Dejun, or ‘Junjun’. I’d just managed to kick over our bucket, returning our entire catch to the stream.

  Junjun, an auto mechanic, laughed at my clumsiness. I’d always adored Junjun for his quick smile and warm, relaxed manner. Like most of Hou Dejian’s immediate family, I’d met him in the early eighties, before Hou’s defection to China.

  From where we stood, the subtropical tangle of palms, ferns and shrubs made lacy black silhouettes against the moonlit sky. Dragonflies hovered over the water, crickets chirped and frogs splashed in the shallows. Finding such an unspoiled place so close to the urban sprawl of Taipei reminded me of how much I’d loved Taiwan when I lived there as a Chinese language student in the late seventies. I often camped with Chinese friends alongside creeks like this. Someone would pick up a guitar and we’d sing the ‘campus folk’ songs that were so popular. ‘You know,’ I told Junjun, ‘I used to know all the words to “Fishing”.’

  ‘Did you know that Dejian wrote that for me?’

  ‘Really?’ I swooped on a shrimp. It swam out of my net before I could bring it to the surface. Junjun chuckled. For every shrimp I caught, he got a dozen. It struck me that netting shrimp was like trying to capture a life in a book—the facts can be hard to pin down and, even then, the little buggers keep slipping away. I was just thinking what an excellent metaphor that was when something colourful flashed by in the dark water, slapping against my leg.

  ‘What was that?’ I squealed.

  Moments later, a cry went up from a group further downstream. ‘Look at this!’ they yelled, holding up their catch. ‘A water snake! Yum!’ They were already discussing the best way to cook it.

  ‘Its bite is very poisonous,’ Junjun remarked. ‘Better that we eat it than the other way around.’

  I swept the water nervously with my torch. ‘I hope he doesn’t have a mother,’ I joked.

  Junjun chuckled. ‘Speaking of parents, Dad’s coming up for a visit tomorrow.’

  This was excellent news. Hou Guobang lived in the south and was something of a recluse. To truly understand Hou Dejian I felt I needed to meet his father. ‘I’m dying to interview him,’ I said as another shrimp sprang out of my net.

  ‘You haven’t met our dad yet, have you?’

  ‘I’ve heard a lot about him.’

  ‘He’s a bit mental.’ Junjun picked up our bucket and helped me up the slippery embankment to where the others were waiting. ‘But he does tell a good story.’

  Hou Guobang, his furrowed face an inscription of misery, shook my hand and began to speak. Underneath my smile, I was panicking. His Sichuanese accent was like thick chilli paste over his words. I couldn’t make out the pork from the eggplant. Worse, he threw in English phrases pronounced so peculiarly that I thought he was speaking Chinese. He’d once been an English teacher—God help his students— and was miffed at my difficulty understanding him. Hou Guobang, I was to learn the hard way, was easily miffed.

  Finally, with an impatient sigh, he handed me a handwritten manuscript. It was eighty-nine pages long. ‘What’s this?’ I asked, pretty sure he’d just told me.

  ‘He said it’s his autobiography,’ Junjun replied, unable to keep the surprise from his voice. Both he and Hou’s other brother, Dewei, appeared gobsmacked.

  I began to read: ‘When I heard that a foreigner would be writing a book about my son, Hou Dejian, about our family, I sat down and in one breath, wrote this account of my life. I’m not a real writer. I don’t have much “ink in my belly”. But these stories are all I’ve ever had to pass on to my children…’

  ‘I’m overwhelmed,’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Dad thinks you’re writing a book about him,’ whispered Junjun.

  In some ways, I was. The more I got to know Hou Dejian, the more I realised how much his father’s stories had helped to shape the narrative of his own life. And what extraordinary stories they were.

  I remember one day, when I was a little kid, the Spirit Warriors arrived in Dragon village. Ai-ya! There were so many of them, and they had huge knives. They’d tied red bandannas around their faces and were jumping up and down, screaming and yelling. When they charged each other with sharpened bamboo staves, the staves broke against their stomachs!

  Dragon Village perches on a ridge high in the Shamaness Mountains that straddle the border between Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China’s southwest, more than four thousand kilometres from either Beijing or Shanghai. Though not far as the crow flies from the second of the Yangtze River’s famous Three Gorges, no roads passed through the village. Anyone wishing to reach Wushan, the ancient county capital and Yangtze port that was Dragon Village’s link with the world, had to walk for days over narrow paths through fields and forest to get there.

  China’s last dynasty, the Qing, fell in 1911 in the republican revolution led by Sun Yat-sen. But by 1925, the year Hou Guobang was born, the republic and its Nationalist government were in disarray. Warlords had carved up much of China into independent fiefdoms. They, in turn, relied on men like Hou Shangmei, the most powerful man in Dragon Village, to keep things running. Hou Shangmei, whose family originally came from neighbouring Hubei but had settled in the area seven hundred years before, was district magistrate, militia chief, a major landowner, fengshui master, herbalist and physiognomist. He was also an opium addict and the father of two sons. His third had been on the way for some time.

