Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

As a result of this attempted renewal of student activism, Liu Gang lost his Party membership, and Shu Tong was forced to write a self-criticism. Shu Tong spent very little of his time on campus after that. A rumour spread that he was going out with the daughter of a high-ranking Party official.

As I watched Sister Gao walk away, I spotted Tian Yi at last. She was standing with her back to me, waiting. My pulse quickened. The night before, we’d made love for the first time. She was wearing the black skirt she’d worn to her cousin’s party. She’d worn black shoes too, that night. I’d noticed that many people of an artistic bent had taken to wearing black. The party had been thrown by her uncle. He’d organised a exhibition of his six-year-old son’s paintings and invited friends and family over for a private view. The walls of the sitting room and corridor were covered with his son’s childish pictures of trees, tropical fish, girls with red flowers in their hair, and yellow apples on white plates. Since the boy was so much younger than Tian Yi, he called her ‘auntie’, not ‘cousin’. His breath smelt of deep-fried dough sticks. A professor from the Central Academy of Art stuck to Tian Yi like a leech all evening, which irritated me.

I walked over and stood behind her, and stared at her back, her hair and her arms until she sensed my presence and glanced round. She quickly turned away again and, without speaking, walked with me towards the library.

She often retreated into her own world like that, cutting me out completely. I found it unnerving.

We reached a campus restaurant that had a small stall outside selling wonton soup. At night, they’d bring out an electric light. Students who got bored of wandering through the campus often congregated there to chat. Tian Yi walked through the light in front of the stall then vanished into the darkness again.

A moment later, she stopped and leaned against a brick wall. Her eyes were black. Her hair was a mess.

She broke into tears and said, ‘Don’t do it to me again.’

It began to snow. The flakes hovered in the air.

‘Are you afraid of getting pregnant?’ I was three years older than her. I felt protective towards her.

She stayed silent and pushed me away. After we’d made love the night before, we’d clung to each for hours, our legs tightly entwined.

‘Look, the wind is altering the structure of the snow crystals,’ I said, noticing her staring at the flakes on the ground. In the two months that we’d been going out together, I’d found that the only times she didn’t contradict me were when I talked about things she didn’t understand. I knew very little about art. She often criticised me for being unable to discuss Schubert, Picasso or Shakespeare. ‘Is there anything you do know?’ she would say, staring at me blankly.

Whenever I sensed she was considering breaking up with me, I’d rush off to the library and leaf through the books she’d mentioned during our conversations. I had, in fact, read one of the books she’d talked about — The Man Who Laughs , by Victor Hugo — but had forgotten the name of the author. I also read the blurbs on the backs of Mou Sen’s novels, to help fill the gaps in my knowledge.

‘I don’t want to take things any further,’ she said slowly.

‘You’re worried the university authorities will punish us. They won’t, I promise you. I’m not worried. Everyone on campus is having relationships. It’s not as if we’re renting a private room together.’

‘It’s nothing to do with the university. I just don’t like this situation any more. And my grades are suffering.’

‘I love you, Tian Yi, I want us to stay together,’ I said, clasping her hand. ‘It’s raining now. Let’s go to the library. We can talk about it there.’ Again there was something in the palm of her hand. It felt like a piece of bark or bamboo.

‘I just want to be quiet. I’ve felt so unsettled these last two months. I haven’t been able to finish one book.’ Her voice sounded cold. I saw tears glinting in her eyes.

‘What do psychologists call this emotional state?’ I asked. I wanted to tell her that this is how you feel when you’re in love, but I thought it might annoy her.

‘Why are you so normal?’ she said, looking at me straight in the face. I knew that if she dared look into my eyes, there was a good chance that we’d make up.

‘I could be a brother to you, rather than a boyfriend. Would you prefer that?’

‘You really are too conventional,’ she said, the corner of her mouth curling upwards slightly. She grudgingly allowed me to take her hand, and as we walked on again, she moved a little closer to me.

I once asked Mou Sen what Tian Yi meant when she said I was ‘too conventional’. He said she meant I was too rational, and not dramatic or artistic enough. He said women like men to be witty and passionate. I knew I wasn’t particularly romantic, but I was 1.8 metres tall, honest and reliable — the kind of young man that many women might consider attractive.

On the bulletin board outside the library entrance, someone had stuck a note with a line from a pop song: I’M STILL STANDING IN THE RAIN, WAITING FOR YOU TO COME… The lopsided characters of the official notice next to it resembled rows of toppled cabbages. We walked into the warm hall and headed for the reading room.

‘Let’s keep quiet and read our own books,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you tomorrow.’

‘Can’t we have lunch together in the canteen?’

‘If you don’t do as I ask, I won’t go to Yunnan with you in January.’

‘All right. But I told Mou Sen and Yanyan that I’d go to a party tomorrow night at Beijing Normal. I thought you might like to come too.’

‘Who’s Yanyan?’

‘A reporter for the Workers’ Daily . She was at Southern University with us, but we only really got to know her when we moved up here.’

‘Oh I know, she’s Mou Sen’s girlfriend, isn’t she?’ Tian Yi thought very highly of Mou Sen. She said he was like a walking library.

‘Yes, but she likes to keep that quiet. She’s from the south, so she’s quite old-fashioned about relationships.’

‘Are you implying that I’m too liberated?’ Tian Yi asked, frowning.

I didn’t answer. I was always afraid of saying something that might upset her.

‘All right, I won’t see you tomorrow,’ I agreed reluctantly, then said goodbye and walked off to the science reading room on the third floor.

I was deeply in love with her by then, and felt very attached to her. She’d healed the wounds that my break-up with A-Mei had inflicted on me.

You’ve scattered into the darkness, like a grain of salt dissolving in the ocean. What troubles you now isn’t that you can’t see anything, but that nothing can see you.

I see myself standing on the sunny mountain top, my mouth wide open, and Tian Yi dancing beside me, her hair floating in the wind. It was the first week of our two-week holiday in January 1989.

I pointed to the dense rainforest, and told her that it was the Land of Black Teeth described in The Book of Mountains and Seas .

‘How did people back then make it all the way down here to Yunnan? It took us three days by train to get from Beijing to Kunming, and then another three days on a bus to get here.’ Her face was covered with sweat. She was wearing heavy leather shoes, a pale green shirt and blue dungarees.

As soon as we’d arrived in Xishuangbanna, the tropical tip of southern Yunnan Province, we’d booked ourselves into a hotel and set off straight away into the mountain rainforests.

‘It would have taken them at least three years to ride down here from the ancient capital,’ I said. ‘They would have been lucky to make it alive.’ I looked like an American soldier in my camouflage combat trousers. I was also wearing a Lee denim cap. Tian Yi had forgotten to bring a hat, so she kept trying to take it from me.