Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

My mind went blank. Everything that happened in the police station was a blur. But I remembered writing my self-criticism. I remembered that.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, it’s all my fault,’ I said, feeling a sudden urge to open the window and jump out.

Memories flit through your head like a torch beam. The scene you’ve just recalled sinks into darkness and is replaced by another.

My mother has no idea how much I still hate myself for all the harm I caused back then.

Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I dropped out of school and went south to the coastal city of Guangzhou, where China’s market economy had just started to take off. I wanted to regain my peace of mind, and make a bit of money too. I peddled pornographic magazines for a while, then bought some electrical goods that had been smuggled over the border from Hong Kong and sold them outside a foreign-currency shop. I had a foreign cigarette filter dangling from my mouth and a digital watch on my wrist. Once I’d saved enough money, I began making trips back to Beijing, bringing cheap southern goods which I then sold at a high mark-up on the black market. In just six months I grew thirty centimetres. I looked like a man of the world.

During my second trip back to Beijing, my cousin Dai Dongsheng and his wife came to stay. His wife had fallen pregnant with a second child, in contravention of the one-child policy. Fearing persecution from their local birth-control officers, they’d left their two-year-old daughter with a neighbour in Dezhou Village and come to Beijing hoping to find a private hospital that would agree to help deliver the baby.

‘Look how you’ve grown! You’re a young man now,’ Dongsheng said. On his previous visit, I’d had to raise my head when speaking to him, but now he had to look up at me.

‘What do you expect? I’ll be seventeen this year.’ My voice was deeper now too. I handed him a cigarette.

He had the typical rough, gnarled hands of a peasant. Because he was the grandson of a rich landlord, he’d been denied a place at middle school, and had been forced to scrape a living off the land since the age of fifteen.

His wife sat on the sofa that my brother and I had constructed a few days before. The bulge of her belly was as round as a terrestrial globe. She had the pure, unaffected beauty that only women from the countryside have. Her expression was honest but slow-witted. Dongsheng had aged a lot since I’d last seen him. He sat awkwardly at the end of my mother’s bed, his legs pressed together and his hands folded politely on his lap. At his feet lay a fake leather bag printed with the words LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT. The salted carp and two balls of red wool that they’d brought for us were lying in the middle of the table. The room stank of fish, and the dusty, rancid smell of train stations.

My mother had fried some sunflower seeds and laid them out in teacups. When I couldn’t think of anything more to say to the couple, I turned on the television set I’d bought for my mother. Their eyes immediately moved to the screen.

‘Look, that foreign woman’s wearing a gold watch and a gold necklace,’ Dongsheng’s wife said.

The news programme was reporting on Deng Xiaoping’s meeting with Mrs Thatcher, and his proposal that Hong Kong should return to Chinese sovereignty. Dongsheng said, ‘If Hong Kong is returned to China, we’ll all be able to travel there soon.’

‘You can go there now, if you want,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen lots of Hong Kong people in Guangzhou. They look just like us.’

The expressions of surprise on their faces gave me a pleasant feeling of superiority. I’d bought my first ticket to Guangzhou with the money my mother had given me to buy a bicycle. I didn’t stay at a hotel while I was there. It was so hot, I was able to sleep on the streets. I wandered through the Western Lake night market every evening, and visited China Hotel’s duty-free shop to look at the imported watches, cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens and multicoloured bottles of perfume. On my last day in Guangzhou, I only had thirty yuan left in my pocket. I went to a street stall and bought four packs of playing cards with photographs of naked women printed on the back. I brought them to Beijing with me, and made a fortune selling them outside our local cinema.

‘How many children are Hong Kong people allowed to have?’ the wife asked.

‘As many as they like,’ I said. ‘Many pregnant women in Guangzhou escape across the border and give birth in Hong Kong, then return with the babies a few months later. And since the babies have Hong Kong citizenship, the families can travel back and forth whenever they want after that.’

‘That’s a good idea!’ the wife said enthusiastically.

My mother came in from the kitchen and said, ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s been to Guangzhou a couple of times, and suddenly he thinks he’s grown up. The only thing that’s changed is that he now goes around with that stupid cigarette filter in his mouth. He hasn’t even had his first shave yet!’

‘Yes I have, Mum.’ Although my voice had deepened, it was still prone to tapering off into undignified squeaks, so I had to keep it constantly under control.

My mother sat on the sofa and asked the couple what plans they had for the future. ‘When is the baby due?’ she said.

‘Middle of next month,’ Dongsheng replied. ‘Our county has been named a Family Planning Model County, so the birth-control officers are especially strict. If a woman becomes pregnant with a second child, they force her to have an abortion. My wife managed to keep her pregnancy secret. Before she left the house, she always tied a cloth around her tummy to hide the bump. Last month she vomited while walking down the street. We were sure someone would report us. That’s when we decided to run away.’ After he said this, he removed the cigarette from his plastic filter, held it between his fingers and sucked a last deep drag.

‘We didn’t dare catch a train from our local station,’ the wife continued. ‘We’d heard that birth-control officers patrol it, trying to stop women who’ve fallen pregnant illegally from fleeing the county. If they come across a pregnant woman who doesn’t have a permit, they drag her off to the station’s family planning clinic and abort the child there and then. Apparently, at the end of each day, there are two or three buckets of dead foetuses in the clinic.’ When the wife spoke, her eyes were brighter than her husband’s.

‘If you don’t have a birth permit for this child, the Beijing police will arrest you too.’ My mother looked anxious. She didn’t know what she could do to help.

‘We can’t go back,’ the wife said. ‘Our house has probably been ransacked. When the birth-control officers discover that a couple has gone on the run, they come with big vans and take away all the family’s valuables: the radio, the mirror, the wooden chests. I’ve got a feeling that this baby’s a boy. Whatever they say, I’m not getting rid of it.’

‘If a couple manages to evade detection and give birth to a second or third child, the birth-control officers force them to pay a huge fine. They’re brutal. If you can’t afford to pay the fine, they beat you up.’

‘Government regulations strictly forbid the officers to use force,’ my mother said, trying to defend the Party.

‘We heard that the police are less violent in the cities. That’s why we came here. In the countryside it’s terrible. The people’s militia have guns, loaded with live bullets. In some neighbouring villages, if a woman gives birth without a permit, the newborn baby is strangled to death. Some families dig holes in the ground so that the women can give birth in secret.’ Dongsheng’s attention was drawn to the television screen again, and the clip of General Secretary Hu Yaobang’s visit to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone near the Hong Kong border.