‘The old man is fond of dragons,’ she said. ‘It’s one of our sayings. This old guy was a dragon fanatic. He studied them, painted them, filled his house with toy dragons. One day a real dragon popped its head in the window. The old guy died of fright. It means you like the idea of a thing, but you can’t cope with the reality.’
Writers having their novels turned into film or television drama are rather like the old man in the Chinese saying, quoted here in a passage of dialogue transferred verbatim from my novel Avenue of Eternal Peace to its television adaptation, the mini-series Children of the Dragon, shown on abc television in 1992. Dreams can turn into nightmares when they come true. Stories abound in the film industry of writers of original works storming off the set, cursing and suing. As complaints are almost mandatory when the final product turns out to be based on the book more ‘loosely’ than expected, let me say at the outset that I have found the experience fascinating and instructive. I am happy about the way I have been treated personally, and relieved that the end result works so well on its own terms.
But the process of transformation was as complex as they all seem to be. Avenue of Eternal Peace weaves together a web of stories set mostly in Peking in 1986. The main strand concerns an Australian cancer specialist who, having failed to prevent his wife’s death from cancer, goes to China in search of insight into non-Western approaches to the disease. Discovering an old Chinese professor who may have known his grandfather, who worked as a doctor in China at the turn of the century, Wally Frith also discovers that East and West are one, at least in the human struggle with mortality. The Chinese woman he has fallen in love with is revealed as the professor’s granddaughter, but she stays behind at the end when the Australian returns home to continue his work. Running alongside Wally Frith’s story are the stories of other Pekingers, local and expatriate, which culminate in the eruption of protest demonstrations, swiftly suppressed, in Tiananmen Square in December 1986.
The novel evolved from ideas with which I went to China, to teach Australian Studies, in early 1986. The draft was completed by the end of 1987. My agent Rosemary Creswell showed it to independent Sydney-based producer John Edwards, who excitedly took up an option – eighteen months before the more famous Tiananmen Square demonstrations of April–June 1989. A year later Sandra Levy, then head of abc tv Drama, had joined forces with Edwards to form the production company, Xanadu, and Robert Caswell (Scales of Justice, Evil Angels) was signed to work on the screenplay. I had accepted an appointment as cultural counsellor at the Australian embassy in Peking, where my time was taken up with a bonanza of bicentenary cultural exchanges. Revision and editing were delayed, and the novel was finally scheduled for publication in mid-1989. As the 1989 protest movement unfolded on television screens around the world, Xanadu and its British partner Zenith, with encouragement from the abc and the bbc, renewed their commitment to the project and sent associate producer Wayne Barry, designer Murray Picknett, and China consultant Linda Jaivin on a research trip to China. They were there when the massacre happened on 3–4 June. By the time I was evacuated to Canberra, the publishers already saw that my book could be associated with the momentous events that have come to be known in shorthand as Tiananmen Square.
Wanting to distinguish the novel from the quickies that would soon appear, and to acknowledge that the events and personages in my black comedy, originally entitled ‘Searching for the Shaman’, and later ‘Crackers’, were to be perceived through a new, tragic frame, I added an afterword connecting the conclusion of my fiction in 1986 with the historical developments to 1989. The title was changed to the more sombrely ironic Avenue of Eternal Peace. Xanadu, by now merged with Southern Star, liked the title and commissioned Caswell to rework the script in the direction of a political thriller culminating in Tiananmen Square. I was called in to have a look at that script early in 1990.
Names and characters had been altered as the scriptwriter put his mark on the material. Blundering Australian Wally became angry Englishman Will Flint, the flinty male will at the heart of a new age parable about learning to own your pain under the higher spiritual/erotic influence of the mystic East. Caswell and his partner visited China for three days during one of the epochal moments of modern Chinese history and laid their mineral water at the feet of the million or so demonstrators filling Tiananmen Square, before the pollution, Chinese food, heavy smoking and spiritual bankruptcy of the place compelled them to leave. Back in Los Angeles after the massacre, Caswell’s commitment to the struggle of the Chinese people surfaced in his readiness to continue with the project, and his inspired idea to re-focus the story on youth. It was the foreign doctor’s son, not his wife, who had died, and his Chinese lover was given a daughter, one of the idealistic student leaders whose safety is threatened after the military crackdown Those young Chinese are the ‘children of the dragon’ (referring to the pop song by activist Hou Dejian sung in the Square) who dare to challenge the dragon: a title arrived at after months of debate between the British and Australian production partners. As a brilliant technician, Caswell did a construction job on the script that imposed a drama of self-channelling, self-realisation and democratic determination onto the quite different structure of the novel, which leads through an apparent maze to the open-ended awareness that East and West form a false opposition.
In the mini-series Will and the girl student manage to escape on a Qantas jumbo, in a gripping rework of the Casablanca ending, while the Chinese are left behind to fend for themselves. Changes to the script meant that, to avoid human and financial risk, the arrangements made through Jaivin with a television production group in Peking had to be abandoned for a shoot done predominantly in Australia, offering employment as extras to thousands of the Chinese students who flocked here round that time. One extra appeared on set at the reconstruction of Tiananmen Square on a airfield outside Sydney wearing the same clothes he had worn to demonstrate in Tiananmen Square in Peking – and was told by wardrobe to go and change into something less colourful.
The visual recreation of China, however, and the look of the production as a whole, are a remarkable achievement. Locations identified by Picknett on his visits to Peking were recreated with great attention to detail, with help from Chinese production staff who had film and television experience in Peking.
