Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘You should ask your foreign relatives to make enquiries for you,’ he says in his native Beijing accent. ‘Perhaps they can track down some specialists who are researching conditions like Dai Wei’s. If they carry out research on him, you wouldn’t have to pay any medical fees.’

‘He’s always coming up with good ideas,’ An Qi says proudly.

‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’ my mother says. ‘I should ask my son Dai Ru to see if he can find any specialists in England.’

On the telephone yesterday, my brother said he wouldn’t be able to return to China until he graduates. He’s working part-time in a Chinese restaurant, and is going out with an English girl. In his half-hour conversation with my mother, he never once asked about me.

They’re sitting on the sofa now, drinking tea.

‘We made contact with another victim of the crackdown yesterday,’ An Qi’s husband says. ‘He was shot in the head, just like Dai Wei. He’s paralysed from the chest down. He spends all day in bed. We sat beside him for half an hour and asked him questions, but he didn’t say a word. When we came out, his wife told us that last year he tried to kill himself by swallowing sixty sleeping pills.’

‘It can’t be easy for you two, tracking down all those injured people. How many have you found so far?’

‘Forty-nine, if you include the ones that Professor Ding found…’

‘He’s in great pain but he insists on continuing the search,’ An Qi chips in. ‘His pelvic inflammation flared up again last month. The old wound became septic. If we had some money, we could pay for him to have steel rods inserted into the damaged joints so that he could walk unaided.’

‘I move faster with these two crutches than I did on my own two feet!’ he says, tapping his crutches on the ground. ‘And besides, if I could throw them away, I might go out to nightclubs every night, and you wouldn’t be happy about that!’

‘Don’t talk nonsense! You’ve no idea what those places are like now. Those young women from Sichuan smother themselves with make-up, then prance around in tiny bikinis that leave nothing to the imagination. It’s so crude.’

‘Sounds like a lot of fun to me!’ he laughs, tapping his crutches on the floor again.

‘We’ve taken up Falun Gong too, now,’ An Qi says. ‘But we still haven’t felt the Falun wheel of law spinning in our abdomens. Hey, next time Master Li Hongzhi gives a public lecture, you should go along and ask him to install a Falun wheel inside Dai Wei.’

‘If you persevere with the meditation exercises, your wheel of law will eventually be awakened,’ my mother says. ‘When it spins clockwise it will absorb energy from the universe, and when it spins anti-clockwise it will dispel bad karma and illness from your body. You’ll never have to waste money on expensive medication again. When you go to hospital these days, the doctors force you to have hundreds of unnecessary blood tests and X-rays, trying to get as much money as they can from you before you leave.’

‘They work on commission. They need to prescribe three thousand yuan’s worth of medication a day to get a bonus at the end of the month. And if you don’t settle your bill every morning, they kick you out onto the street. You can’t reason with them.’

‘They don’t care about saving lives. All they care about is money.’

I suddenly remember an ancient copy of The Book of Mountains and Seas I leafed through in a second-hand bookshop in Guangzhou. It had a fold-out map at the back. When I tried to open it, it crumbled into pieces.

Beyond Qizhou Mountain live the People With No Descendants. They all share the surname Ren, and are themselves the descendants of the People With No Bones. They eat only fish and air.

‘Only forty people have enrolled so far,’ Mou Sen said to Tang Guoxian as he drafted his speech for the Democracy University’s opening ceremony. ‘We need at least four thousand. If you can’t recruit that many, I’ll have to find a new admissions officer.’

‘Don’t talk down to me like that,’ Tang Guoxian said, not looking up from the list of contacts he was copying out. ‘You just wait and see. One day I’ll be more famous than any of you!’ He’d been sacked from the Provincial Students’ Federation the previous week for supporting Han Dan’s proposal to withdraw from the Square.

‘Can you help us out, Dai Ru?’ Tian Yi said, handing my brother some name cards. ‘Phone these people and see if you can persuade them to enrol.’

My brother seemed distracted. Earlier that day, he’d asked if I had any spare red armbands. We’d run out of them, so I gave him some baseball caps instead. I didn’t ask him what he was up to. My mother had stopped interfering in his life, so I thought I should too.

It was stiflingly hot inside the broadcast tent. I’d made a hundred posters publicising the opening ceremony. Xiao Li and Zhang Jie took them from me and went to paste them up around the Square. Everyone was working hard to ensure the Democracy University would be a success.

‘I heard your father telephoned you and begged you to leave the Square,’ I said to Tian Yi.

‘Did you say “father”? That word sounds very unfamiliar to me.’

‘Can’t we move into another tent, Dai Wei?’ Nuwa said. ‘It stinks in here.’

‘There isn’t another one as big as this,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t smell so bad if you lot stubbed out your cigarettes in a cup rather than in those ink pots,’ Tian Yi said, glaring at Mou Sen.

‘Who dropped those dumplings?’ said Shi Ye, the bespectacled girl who used to share a dorm with A-Mei at Southern University. ‘They’ve been trodden into the ground now. It’s disgusting!’ She’d arrived in Beijing a few days before. She was waiting to take Mou Sen to meet a student delegation from Hong Kong. She spoke Cantonese, so was going to help translate.

‘Be quiet everyone,’ Nuwa said, wiping beads of sweat from her brow. ‘The Voice of America is broadcasting a news story about us. Shall we relay it to the Square, Mou Sen?’

‘You seem to have forgotten I’m not in charge here any more,’ he said.

‘… Fear has descended on the Chinese capital. Liberal intellectuals and progressive Party leaders who discussed democratic reform with such excitement two weeks ago are nowhere to be seen. Beijing citizens are avoiding contact with foreigners. Those with passports are beginning to flee the country. The dissident astrophysicist Fang Li and his wife are believed to have gone into hiding in the outskirts of Beijing…’

‘What does he mean “fear has descended on the Chinese capital”?’ Tang Guoxian said derisively. ‘What crap!’

‘Did you hear what he said? A million people in Taiwan linked arms and formed a 400-kilometre human chain across the island. And in the pouring rain, too! Fantastic, fantastic! ’ Nuwa said, exclaiming the last words in English.

‘The world is watching our every move,’ my brother said excitedly. Then he and a couple of his friends walked over to Tang Guoxian and said conspiratorially, ‘You really should join forces with us.’

‘Do you have anything to eat, Dai Ru?’ Tian Yi asked. ‘I’m famished.’

‘I never keep snacks on me,’ he said, turning to her. ‘When we were kids, Dai Wei would always rifle through my pockets and steal whatever he found.’ Whenever I heard my brother speak, I’d always be reminded of the musty smell of our flat.

I suspected that my brother was attempting to form a new national student organisation, so I tried to dampen his zeal. ‘I had a chat with a plain-clothes policeman this morning,’ I said, glancing at him. ‘He told me that students who cause disturbances are usually sent to a re-education camp for two years, but our protests amount to a counter-revolutionary rebellion, and he thinks we’ll get locked away for at least ten. None of us will be able to escape. They have the names and photographs of every student who’s stepped into the Square.’