Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘Follow her up, Xiao Hu. Make sure she doesn’t fling herself from the top of the building. That old bag’s very devious…’

‘We’re going to be stuck with them for five days! I hope we get a bloody big bonus.’

They light their cigarettes. The van stinks of petrol. The engine begins to rumble.

Damn. Who’s going to look after my sparrow?

The emperor tied the God of Twin Burdens to the trunk of a tree, binding his hands together with strands of his own hair. As the years passed, the god slowly solidified into a rock.

The police took us to a small guest house near the Great Wall. Every day, the female officer read out articles to my mother on the evils of Falun Gong. In the month since we’ve returned, the police have visited twice a week. My mother was told to stay in the flat, but today she went out, leaving me to listen to callers talk into the answer machine.

‘It’s terrible!’ shouts the voice on the other end of the line. ‘The police are knocking on every door in the city, rounding up Falun Gong members. Two officers came to our flat last night, dragged my father out by his hair and forced him into a police van. They arrested about thirty people from our compound…’

My mother set off with Granny Pang this morning to meet Master Yao outside the Central Appeals Office. He wanted to submit a petition. It’s evening now, and she still hasn’t returned. I presume she’s been arrested. The government appears to have launched a large-scale manhunt.

There is a sinister atmosphere in the air. Two police officers suddenly break into the flat and begin searching through my mother’s belongings. One of them comes over and slaps me on both cheeks. ‘My God, look what I’ve found. Is he dead or alive?’

‘He’s the vegetable. Everyone round here knows about him. He’s been like this for ten years. We thought he was putting on an act at first, so we planted a nurse here for a few days, but she confirmed that his coma was genuine. If he’d been faking, we would have flung him in jail. He was one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen movement.’

‘So mother and son are both counter-revolutionaries, then.’

‘Let’s hurry up and see if we can find any incriminating letters or Falun Gong tapes.’

They pull the quilt, sheets and pillowcases off my mother’s bed and empty her drawers onto the floor. A third officer pulls out the sofa in the sitting room and rips off the fake leather cover. Then they unhook the mirror from the wall and smash it to check whether there’s anything hidden inside the frame. The television set has been wheeled into the middle of the room and is also being smashed open.

‘Hey, look at this book: The Great Law of Falun . I found it hidden in her kitchen drawer.’

‘Well done, Inspector Holmes!’

‘It wasn’t difficult. She lined a filthy drawer with a clean sheet of newspaper. Any fool could have guessed there was something hidden underneath.’

I feared something like this might happen. Master Yao has been put under house arrest. He phoned my mother several times this week. He told her there are two armed police officers guarding his front door and a police van parked outside his block. At night its headlights shine straight into his flat. He said everyone who petitioned outside Zhongnanhai in April is going to be arrested. 10,000 armed police officers have been mobilised to carry out the job.

At the end of the phone conversation he had with her this morning, he said, ‘The government feels we made them lose face in April, and they want to punish us. But they shouldn’t slander Master Li Hongzhi. He has never tried to stop any members from seeking medical treatment, and he has no intention of usurping the Communist Party. Falun Gong isn’t a political organisation or a religion. It’s a cultivation practice that promotes well-being through meditation exercises and good morals. There’s no foreign force manipulating us behind the scenes. The government’s accusations are unjust. When the guards have their lunch today, I’m going to sneak out of the flat and go to Zhongnanhai to submit a petition to the Central Appeals Office.’

‘I’ll go with you,’ my mother said. ‘And I’ll get Granny Pang downstairs to come too. I don’t care if they arrest me. The police came round last night and told me not to leave the flat. What are they afraid of, for God’s sake? I’m not likely to go very far, am I, as long as Dai Wei is still alive. They’re forcing us to renounce our movement, just as they forced the students to renounce theirs after the 4 June crackdown.’

But after she put the phone down, my mother squatted on the floor and sighed, ‘Huh, I’ve had to live through so many political campaigns. Is this the one that’s finally going to break me?’

She removed the photograph of Li Hongzhi from the wall, gathered all her books and instruction tapes together and began concealing them around the flat. She switched on the radio and tuned into each station, searching for the latest updates. Every station was broadcasting the same pre-recorded reading of the People’s Daily article entitled ‘The Truth about Li Hongzhi’. ‘Are we going to have to be subjected to another Cultural Revolution?’ she muttered to herself. ‘Has President Jiang Zemin lost his mind?’

I’m afraid that my mother will be physically punished for her thoughts and actions, just as I was. In this police state, I’ve managed to gain freedom of thought by pretending to be dead. My muteness is a protective cloak.

You lie hidden inside your body, like a stowaway concealing himself in the hold of a ship.

‘Mum? Are you there? Please pick up the phone. It’s me! I remember you mentioning that you’ve taken up Falun Gong. I heard on the BBC today that 10,000 practitioners have been arrested. The Chinese government has jammed the internet. None of the emails I’ve been sending my old classmates have been getting through. Are you there, Mum? Please pick up…’

The sparrow flies around the room all day. Sometimes it goes to the kitchen to drink some water or peck at the bag of millet. In the last few days, it’s taken to shitting on my bed. I remember dissecting a sparrow when I was at Southern University. Its feathers had been plucked off. Through the thin, purplish-red skin, I could see its translucent stomach, suspended inside its abdomen like a small sausage.

Before I slowly die of starvation, I must try to take stock of my predicament.

My pulse is stable, my organs are functioning well. If someone were to pour milk or vegetable soup down my feeding tube, I would be able to produce some urine.

Although my motor cortex has atrophied, my synapses have been strengthened through continual use. My cognitive ability has improved and my memories have been consolidated. The plain-clothes officer who shot me destroyed my body, but he didn’t destroy my mind. I’m probably the only citizen still alive in this country who hasn’t yet signed a statement supporting the government crackdown.

If I were to wake from this hibernation, perhaps I’d become the manager of a computer company or a nightclub security guard. Or maybe I’d take up Falun Gong and end up dying in jail. Do I really want to wake from this deep sleep and rejoin the comatose crowds outside? I withdrew from society and retreated into my bedroom, then from my bedroom I retreated into my body. Eventually, I will leave my body behind and retreat into the earth. When seen from this perspective, death looks like an easy escape route. But although I’m tempted to take it, something pulls me back. I still want to read the Illustrated Edition of The Book of Mountains and Seas one more time, then travel through the landscapes it describes, and write a scientific treatise elucidating every geographical, botanical, zoological…