Hou Dejian and Hong Ying and their spouses
At the Xin Zhou Kan Magazine’s Study Salon held in their office in Beijing on 6th April, a Chinese novelist and a Taiwanese singer met after many years to reminisce nostalgically about their formative years as poets and performers during China’s 1980s. Hong Ying who left home in 1980 to travel round China for a decade talked of the liberation and idealism of those years when a poet embodied aspiration and hope in every level of society and was welcomed into ordinary people’s homes. Hou Dejian, a pop star who was an icon for a Chinese youth experiencing more changes in their society than had inspired even the Sixties generation in America and Europe, talked of the innocent patriotism of those years – and both recalled the fun, the music, the sex and the sheer adventure of living in those times.
For me, to meet Hou Dejian again was a moving experience. I had never forgotten his conversation and his humanity at one memorable dinner in 1989 which inspired me so much that I later based a fictional character on him in one of my novels.
It was an evening to make one feel young again.
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