Casting proved to be more problematic. The vagaries of co-production meant that alongside Bob Peck as an Englishman working in Australia was Australian actor Linda Cropper as the American feminist/bimbo Monica, a character invented for the adaptation (replacing the novel’s more idiosyncratic Dulcia) to lure American interest. Local Chinese communities were searched high and low for a leading lady who could act in both Mandarin and English, and who had the right mix of sharpness and austerity to play a middle-aged Northern Chinese intellectual, beautiful without being glitzy. Lily Chen, a Chinese costume-drama star, was eventually brought from Texas. Stilted though her performance and delivery are at times, reflecting in part different conventions of acting and body language, she seems to me right in the part.
The production gave opportunities to a great many local Chinese performers, some of whom were found through casting agents, others through restaurant searches and other grassroots activity. There are some real finds, such as Linda Hsia (from Radio Australia, Melbourne) and Mimi Phu, daughter of a great Chinese stage star, who should put paid once and for all to the excuse that Asian parts cannot be written in Australian drama because they cannot be cast. There are also some regrettable cases of ‘all-Asians-look-the-same’ casting. The Chinese opera in Peking is sung by a Sydney-based Cantonese troupe. Filipinos and Indonesians masquerade as citizens of Peking – rather like some of the boat people, who apparently come from Guangxi near the China–Vietnam border area, but claim to be political refugees from Peking.
The gay relationship loses impact through casting against type in the case of Gary Sweet and his Chinese boyfriend, who is presented in a studious Hong Kong image rather than the haughty, histrionic style favoured in Peking – and perhaps also because the screenplay and direction have a general residual awkwardness about Chinese sexuality, falling for oriental clichés despite strenuous efforts to avoid doing so. The hardest part to cast, interestingly, was the old Chinese professor. Actors in China were traditionally regarded as little better than courtesans. An elderly actor was more likely to be suited to playing the scheming eunuch or the old queen than the dignified Western-educated professional. The old are also cautious in China, having learned too much about the pendulum swings of policy. For this reason the senior actors in China and senior scholars and professionals from the Chinese community in Australia who were approached for the part invariably turned it down. It is a worldwide shortage, which has created a niche for one Chinese actor based in the United States who specialises in playing Chinese sages. He is much in demand at a price well beyond the budget of this production. Shooting had already started when Wan Thye Liew, an amateur Cantonese opera enthusiast from Adelaide, was brought forward from among the extras. He gives a charming performance.
Questions of authenticity can be academic. Neither novel nor television drama claim strict factual accuracy. But the changes and transformations that are made in the interests of creating a story, tightening a scene, attracting investors, coming in under budget or, most fundamentally, making the product compatible with expectations of the makers and the hoped-for audiences, reveal social and cultural attitudes at work. Historical drama stylises and concentrates material, and in the process distorts. In Children of the Dragon the corruption the Chinese students protest against is dramatised as the passing of a cash bribe to a shady go-between, a simple and blatant act that can be shown clearly in a television scene. The all-pervasive, invisible, decorous and far more insidious institutionalised corruption of the society is beyond our television’s capacities. The student protester is shot in front of his foreign lover’s eyes in Tiananmen Square. With legal exactitude the Chinese authorities could claim that no such thing happened and that to show it as happening is to fall victim to the designs of propagandists intent on subverting the Chinese state. If it happened, it would have been just outside Tiananmen Square. But the economies of representation dispense with such niceties.
Much of the adaptation has a cartoon-like logic and directness, reflecting an American style of television. It was a tendency resisted in production by director Peter Smith (A Perfect Spy) in favour of a slower, more intricate, more ironically literate unfolding – in the bbc mould with which Smith and Peck are more comfortable. The British style of leisurely bemusement was in turn resisted by the Chinese involved in the production, led by director’s assistant Wang Ziyin, who wanted a tough, raw, passionate quality, even if at the expense of polish. Interpersonal and intercultural frictions have bequeathed to the finished product a powerful kind of tension, warts and all, that meshes with the narrative-focused direction and Peck’s highly strung performance. At times the expressions on Peck’s face, on the umpteenth take, suggest he is doing the acting for all the participants in the scene at once
The strength of tradition and the weight of history, the invasion of personal lives by social control, the desperation for change, the supportive yet burdensome webs of relationships, the ineptness of Westerners in the encounter: such central issues of China are pursued down a winding path until we are brought to the blood-stained centre. Children of the Dragon deals with the drama of China with a maturity and range that, given the constraints, may not be easily matched by other international screen versions of the events surrounding Tiananmen Square 1989.
Cultural materialists use sophisticated methodologies to analyse television drama, and television drama responds to such interest in its procedures. From Twin Peaks to GP, the product offered is highly sensitised to the ways in which its structures will be decodified, its messages read. Television drama is engaged in what the Propaganda Department in the People’s Republic of China would call ‘thought work’, with big rewards if it is got right. The changes made in adapting literary works carry the hidden meanings a Chinese writer would recognise when warned by television authorities that some changes to the script will be required. It is a process of bringing into line, for a greater good. The often eccentric and private world of a novel must be changed if it is to be communicated to the potentially larger screen audience. The story must be made to work. It must have no stray elements, no redundant characters. It must, ultimately, suit the taste of the makers, whose job is to second-guess the taste of the consumers.
Taste, a neat eighteenth-century invention, is designed to harmonise the potentially conflicting areas of enduring truths and passing fashion, personal choice and social desiderata. It looms ever larger in a society where everyone is watching everyone else to find out what is ‘correct’ and hence what will take off. The marketing manager and the contemporary moralist occupy the same space.
1992