Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘Kenneth has sent us a thousand dollars from America. You’re lucky to have a kind relative like that. With this money, I’ll be able to bring you back to life, you lawless rioter…’

I have a raging fever. My thoughts seem to have disconnected from my body. I long for the cool air that wafts over me when my mother opens the fridge door. Although it smells of herbal medicine and sour leftovers, it feels as though it’s blowing from a land of ice and snow.

My mother turns the radio back on, as she always does when she wakes from her midday nap. ‘The Ministry of Public Security has announced that twenty-five Chinese cities and counties have been opened to foreign investment… There are now 11,00 °Chinese students studying abroad… The Shanghai Women’s Association, in conjunction with the local law courts, has set up a Divorce College, and already more than three hundred of the four hundred students enrolled have successfully managed to repair their relationships…’

The stifling temperature conjures up images of roads scorching in the sun, sunburnt skin, hot, shadeless pavements… In the northern region of the Land of Black Teeth lies the Scalding Valley, where the ten suns go to bathe. A large mulberry tree grows in the hot water at the bottom of the valley. When the suns take their bath, nine of them sit on branches below the surface of the water, and one sits on a branch above it…

The cells of your prostate gland absorb ribose, nucleic acid and protein but are unable to meld them together. Your capillaries become weak and limp.

‘You’d better come down!’ Xiao Li said, poking his red face round the door of the dorm. ‘The Organising Committee is going to hold another election. Shu Tong’s very nervous. He wants to get reinstated. Now that it’s clear the government aren’t planning to clamp down on us, lots of students are putting themselves up for election.’

Since I’d forced Xiao Li to join our rally in Tiananmen Square on the day of Hu Yaobang’s funeral, he’d written a poster entitled ‘My Utter Disappointment with the Authorities’ and had become very involved in the student movement.

‘I thought the Organising Committee was going to hold an oath-taking ceremony this morning,’ I said. I’d been up all night with Tian Yi, collecting donations for the student movement outside the Dongzhimen subway exit, and had only just got back to the dorm.

‘They’ve cancelled the ceremony and decided to hold the election this afternoon instead,’ Xiao Li said, sitting down.

I called out to Chen Di, who’d been up all night playing cards in the television room. Then I checked in on Wang Fei and Shu Tong’s dorm, but there was no one there apart from a couple of students who’d travelled up from the provinces.

‘So how did the speeches in the Triangle go?’ I asked Xiao Li.

‘Wang Fei accused Han Dan of being a saboteur, then Han Dan accused him of being a spy. Most of the students who’d come to listen laughed and walked away. Wang Fei’s new girlfriend, Nuwa, had persuaded lots of foreign journalists to attend. She was so furious about the argument, she threw down her microphone and stormed off in a huff.’

‘So where’s Wang Fei now?’ I asked. ‘The idiot!’

Xiao Li looked exhausted. ‘He’s probably gone to the election meeting,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get the science students to cast their votes, none of us will make it back onto the executive.’

‘This is the fourth reshuffle. Go and see if Old Fu is at the meeting. I’ll do a tour of the science block and ask everyone to go and vote.’

I climbed up to each floor of the science block, shouting through my megaphone, but there was hardly anyone around. Since the class boycott had started, many science students had taken advantage of the chaos to return home or go travelling. The ones who’d stayed behind lay on their beds all day with their noses in their books.

By the time I’d managed to round up twenty or so science students to come to the meeting, there were already more than three thousand people packed in the history block’s lecture theatre.

Sister Gao was chairing the meeting. She talked through the rules and procedures, explaining that the candidates would be called one by one onto the stage to give a five-minute talk about the contribution they could make to the student movement. When she finished speaking, a man jumped onto the stage. He said he was a crane operator on a nearby construction site, and had been sent by his fellow workers to convey their support for the students and appreciation for their efforts in building a new China.

Shu Tong, who was standing next to him, took a sip of water, thanked him cursorily then launched into his speech, setting out his vision for a three-stage democratic campaign. In the first stage, the students would focus on class boycotts, demonstrations and dialogue with the government; in the next stage, they would set up independent radio stations and newspapers. Before he’d finished explaining the third stage, which involved taking to the streets in October in a nationwide movement for democracy, his five minutes came to an end and he had to cut his speech short. He’d worked himself up into such a state of excitement that his face was dripping with sweat.

Then it was Old Fu’s turn to speak. He said the student movement shouldn’t be turned into a national salvation movement, and proposed that, during times of emergency, the members of the Organising Committee be granted absolute powers. He ended by urging the committee members to read the posters in the Triangle every day, to ensure they stayed in touch with grass-roots opinion.

His speech didn’t go down very well. He’d sounded like a logistics manager. I doubted that he’d get many votes.

The next candidate walked up to the microphone. Zhang Jie, who was supervising the proceedings, asked to see his student card. The man replied loudly, ‘I don’t have a student card. My name is Shang Zhao.’

‘Which department are you from?’ Sister Gao asked. ‘Who are your guarantors?’

‘I don’t have any guarantors. I study from home, so I seldom come to the campus.’

‘Well you can’t put yourself up for election, then,’ Sister Gao replied.

‘I was called up here because the students put my name forward. Isn’t this supposed to be a democratic election?’ It was true that he’d been nominated. His name was on the blackboard. But he didn’t look like a student. He looked more like a professor, or a plain-clothes policeman. He delivered a dry speech about the need for the students to abide by the constitution and remain on guard against conspirators intent on using the movement to overthrow the state.

I scanned the audience, looking for the traitor Mao Da, and spotted him in the row below me. Of the three thousand students sitting in the lecture theatre, I guessed that about two or three hundred were government informers, and that they would vote for this guy called Shang Zhao.

Just as Wang Fei was about to start his speech, a student who’d witnessed the public row between him and Han Dan earlier snatched the microphone and said: ‘So tell us, are you a spy or not?’ The intervention created such an uproar that Sister Gao and Bai Ling had no choice but to ask Wang Fei to leave the stage.

Ke Xi displayed his usual oratory skills. He said that he was prepared to lay down his life for democracy and freedom. He claimed he’d already bid his last farewell to his parents, and was ready to fight to the bitter end. The journalists standing at the front quickly pointed their cameras at him and snapped away.

Liu Gang and Hai Feng’s speeches were well received. Zhuzi had tied a white bandanna around his head. He introduced himself as ‘one of the older graduate law students’ and said that if he were elected onto the committee he’d be able to provide invaluable legal advice.