Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

I thought about the application forms I’d sent off to various American universities a few days before. My academic results and TOEFL score were high enough to get me a place at a middle-ranking college. The day I sent them, Tian Yi said to me, ‘Don’t stay in China. You’ll be much better off in America. And with your rich great-uncle, you won’t even have to worry about getting a scholarship.’

I tried to go to sleep but my mind flitted back to the woods beyond the campus walls.

Two days before, Tian Yi and I had decided to leave the crowded campus and go for a quiet walk. We walked to the end of the football pitch, sneaked over an ancient red wall and entered the deserted grounds of the Old Summer Palace. There was spring blossom on the peach trees growing wild on a grassy mound. At the foot of the slope a stream flowed silently towards a distant lake.

Tian Yi was wearing a black dress tied at the waist with a red leather belt. The dappled sunlight fell on her neck and shoulders.

This side of the wall was darker and damper, and covered in thick creepers. The peach trees were ragged and unkempt. Against their pale-green leaves, Tian Yi looked like a celestial fairy about to take flight. I was amazed to find this rural haven hidden beyond our campus walls. Tian Yi and I lay down on the grass beneath the peach trees. I kissed the warm splashes of sunlight on her skin.

We hadn’t had a chance to make love in the two months since we’d returned from Yunnan.

‘You want to?’ she whispered, pulling my hand away from her thighs. ‘Then take your trousers off. I want to see it…’ Her face was the same pale pink as the blossom on the trees above.

‘Men’s bodies aren’t that great to look at, you know.’ I unbuttoned her dress and watched the sunlight fall on her breasts.

She stood up and combed her fingers through her hair. There were blades of damp grass stuck to the top of her pale feet, and fine leaves caught between her toes. Her nails looked like fallen petals. She pulled off her knickers, climbed out of her dress then squatted down in front of me, her black pubic hair brushing against the green grass.

‘Do you see? I’ve got my period…’

I stared at the dark flesh between her pale thighs, pulled her down and rolled on top of her, licking her face. She dug her fingers into my back and grabbed my hair. We writhed against each other. As I poured myself into her I felt her thighs shudder.

‘Get up! Get up!’ someone shouted, kicking my legs. Behind us were three men, bending beneath the low branches.

‘Get up, you little hooligans! We’re taking you to the Summer Palace police station.’

We hurriedly got dressed. ‘She’s my girlfriend,’ I said, standing up. ‘We’re at university together.’ The men were all shorter than me. Each held a wooden baton.

‘You’re hooligans,’ said the fat officer who seemed to be in charge. ‘We’re arresting you now and you can talk later.’

‘We have our student cards.’ Tian Yi was clutching her bra and a clump of grass in her hand. Strands of hair were stuck to her damp cheeks.

‘Hurry up now!’ The fat officer grabbed the cards without looking at them. The other two impatiently tapped the branches with their batons.

‘We’re going out together, we’re not hooligans,’ Tian Yi said, once she’d buttoned up her dress.

‘Don’t you know that it’s against the law to have intercourse before marriage?’ said the fat one. Then he glanced at the officer in sunglasses and said, ‘Take her away and get her to tell you all she knows about his family background.’

The officer in sunglasses led Tian Yi down the grassy slope. She was still clasping her rolled-up bra in her hand.

‘What’s her name? Tell us!’ the other two shouted.

‘Tian Yi,’ I replied.

‘What’s her father’s name?’

I knew that if I named her father and his work unit, Tian Yi’s future would be ruined. I was determined to keep silent.

‘You don’t want to tell us? You want us to beat you up? We saw what you two were up to. We’ll take you back to the station and examine your trousers. Any sperm, and you’ll get at least five years!’ He poked me in the thigh with his baton.

I panicked. ‘I’m sorry, comrades. It was wrong of me to bring her here. Please let us go. We’ll never come back again. We’ll be good students from now on and study hard.’

‘Let you go? Do you know where you are? You’ve illegally trespassed onto a state-protected heritage site and you’ve committed an obscene act. That’s two offences. What’s more, the university regulations clearly forbid students to have relationships during term time.’

‘But we’re in love, we couldn’t help it. I give you my word that we won’t do this again. We’ll concentrate on our studies. Please let us go.’

‘If you want to go back to the campus, you’ll have to leave us a deposit of at least three hundred yuan. But I’ll have to discuss it with my two mates first.’

I pulled out all the money from my pockets. Fortunately, the day before I’d gone home and collected 120 yuan to cover a month’s living expenses. The fat officer took the notes from me without looking and stuffed them into his pocket. Then he lit a cigarette, inhaled, and let a puff of smoke escape through the gaps in his yellow teeth.

‘This won’t even cover our overtime pay. Squat down and don’t move until we return. We’re going to talk to the university’s security office.’

I stared down at the dirty green weeds and the moving shadows of the branches. After a while, I raised my head and looked at the path Tian Yi had walked down. The grass on the slope was still. Now and then a bird cried out as it flitted between the trees. I wondered where they’d taken Tian Yi.

At last, I plucked up my courage, stood up and followed the wall downhill. When I reached the stream at the bottom of the slope, I saw her. She was alone, standing against the wall, shaking so much that she couldn’t speak. I hurriedly gave her a leg-up, and we clambered back over the wall into the campus. There were fewer trees there, so it was much brighter. Students were kicking a ball about. Tian Yi was still shaking. She could hardly walk. I sat down with her on the grass. She bit her sleeve then sobbed into her folded arms.

For the next forty-eight hours, Tian Yi wouldn’t speak to me. Her dorm mates told me that she’d come down with flu and needed to rest. When I went to visit her, she told me to go away. I wasn’t brave enough to ask her what the police had done to her. I knew that even if I did ask, she wouldn’t tell me. I hated myself for having taken her to that place, and for allowing the police to lead her away.

Then, when I was eating supper in the canteen, I overheard someone say that a gang of thugs had been prowling the grounds of the Old Summer Palace pretending to be policemen, extorting cash from students they caught having sex. They’d made a fortune from the racket, he said. Something in my memory exploded: policemen don’t refer to their colleagues as ‘mates’. How could I have failed to notice?

Apparently, the men were bicycle menders. One day they pounced on a foreign student who was having sex with an English major, and extorted two hundred US dollars. They paid backhanders to the police authorities at the Summer Palace. It was a good business. They caught an average of seven couples a day in those woods. We’d been duped by a gang of thugs. I didn’t dare tell Tian Yi. I knew it would only make her feel worse.

Wang Fei’s dorm was so smoky that, after dozing off for a few minutes, I woke up again with a sore throat.

‘Well, next time you bring a girl back, just let us know first,’ Shu Tong said, still annoyed at having been kept awake by Wang Fei’s noisy shenanigans the night before.