The Monkey and the Dragon by Linda Jaivin

Author:Linda Jaivin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV000000, TRV003020, BIO000000
ISBN: 9781921799921
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2004-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

Hou covered two of Luo Dayou’s songs as well, and sang one composed in collaboration with his Hong Kong friend Teddy Robin.

What was truly innovative was Hou’s decision to make music videos of a number of the songs—the first music videos made in China— with the director Sun Zhou. In the most memorable clip, Hou came out looking like a closet queen—or Oriental Song and Dance Company performer—in eyebrow pencil, thick foundation and lipstick.

I found the videos passably earnest at best and at worst an audiovisual chop suey of pretension and kitsch. Maybe I just didn’t get them. When they were seen in Taiwan the following year, critics there praised them highly.

After Thirty sold more than 700,000 cassettes on the mainland. In Hong Kong, only about 3000 were snapped up, less than a third of the sales enjoyed there by New Shoes, Old Shoes. By way of comparison, Luo Dayou’s most recent album had sold over 10,000 in Hong Kong and Alan Tam, a popular Cantonese singer, enjoyed sales approaching 200,000. Hou claimed that he wasn’t surprised, telling one reporter that ‘only mainlanders and Taiwan people can understand my songs’.

The significant thing was that he now had a Taiwan market. In October 1988, Julie Su Jui sang ‘Song of the Junkman’ on a popular Taiwan TV show—the first time this intensely popular song had ever been broadcast by the mass media there, and the words ‘lyrics and music by Hou Dejian’ appeared bold and clear on the screen. A Taiwan reporter phoned Hou to tell him. He asked Hou how he felt.

‘Terrific! I’m really moved. I feel like I’ve been accepted.’

Yet when another Taiwan entertainment program decided to screen several of Hou’s videos, the authorities intervened, citing laws relating to the import of mainland cultural product. In the words of one Taiwan newspaper, the whole affair resulted in Hou becoming ‘the newest hotly discussed personality’ on the cultural scene.

Hou was on a roll. Together with the avant-pop star and novelist Liu Sola, he wrote and produced a rock opera about a pregnant schoolgirl in the Cultural Revolution who dies during a botched abortion. It was to be performed by three women—Liu Sola, Cheng Lin and Li Dandan, an opera singer—in a style that combined rock and Beijing Opera. In the end, they had trouble getting past the censors, and the opera was never performed.

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