Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

Mou Sen had passed on to me The Red and the Black, The Old Man and the Sea and One Hundred Years of Solitude , and although I didn’t have a deep understanding of literature, I enjoyed them very much.

Sun Chunlin was standing in the middle of the dorm. His shirt was buttoned to the top. The collar was too tight. He picked up a thermos flask and poured some more water into his cup of green tea. As he took a large gulp from it, sweat streamed down the back of his neck. He was too priggish to ever remove his shirt. I had no inhibitions, though. As soon as I returned to our dorm after classes, I’d strip down to my Y-fronts or wander off to the washroom completely naked. If a girl came in to talk to someone, I’d wrap a towel around my waist.

It was July, and the temperature had soared to forty degrees. I didn’t have any appetite for lunch, so I just sprawled myself out over the reed mat on my bed. We had completed most of our exams, so the pressure had eased a little. Usually, you could hear other students in the building playing English language cassette tapes, or revising in the washroom or toilets. But today we were all lying on our beds, panting in the stifling heat like dumplings in a bamboo steamer. So when Sun Chunlin came into the dorm shouting, ‘I’ve got a book here by Sigmund Freud about sexuality and the unconscious!’ it startled us a little.

Mou Sen found another passage in the book that took his interest: ‘He’s saying that below our consciousness lies an unconscious level of desires and memories that are repressed by the conscious mind. Without this repression, our brains wouldn’t be able to function…’

‘I have an unconscious desire to beat up the head of the recreation and sports association,’ said Wang Fei. ‘The stupid wanker! He only joined the Party because he wants to get a good job after he graduates. He hasn’t even read the Communist Party Manifesto !’ Wang Fei spurted so much saliva when he spoke that one’s eyes were always drawn to his mouth and chin. I made sure never to share a meal with him.

‘Wang Fei, you switched the light on and off about a hundred times last night,’ Sun Chunlin said. ‘You only stopped when the cord broke. What unconscious motive was behind that, do you think?’

Tang Guoxian was in the bunk next to mine. He banged on the wall and cried up to Wang Fei, ‘It was a girl you wanted to pull — not the light switch! Ha!’ He was tall, high-spirited and sporty, and always liked to bash something when he laughed. If you didn’t get out of his way in time, his big hands would land on your face.

‘I definitely don’t have an unconscious,’ Wu Bin said from his bunk. He had a shaven head, scornful eyes and a thin black moustache. He was always rambling on about Hitler’s SS, Soviet double agents, or Sherlock Holmes. He’d often go missing for a couple of days. A rumour spread that he was a spy planted by the local police. Whenever he was around, everyone watched what they said.

‘If you didn’t have an unconscious, where would you get all your ambition from?’ said Wang Fei. ‘Didn’t you say you wanted to be a great detective one day? Ambition is fuelled by unconscious desires.’ Wang Fei always spoke his mind, and often ended up offending people. The month before, he’d got beaten up outside the cafeteria by some political education students.

‘Read us another passage, Mou Sen,’ Sun Chunlin said. His bunk was nearest the door, so he was the first person to be able to enjoy a breeze when it blew in.

Wang Fei circled the room slowly, then leaned down and swiped the book from Mou Sen’s hands. Sun Chunlin ran over, shouting, ‘Don’t break it!’ then grabbed it back and began to read another passage: ‘“If the unconcious, as an element in the subject’s waking thoughts, has to be represented in a dream, it may be replaced very appropriately by subterranean regions. — These, where they occur without any reference to analytic treatment, stand for the female body or the womb. — ‘Down below’ in dreams often relates to the genitals, ‘up above’, on the contrary, to the face, mouth or breast…”’ When he reached the end of the page he said, ‘Guangzhou Bookstore received only a hundred copies of this book. They sold out in an hour.’

‘Dreams are no more than a chaotic series of nerve impulses. I never have dreams,’ Wu Bin said, rubbing his triangular eyes. The week before, after his scholarship money had come through, he’d avoided us for days, afraid that we might bully him into taking us out for a meal.

‘I dreamed of a man’s corpse once. There was green moss growing on the skin.’ Mou Sen smoothed his hair back. He was the only science student whose hair was so long it hung over the eyes.

‘That signifies you have an unconscious urge to kill your father! Ha!’ Tang Guoxian punched the wooden frame of his bunk and roared with laughter. The room’s temperature seemed to soar again.

‘Freud was a genius!’ said Sun Chunlin, taking another gulp of tea.

‘Be careful you don’t get yourselves accused of spiritual pollution,’ Wu Bin said, grabbing a bottle of lemonade someone had left on the table. ‘If the university authorities call me in and ask me about this conversation, I’ll tell them I didn’t hear a thing.’ Wu Bin was very selfish. If he wanted something — whether it was someone’s comb, tiger balm or new pair of shoes — he’d simply help himself to it, without bothering to utter a word of thanks.

The only time he showed any generosity was when he stole a chicken that belonged to Mrs Qian who worked in the university cafeteria. He cooked it on a small electric hob in the corridor and shared it with everyone in our dorm. He’d killed the chicken after the university’s governor called for a clean-up of the campus, complaining that poultry and dogs belonging to the university’s staff had been fouling the paths and lawns. Mrs Qian didn’t realise that the staff weren’t allowed to rear animals on the campus.

A few minutes after Wu Bin ran into our dorm with the dead chicken, Mrs Qian turned up at our door. She saw one of us slicing up some ginger, and guessed that we were planning to make a stew out of her beloved pet. By then, Wu Bin had taken the chicken to the men’s toilets and hidden it in the water tank. Assuming that her pet was still alive, Mrs Qian whistled and clucked, trying to coax it out from its hiding place. When there was still no sound from it after half an hour, she reluctantly gave up and walked away.

‘See, you do have an unconscious after all, Wu Bin!’ Wang Fei said. ‘You’re afraid that if you get into trouble with the university authorities, you won’t be granted Party membership! I tell you, the Communist Party is a rotting corpse. Don’t be fooled by the cloak of reform it’s draped over itself. Underneath, it’s still the same.’

‘The book doesn’t belong to me,’ Sun Chunlin said, passing it to Mou Sen again. ‘I’ll have to give it back tomorrow. If we all squeeze up on your bed, we can read it together.’ Sun Chunlin came from a privileged background. He was one of the few students who owned a bicycle. His uncle was head of the Municipal Department of Communications. He always had cash on him. The imported digital watch on his wrist sparkled whenever he walked past.

I ran over to Mou Sen’s bed and squeezed in next to Wang Fei. The previous month, I’d had to wait until two thirty in the morning for my turn to read The Second Wave . I finished it in two hours, then woke Mou Sen and passed it to him. But Freud’s book was much thicker, and looked as though it would take all night to read, so everyone was desperate to get their hands on it first.

‘Ask your Hong Kong girlfriend to buy you a copy!’ Wang Fei jibed, trying to push me off the bed.