  I stayed in my mother’s womb a whole extra month. I think I had a premonition that life wasn’t going to be easy. Even as a child, Hou Guobang thought of himself as ‘a stone in an outhouse—hard and smelly’. His temper earned him the nickname Yangyoutong—‘Kerosene Drum’—because it was so easy to make him exp
lode. His attention-seeking antics, which often involved disturbing his father’s opium dreams, earned him canings with bamboo.

  Dragon Village was so poor that Hou Guobang was nine years old before the district got its first primary school. He did his homework by the light of a kerosene lamp—electricity wouldn’t come to the village for many decades. Hou Guobang was eleven when he saw a car for the first time.

  Of the thieves and brigands that roamed the countryside when Hou Guobang was young, the most terrifying were the Spirit Warriors of the White Lotus Society. Like the Boxer rebels who at the turn of the century had attacked the foreign legations in Beijing, the Spirit Warriors, who wore red turbans and fought bare-chested, believed that their amulets and magical incantations made them impervious to both bullet and sword. They prepared for battle by chanting spells. Their mortal enemies were local authorities like Hou Shangmei.

  On a snowy night in the dead of winter, when Hou Guobang was very little, a band of Spirit Warriors descended on Dragon Village. By the time they reached Hou Shangmei’s house, its owner and his brothers had fled. Hou Shangmei, who couldn’t run as fast as his brothers, dashed into the Temple of the Nine Dragons just a heartbeat ahead of the Spirit Warriors, concealing himself as best he could in the tiny nook behind the statue of the Buddha. He was trembling with fear and cold.

  When the Spirit Warriors entered the temple, they were greeted by a juddering, swaying Buddha.

  They immediately dropped to their knees and began to pray! Father had an inspiration. He put on a strange voice and, speaking as the Buddha, told them that if they headed east, they’d find who they were looking for. They leapt up and raced off.

  Hardly able to believe his luck, Hou Shangmei half-ran, half-tumbled back down the snow-covered slope to the village.

  Hou Shangmei’s brother-in-law, Hou Guobang’s maternal uncle, set out to pursue the Spirit Warriors with a homemade gun, taking with him his only son. He took the precaution of soaking his bullets in the blood of a black dog—believing that would counter their amulets and prayers. In the end the Spirit Warriors got both him and his son. When their faces were next seen in the village, it was on the end of wooden staves.

  Hou Guobang’s uncle left behind a newborn daughter. Feeling sorry for her, Hou Guobang’s mother arranged for Guobang to marry his cousin when they were both old enough.

  In 1938, Japan invaded China. Hou Guobang saw joining the army as both a patriotic duty and a way of escaping a marriage he couldn’t avoid but never intended to consummate. At thirteen, he’d had enough schooling to know that marriage between first cousins was not a good idea. He left the village to attend high school; as soon as he graduated he enrolled in a branch campus in Hubei of the famous Whampoa Military Academy. Hou Shangmei was not pleased with his son’s decision. ‘The best iron doesn’t go into nails,’ he told him, ‘and the best men don’t become soldiers.’

  While Hou Guobang was at the academy, his father wrote to him. An itinerant seer had predicted that the Hou family would produce a great man; it was up to Hou Guobang to fulfil the prophecy, either himself or by having sons. If he insisted on being a soldier, Hou Guobang could at least become a great general.

  The Japanese surrendered in 1945, at the end of World War II. But China was soon plunged into civil war. Hou Guobang, as part of the Nationalist government army, found himself combating the rebel Communists’ People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

  He was assigned to the guard at the presidential palace in Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. One day in February 1949, his company received a mysterious order to move out into the countryside. As the company commander had gone missing, Hou Guobang was deputised to take his place. Following instructions, he led his men to a bamboo grove to await further orders. Suddenly, a plane buzzed overhead, and pieces of paper fell from the sky like snow. The leaflets announced the defection of their commander to the Communists and invited them all to follow. Some of the men wept with fear and confusion. Hou Guobang whistled for their attention, and ordered them to follow him back to base, preventing further defections.

  Yet the PLA was unstoppable. Two months later, they took Nanjing. Hou Guobang fled with a small band of men into the countryside, where they marched for days with little food or sleep. They were nearly killed crossing a bridge under PLA machine-gun fire.

  Finally, the desperate band reached the scenic town of Hangzhou, which they thought was still under Nationalist control. The Communists had got there just ahead of them. Discarding their uniforms, Hou Guobang and his mates joined a stream of refugees fleeing the city. They piled into boats and ferries to cross a river. The PLA strafed the ferry Hou Guobang was on and it overturned. He swam to the embankment, chilled to the bone.

