Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘Look, that bird keeps flying into their window,’ the kid says. ‘It must have built a nest in there.’

‘Why isn’t your son at school today?’

‘The school he went to was for children of migrant workers. It was unlicensed and run by volunteers. We don’t have a Beijing residency permit, so no state school would accept him. When China’s Olympic Bid Committee visited the area last week, they came across the school and told the police to close it down. They’re proposing to build a huge “Bird’s Nest” sports stadium near here. This whole neighbourhood is going to be razed to the ground.’

‘The entire city is being demolished and rebuilt. It’s all part of the government’s “New Beijing, New Olympic Bid” concept. Our compound will be pulled down soon.’

‘The snow’s stopped! I barely got a chance to cool down, and already it’s getting hot again.’

‘The state schools are so expensive now. The one my son goes to is middle-ranking, but the fees are 10,000 yuan a year. I only earn 11,000. How can the government expect people like us to fork out that amount of money?…’

The snow gave my neighbours a brief respite from the summer heat, but my room is still swelteringly hot. In the afternoon, the sun beats down on the covered balcony and the temperature rises even higher. When I sense my body start to evaporate at last, I feel as relieved as I did whenever I left the stuffy hospital ward in which my father was dying.

A picture comes to mind. I see a woman in blue trousers standing in our flat with her young child. I think it’s a boy. There’s a yellow star on his cap, and a dog’s face embroidered on the knee of his trousers. The fake leather shoes the woman is wearing are cracked and covered in dust. The woman has no face. All I can see is her claw-like hand touching her son’s head. Who is she? The mad wife of my cousin, Dai Dongsheng? Perhaps it’s an image cobbled together from scraps of other memories. I have no control over my mind any longer. As I slip into unconsciousness, a series of random scenes flicker before my eyes… In the north region of the Great Wastes stands Mount Zhangwei. A giant god with a human face and a snake’s body lives on its summit. When he closes his vertical eyes, it’s night; when he opens them, it’s day. He doesn’t eat or sleep or breathe. All he feeds on is the wind and the rain. He shines his light over the dark lands, so they call him the Torch Dragon…

Both night and death are approaching. The mosquitoes continue to suck my blood while the internal bacteria start to attack my flesh. The sparrow nestled in my armpit shakes its feathers and prepares to sleep.

I hear two men enter the flat. A beam of torchlight moves across my room.

‘Careful, there’s a corpse in that room. Come on, let’s see what we can find!’ It sounds like Gouzi, the electrician who works in the restaurant across the road.

‘How could anyone bear to live in this squalor? You said her TV had stereo speakers. Where are they? God, this flat’s a tip. What a stench!’

‘Look at all these newspapers stacked on her table. This one must be two years old, already. It’s got a photograph of Deng Xiaoping’s corpse on the front.’

‘Search through that pile of cardboard boxes then take a look at the bicycle.’

‘Hey, a modem! So the old lady wants to join the internet age, does she?’

‘What’s in all those plastic bags over there?’

‘This book is huge. It’s called Illustrated Edition of The Book of Mountains and Seas . Do you think it’s worth anything?’

‘You won’t get any money for a book, unless it’s a business directory.’

‘Aiyaa! There’s a mouse under that bed!’

‘Here’s the microwave oven I was looking for. So this is where she put it…’

‘Have you got everything? Great. Let’s get out of here…’

They’ve probably taken all the goods my mother bought when she was collecting lottery tickets. I can smell, too, that the box of soap powder which has been standing in the corner of the sitting room for the last six years, is no longer here. After they flicked through the Illustrated Edition of The Book of Mountains and Seas and my mother’s Mysteries of the World , they tossed them onto the chest of drawers.

The room is quiet again. If I’ve remembered correctly, today is my seventh day without food. A small distance separates me from death. I am still living in what Buddhists refer to as the stinking skin-bag of the human body.

I remember one night when my mother tried to shoo the sparrow away, it flew out of the window in terror, and I felt myself break free and drift into the locust tree outside. I was too light to fall to the ground, and not strong enough to fly into the sky, so I just hovered in mid-air, caught like a balloon between two branches.

If anyone were to spend a week locked inside his own body, he would choose to run away, even if the only escape route available was death.

Flesh-eating cells gnaw at you. Your organs disconnect and drift apart.

My mother must have been released from detention an hour or so before dawn. She plods back into the flat in a daze and throws herself onto the sofa, without bothering to turn on the light or even shut the door.

She is as silent as a corpse. A sour, grimy smell wafts from her hair. I think she’s passed out.

When the sun begins to light up the sky, the sparrow chirrups. My mother stirs and lets out a deep sigh. She walks into my room, stands silently at the door like a stranger, then walks out again.

I’ve been alone for a week, but am still not dead. I feel guilty for having let my mother down.

There is a mountain called Mount Wilderness, where the sun and the moon set. The people who live there have three faces: one at the front and one on either side. These three-faced people never die.

After the rain, the sky cleared.

The crowd outside the broadcast tent became agitated. Shan Bo, the Beijing Normal teacher, stepped out of the hunger strike tent and squeezed through the throng holding an open letter he wanted to read out. Wang Fei followed behind him, with a megaphone in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other.

‘The broadcast station is the command centre now,’ Lin Lu whispered to Bai Ling, switching off his walkie-talkie. ‘We can’t allow the intellectuals to jump up and say what they want.’

‘Why not?’ Zhou Suo asked.

‘They have no idea how volatile the mood is in the Square. If he reads out his letter, it might trigger a riot.’ Lin Lu’s mouth twisted into a worried smirk.

‘Let him say what he has to say, then take him straight back to the hunger strike tent,’ Bai Ling said.

Mimi dragged the three microphones outside and handed them to Shan Bo.

Shan Bo held up the letter and began reading it out: ‘We four intellectuals came to the Square to show the world that we too are prepared to put our lives on the line to fight for democracy. We oppose martial law and support your demands for an equal dialogue with the government. But recently we have noticed that despite your good intentions, your movement has become riven with division. It is now badly organised and dangerously undemocratic. If military dictatorship is replaced by student dictatorship, the Democracy Movement will have come to nothing…’ Wu Bin jumped onto a box and shouted through a megaphone, ‘Teacher Shan Bo, we admire you for going on hunger strike. But how can you come here, at this crucial moment, and try to sow discord among the students?’

‘Lin Lu, quickly tell Shan Bo to return to his tent,’ Bai Ling said crossly.

Before Wu Bin had finished speaking, voices in the crowd shouted, ‘Spineless intellectuals! Traitors! If you don’t have the balls to continue your hunger strike get out of the Square!’