Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

Is it really A-Mei’s spirit, visiting me from another realm? I regret that she and I never entered those seven interconnected caves in Guangxi Province. Perhaps if I’d walked through them, I would have achieved enlightenment by now, and been able to tap into the secrets of the spirit world.

I feel a change taking place.

Before the sparrow arrived, I was scattered around the room — over the fibres of my quilt, the ashtray on the table and the metal bowl under the radiator. I had dreams of being crushed between two moving walls, and of a swathe of toppled bicycles glinting in the sun like a wheat field. I even dreamed of glueing my shattered skull back together, taking a bath, then boarding a slow train to death. I’d separated myself from my body, or perhaps my body had separated itself from me. But then the bird arrived and dragged me back into my fleshy tomb.

You lie on your bed like a stone on a riverbed, while time flows past above you.

‘Dai Wei! Are you still playing dead?’ This is Wang Fei’s voice. haven’t heard it for ten years.

‘That can’t be Dai Wei,’ Liu Gang gasps. ‘It can’t be…’

‘He looks even thinner than the last time I saw him,’ Mao Da says.

Wang Fei grabs my hand and starts trembling. ‘He’s just a heap of bones. He’s skinnier than a mummified corpse. That fucking Premier Li Peng! If I had a gun, I’d shoot the bastard dead!’

Mao Da and Liu Gang are still catching their breath. It can’t have been easy hauling Wang Fei and his wheelchair up six flights of stairs.

‘I’m sorry the flat’s in such a mess,’ my mother says, walking in. ‘I keep meaning to tidy it up, but I never have time. What prompted you to visit me all of a sudden? Has the sun gone to your heads?’

‘What do you mean?’ Wang Fei says, tapping the side of his wheelchair. ‘I’ve been writing to you and phoning you for years, Auntie. You look very well. You haven’t changed a bit.’

‘How are your parents?’ my mother asks.

‘My father was persecuted so badly during the Cultural Revolution, he went insane. He spends most of his time in a mental hospital.’

In all our days together, Wang Fei never mentioned this to me.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Now, this man looks very familiar to me.’

‘My name’s Liu Gang. I was in Wang Fei’s dorm at Beijing University. I’m a book trader now. I live in Hefei.’

‘Oh, I remember. Your name was on the most-wanted list. I saw your photo on TV. Your hair’s turned grey. That’s why I didn’t recognise you. You were sentenced to seven years in prison…’

‘So you keep birds now, do you?’ Mao Da says, sitting down.

‘Huh! It flew in one day and refuses to leave. I’m a Buddhist, so I can’t kill it… I’ll get you something to drink. Do you have any siblings, Liu Gang?’

‘Yes. They still live at home. But I don’t see them. Since I’ve been released from prison, my parents haven’t let me back into the flat.’ Liu Gang’s voice sounds very frail.

‘Pass me a cigarette,’ Wang Fei says, pulling his hand away from mine. A smell of tobacco rises from the impressions his fingers left on my skin.

Wang Fei has lost both his legs, but at least he’s alive. I’ve been half dead for almost ten years. I’m worse off than Shao Jian. Although the beatings he suffered damaged his brain, at least he’s now able to use computers and hold down a job.

‘What does he eat, Auntie?’

‘See those plastic tubes? I pour his food down them: vegetable broth, milk, fruit juice, that kind of thing.’

‘Careful you don’t give him any of the fake milk that’s being sold now,’ Wang Fei says. ‘I drank some fake rice wine recently. It gave me a terrible rash.’ His Sichuan accent sounds less pronounced now.

‘Where do you put the tubes?’ Liu Gang asks. ‘Can he open his mouth?’

‘I usually put them into his nose.’

‘If he could open his mouth, he wouldn’t be in a coma, you fool!’ Mao Da says.

‘I haven’t had time to wash those tubes yet. They’ve been soaking in that bowl for two days. Look at all those glasses, syringes, feeding tubes — I have to sterilise them every day.’ My mother always moans about these things when visitors come round.

‘Where have you been this last year, Wang Fei?’ Mao Da asks. ‘You didn’t phone us once.’

‘I went to Hainan Island again, and Shenzhen, to help a friend set up an advertising business. But I’m determined to stay in Beijing now, at least until the police find me and send me back to Sichuan. The Beijing Handicapped Centre has picked me for their wheelchair basketball team. The government has put a lot of money into it. It’s part of their new bid to host the Olympics. I paid someone in Shenzhen to make me a fake identity card. I’ve kept my name but have changed my place of birth.’

I wonder how he made it into the team. The only sport he ever played at university was ping-pong.

‘I’d heard that Shao Jian’s condition had improved. But I bumped into him in Electronics Street the other day. He didn’t seem to recognise me when I said hello. He just stared at me blankly and nodded his head up and down.’

‘Guess who I met the other day? Do you remember that skinny guy called Zhang Rui who ran the Qinghua broadcast station? He’s a property developer now, a multi-millionaire. He’s got a huge villa with twelve cars in the garage…’

‘No, I don’t remember him…’

‘Shu Tong sneaked back to China last month,’ Mao Da says. ‘You remember him, Auntie.’

‘Yes,’ my mother says, standing in the doorway. ‘Tian Yi sees quite a lot of him in New York.’

‘He’s formed an US-based Chinese dissident organisation called the Freedom Club,’ Mao Da says. ‘He’s lying low in Sichuan at the moment, but we had a secret meeting with him in Beijing last week. We’re planning to do something in the Square to mark the tenth anniversary of the 4 June crackdown.’

‘It will give us an opportunity to mourn the dead,’ Wang Fei says. ‘Perhaps we could carry Dai Wei through the Square and let him revisit his old haunt.’

‘If you carry him out of this flat, don’t bother bringing him back again,’ my mother splutters, as the air fills with tobacco smoke.

‘We’ll ask Little Chan to stand in front of the tanks again, like he did in ’89.’ Wang Fei seems to move his hands around much more now that he’s lost his legs.

‘What? That young man who blocked the army tanks was a friend of yours?’

‘Yes. Thanks to the photo the foreigner took, he’s become an icon around the world, apparently — a symbol of human courage and defiance.’

‘No, that “Tank Man” wasn’t Little Chan, he was a factory worker from the provinces.’

‘I heard that Little Chan’s living in Yunnan now, teaching at a small primary school in the mountains.’

‘The Tank Man got a lot of attention, but no one talks about those three guys from Hunan who threw ink on Mao’s portrait,’ Liu Gang says. ‘They’re the forgotten heroes of our movement. One of them got a life sentence, the others got sixteen years and eighteen years. I only spent seven years in jail, but it nearly destroyed me. I don’t know how they’ll manage.’

‘But the truth is we were protesting against corruption,’ Mao Da says. ‘We weren’t trying to overthrow the Party or attack Mao. I think they took things too far.’

‘Well, I was attacking Mao,’ Wang Fei says loudly. ‘We had guts back then, but we lacked political foresight.’

‘I heard the guy who got life — Yu Dongyue — has been tortured very badly. He was tied to a pole in the prison yard and left out there for days, and was then put in solitary confinement for two years. He’s a broken man now. When his parents go to visit him in jail, he doesn’t recognise them.’