Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘The government pays me a salary and has given us this flat. What more could I want? Do you know how many counter-revolutionaries they’ve had to execute in order to achieve the stable society we enjoy today? Do you really imagine that you and your little band of classmates are going to be able to turn this country upside down?’

‘I don’t understand. The Party drove your father to suicide and locked up your husband. Why do you feel you have to defend it? If the Communists hadn’t taken over in 1949, you’d be a rich woman now, living in a big house.’

‘Without the Communist Party there would be no New China. Without the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, our family wouldn’t be having the life we enjoy today.’ She stepped back into the kitchen, wiping her wet hands on her trousers.

‘My father was a professional violinist, but he was made to starve in labour camps for twenty years. You read his journal, didn’t you? You remember that Director Liu, and his daughter Liu Ping, he used to talk about so much? When I was in Guangxi Province I found out they were both condemned as class enemies during the Cultural Revolution, and their bodies were eaten.’

‘If anyone heard you speaking like that, they’d drag you to the execution ground,’ my mother said in a hushed voice. ‘Why can’t you learn from your father’s mistakes? The Party is encouraging people to get rich now. If you’re clever, you can go down to Shenzhen and make your fortune. Lulu’s bought herself a flat down there.’

‘Shenzhen is a capitalist haven, but a cultural desert. The only thing people think about there is money.’ I realised that my mother hadn’t taken in what I’d told her about Director Liu and his daughter. The story was probably too horrible for her to contemplate. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else, apart from Mou Sen and Wang Fei.

‘You should start reading the People’s Daily editorials every day. If you don’t keep up with the latest developments, you’ll get into trouble.’ My mother raised her eyebrows and returned to the kitchen again. The vegetables in the wok were burning.

After supper, my mother let out a loud belch and said, ‘Your great-uncle in America has sent another letter asking whether you still want to go there to study. His son, Kenneth, has agreed to be your sponsor. I think it would be best if you left the country as soon as possible.’

‘My English still isn’t good enough. I’ll wait until I’ve finished my PhD.’ I didn’t check the expression on her face. I knew that it was she who really wanted to go to America. When my father was cremated, she placed her favourite foreign-landscape wall calendar inside his coffin. Since then she has built up a large collection of calendars featuring foreign landscapes or monuments. She buys four or five a year. In the living room, there are calendars of the Paris Opera House and Louvre Museum, and in the toilet there’s a three-year-old one with scenes of the English countryside. She once told me that the reason she married my father was that he’d promised they would travel the world together and lay flowers on Marx’s tomb. I know she still longs to go abroad and fulfil his wish to have his ashes buried in America.

Although my mother always gave me a good meal when I went home, I only went back about twice a month. As soon as I arrived, I wanted to leave. I much preferred the communal life on campus.

When my father didn’t have much longer to live, he began reminiscing about his student days in America. I always took a few magazines to read when it was my turn to sit at his bedside. He liked talking about his white-haired violin teacher who owned three dogs. The teacher and his wife would often invite him over for lunch at the weekends. The first time my father went, he didn’t realise that Western meals have several courses. When the soup was served, he assumed that this was the entire meal, so he filled himself up with five slices of bread from the breadbasket. Then, to his dismay, the main course arrived, and he had to eat his way through a huge plate of steak, potatoes and fried onions. Just when he thought the meal was over, a large slice of cake was placed before him, covered in a chocolate butter cream. On his way back to his lodgings, he had to stop and lie down on a bench. For the next three days, he couldn’t eat a thing.

‘They were so good to me,’ he said. ‘If you ever make it to America, you must promise to visit them. But perhaps they’ll have passed away by then. Who knows? Anyway, this is the address. I know it off by heart.’ Taking short gasps of breath, my father wrote the address down in my notebook. He hadn’t lied to me. He really could write in English.

He told me about the time he gave his final graduation concert. It was freezing outside, and his fingers were so numb, he couldn’t pick up his bow. But American universities have central heating, even in the toilets, so he was able to go to the men’s lavatory and warm his hands on a radiator before his performance. He played the Brahms Violin Concerto that day, and was awarded the highest grade.

He told me he’d returned to China shortly after he graduated and was immediately accepted into the orchestra of the National Opera Company. Their playing style seemed stiff and spiritless, and after five years as their principal violinist, he felt that his musicianship had deteriorated. ‘I played Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with them countless times,’ he said, gazing sadly at the window. ‘Then one day, I heard on the radio an American recording of the concerto, and realised that for the past five years, I’d been playing it like an automaton. The day I returned to China, my spirit died.’

I leafed through the magazines while he talked, only looking up at him when he asked for a drink of water or told me he needed to go for a piss.

At the time, I still hated him, and longed to free myself from the stigma of being the son of a rightist. I’d spent my childhood like a bird without feathers, unable to flap its wings and left to scuttle about on the ground.

On that last day of 1986, I waited until my mother fell asleep before pulling out of my bag a piece of red cloth I’d bought, and the characters BEIJING UNIVERSITY SCIENCE DEPARTMENT that I’d cut out of paper. I was going to sew the characters onto the cloth to make a banner, but I was afraid that the noise might wake my mother, so I decided to take a needle and thread from her sewing box and make up the banner the next day.

I went to bed, but was too excited to sleep. So to pass the time, I thought about A-Mei. I remembered lifting her long skirt and seeing her soft toes, each capped with a smooth nail, clench for a moment, and then relax.

You watch your wound heal over and neural pathways reconnect, and wait for the rest of your body to recover.

‘A woman-trafficking racket has been uncovered in Zhuang Village, Anhui Province. Five hundred residents of the village have been arrested for abducting young women and selling them as wives to peasants in neighbouring counties. So far, sixty-one have been sentenced…’ My mother has turned the new radio on. She must have bought it especially for me. The sound is very clear. It probably has short wave, which means I could listen to Voice of America on it, if only she knew its frequency. If she keeps it on, I’ll be able to keep track of the time and know what day it is.

An image of me setting off for the New Year’s Day demonstration, with my red cloth and cut-out characters in my bag, passes through my occipital lobe. The neurons disconnect for a second, then reconnect and transmit the image to my temporal lobes.

At noon, I joined the crowd of students huddled below the steps of the Museum of Chinese History, and looked over at the vast Tiananmen Square spread before us. This enormous public space, the size of ninety football fields, was completely empty. The authorities had ordered it to be cordoned off to prevent our demonstration from going ahead. A few police vans were parked on the road separating us from the Square, ready to take troublemakers away. Police officers and undercover agents paced back and forth nearby, stamping their cold feet on the ground.