Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

The old locust tree outside our building was bulldozed to the ground yesterday. It’s probably lying amid the rubble now, covered in grey dust, or perhaps a truck has already taken it away. In my childhood, that tree was my only safe haven. My mother will soon don her red-and-yellow baseball cap, then take her gold ring from her drawer and slip it on her finger. She will then cover the ring with her right hand, to hide it from any thieves that might be prowling outside.

My body has become much more efficient. Through a process of energy conversion, I can now survive for a week on just one glass of milk. My skin has learned to absorb as many ultraviolet rays from one small beam of sunlight as most people absorb during an entire summer. My mother, however, is getting stiffer and frailer by the day. She seems to be slipping into a trance.

She switches on the television. ‘… St Mary’s Hospital in Hong Kong has begun to use deep brain stimulation of the thalamus to treat Parkinson’s disease. The symptoms of Parkinson’s include stiffness and rigidity, a blank facial expression…’ She quickly turns up the volume. ‘… The procedure involves screwing a metal frame to the head, inserting fine needles into the brain to locate the thalamus, then drilling a hole about the width of a finger into the skull…’ She turns the volume right down again and mutters, ‘Huh! As if that will do any good!’

‘Huizhen! It’s me — Granny Pang. Will you let me in?’

‘What a terrible sandstorm we’re having,’ my mother says, opening the door.

‘It’s not sand, it’s dust from the demolition site. Look. The stairwell is covered in it. The workers should sprinkle water on the ground to keep the dust under control… I’ve come up to tell you that I’m moving out this afternoon. I’ll come back and visit you, when I have time.’

‘I still don’t know where I’m moving to…’ When her mind is clear, she forgets how she often talks about moving to England or America.

‘You’re the last person left in this building. You’d better hurry up and move out. They’re going to cut off the electricity soon.’

The sparrow walks up the side of my chest and nuzzles itself into my armpit, to shelter itself from the cold draught. It has lost so many of its feathers that all it can do is skip and scurry over my body. My mother has picked it up a few times and taken it to the window, but just as she’s on the point of throwing it out, she always changes her mind and says, ‘I’ll let you wait until my son wakes up, then you can fly into the sky together…’

‘I haven’t dared open my window,’ Granny Pang continues. ‘There’s so much dust out there. They’re working overtime to make sure the project is completed before the millennium. It’s been so noisy at night, I haven’t slept a wink.’

‘They can pull everything down and cut off the electricity, I don’t care! I’ve brought out my old charcoal stove so I can cook on that if I need to. I will stand up to them. Even a rabbit can bite if it’s pushed into a corner.’

‘To be fair, we should be pleased that the government is finally building new flats for us…’

‘Auntie Hao from the neighbourhood committee came over yesterday with Officer Liu and tried to persuade me to move out. But I’m not budging. I’m like the turtle in the fable, which swallows a lead weight when someone comes to remove it from its pond. I will stand firm.’

‘A Bodhisattva appeared before me yesterday. It looked just like your Guanyin figurine. How do you explain that?’

‘Old Yao said that during the early stages of cultivation, the gods that appear to you are as small as a grain of rice, but they grow larger the longer you practise. If you saw a Bodhisattva as large as my figurine, it shows that you have almost reached the stage of Buddha yourself.’

‘Really? That means I’ll be able to fly into the sky soon… The Falun paradise is superior even to the Buddha Realm. It’s a land of eternal spring, with golden mountains and silver streams…’

Have I now explored all 5,370 mountains of The Book of Mountains and Seas ? On my travels through my body, I’ve discovered that all the wonders described in the book exist within me: the peaks and marshes, the buried ores, the trees that grow in the clouds and the birds with nine heads. I know now that to reach the soul, you must travel backwards. But only people who are asleep have time to tread that backward path. Those who are awake must hurtle blindly onwards until the day they die…

Dusk is falling. In the darkness, my mother removes the bedpan from between my thighs and empties it into the toilet hole. She hardly ever cleans me any more. Since Gouzi the electrician made this specially shaped bedpan, she hasn’t had to wash any of my sheets and blankets.

She’s taken to eating her meals in the dark. She seldom turns on the light to read a book or a newspaper. I imagine that the ten volumes of Mysteries of the World she used to treasure so much, and keep neatly lined up on the cabinet are now buried under a mound of plastic bags. The photograph of my father playing the violin is probably still hanging on the wall above them. Those objects authenticate my memories. They will survive in my mind, whether they still exist or not, but everything else will slip away.

The sparrow chirps softly. When it’s asleep, it clings to me with its claws and warms my skin. It should be living in the sky now, flying so high that people have to lift their heads to see it.

My bed shakes as the piledrivers outside ram steel bars deep into the ground. The thuds seem to pound in time with my heartbeat. I remember the heartbeats of A-Mei and Tian Yi. Everyone else seems distant from me. The hole where my left kidney used to be begins to tremble. Perhaps my left urethra is full of urine, or a few drops of blood have dripped into my bladder. I feel a change taking place. My organs seem to have received some secret signal. They appear to be preparing for something — either death or a return to consciousness… My thoughts go back to Wen Niao and the bliss I felt that afternoon she made love to me.

I hear people climbing up the stairwell. They’re not removal men or migrant labourers. These footsteps are light. They ascend to the third-floor landing and come to a halt outside our front door.

‘You’re an illegal resident here,’ a voice shouts. ‘Everyone else in this building has moved out. We’re telling you this for the last time. This building will be pulled down in the next three days. If you don’t move out now, you will have to take responsibility for the consequences.’

The pounding thuds of the piledrivers outside echo through the stairwell.

‘Who are you? Another bunch of relocation officers trying to pass yourselves off as government officials? I haven’t signed the demolition agreement. You have no right to order me to move out.’

‘I know you haven’t signed it. We’re from the demolition and relocation office. Every building has the odd stubborn resident like you. In the end, we have to remove them by force. If you resist us, you will not only forfeit any claim to compensation, you will also be breaking the law. The company has been granted a demolition licence by the public security bureau. When the building is demolished in three days’ time, the police will be present to make sure that everything goes smoothly.’

‘What a stench! It smells like a chicken hut in here. How can she bear to live like this?’

‘You businessmen are colluding with the government to oppress us ordinary citizens. But I’m not afraid of you! Go ahead and build your shopping centre, your public square, your Bird’s Nest stadium, but don’t push me out of my little nest.’

‘This is your last warning!’ They walk out without closing the door. I can hear bulldozers thud in the distance and walls topple to the ground.