  My whole body was shaking with fever. I was too weak to walk. One of the men carried me on his back for two days until we found an abandoned Catholic church. They had to leave me there. I wondered who would take the news of my death to my parents. Then, I began to recover. I was very hungry.

  Hou Guobang wandered for weeks as a beggar through Jiangsu province until at last he stumbled upon a Nationalist encampment. On the edge of starvation, and lacking any documentation to prove he was an officer, he volunteered to work as a cook. That way, he’d at least get enough to eat. One day, a former classmate from the academy recognised him. He was promoted to deputy company commander just as the Communist revolution swept through China. Hou Guobang was one of 800,000 soldiers and a quarter of a million civilians who joined Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘tactical retreat’ to the island of Taiwan, several hundred kilometres off China’s southeastern coast. It was October 1949.

  Chiang’s government assigned housing to Hou Guobang and other soldiers and Nationalist supporters and their families in juancun, ‘villages for military dependants’, which once housed members of the Japanese colonial administration and army. Japan had ruled Taiwan for fifty years beginning in 1895, when it took possession of the island after defeating China in a war. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the Japanese were forced to give it up again. The Nationalist government assumed responsibility for administering Taiwan on behalf of the Allied Forces.

  The largely ethnic Chinese population of Taiwan at first welcomed their new Chinese rulers. But relations between mainlanders and Taiwanese soon soured. Rampant corruption, a lack of discipline in the army and police brutality led to island-wide protests in 1947. The Nationalists crushed the protests with violence, leaving tens of thousands of people dead, injured, missing or imprisoned. This was known as the ‘28 February Incident’. By the time Hou Guobang arrived with the rest of the army and government in 1949, the local population was politicised and angry, though the imposition of martial law and the suppression of dissent meant that newcomers like Hou were largely unaware of any problems.

  In any case, Hou Guobang was preoccupied with his own situation. He had no way of contacting his family back in Dragon Village and suffered almost nightly from nightmares that his mother had been blinded and needed him. He contracted tuberculosis. He was desperately lonely. As his marriage to his cousin had never been consummated, in 1954, Hou Guobang’s elderly neighbours, the Chens, offered to introduce him to a young lady they knew.

  Luo Yingwen had just turned seventeen. She was born in Hunan province, to a well-off peasant family. But her childhood memories were of war, of joining columns of refugees fleeing from the Japanese with her terminally ill mother, who wept constantly from pain and despair, and of seeing Chinese people slaughtered by Japanese soldiers. She and the other refugees were often hungry. American planes occasionally dropped cases of food that floated to earth under tiny, magical parachutes, but the refugees were confounded by their contents—milk powder, which smelled horrible to them, and flour, which the Hunanese, used to eating rice, didn’t know what to do with. They tried to make soup but it was inedible. When Luo was five her mother died. ‘I had no childhood,’ she told me.

  Her father, Luo Bingqian, was a machine-gunner with Gener
al Claire Lee Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, who flew missions against the Japanese under the Chinese flag. (When the Tigers were founded, America was still officially neutral.) Luo Bingqian earned a stack of medals for bravery in combat. After Luo Yingwen’s mother died, he returned to collect the daughter he’d abandoned at birth and take her and his new wife, Deng Yihui, to the Flying Tigers’ base in Hankou, Hubei province. Having associated with Americans for years, he was able to explain the mysteries of milk powder and flour to the wide-eyed Luo Yingwen. Following Japan’s surrender, the Flying Tigers continued to play a non-combat role in support of the Nationalists, airlifting supplies into cities blockaded by the Communists.

  Luo Yingwen was twelve when the Nationalists made their retreat. The Flying Tigers evacuated people, assets and supplies to the ‘island fortress’ of Taiwan. Luo Yingwen remembers boarding the evacuation flight in her padded clothing. When the plane landed, the unexpected heat had her shedding layers in a perspiring rush. Wiping the dust from her eyes, she blinked at the ‘incredibly weird’ sight of the Taiwanese peasants tending the fields around the airstrip in tall conical hats and midriff-baring tops unlike anything she’d ever seen on the mainland. The clip-clopping Japanese-style wooden sandals worn by the locals were another source of amazement. For all the mainlanders understood of it, the dialect spoken on the island might as well have been a foreign language.

  The Luos were assigned housing in the same juancun as Hou Guobang, in Gangshan, on the outskirts of the southern port of Kaohsiung. There, the whole family had to sleep and live in one room. At the outset, they had only a tiny makeshift kitchen and an outside toilet that was little more than a hole in the ground.

  The family converted to Christianity. Luo Bingqian, who held strict views on the place of women, didn’t see why his daughter should go to school. Church was good enough for her, he thought. Luo Yingwen spent most of her time at home, making clothes, embroidering, squirming under her stepmother’s thumb. The only escape possible for her, she knew, was marriage.