Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

In the background, a male newsreader drones: ‘Kim Il-Sung, the General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and Chairman of the Korean People’s Republic, arrived in China today on a state visit…’

‘Turn that radio off!’ my mother says. ‘I’d like to smash it up. I only put it on for Dai Wei. I can’t bear the way they’re always painting such a rosy picture of things.’

Since my mother began to devote her life to caring for me, her view of the world has changed. I often hear her grumbling complaints about the government or the police.

If Bai Ling hadn’t persuaded all those students to join the hunger strike, if moderates like Shu Tong and Liu Gang had managed to retain control of the movement, if the students had evacuated the Square on 30 May, then perhaps I wouldn’t be lying here now… There is a place in the mountain called Warm Spring Valley, where the nine suns rise every morning. As soon as one sun returns to the valley, another one rises up. Each one is carried through the sky on the back of a three-legged bird…

Like a heap of fish scooped from the sea and dropped onto a conveyor belt, your cells move towards their death.

We all squeezed into Shu Tong’s dorm. The night before, he’d come back from an Organising Committee meeting and reported that he was now propaganda chief.

His first mission was to transform his dorm into a news centre, from which he would publish an independent student newspaper and run a broadcast station. He gave me some money and a list of equipment to go and buy at the Haidian electrical store. I wanted to take Tian Yi with me, so I went to find her. I’d heard she was helping set up the Organising Committee’s administration office.

I walked into the arts students’ dorm block and saw a sign pasted onto the door of a ground-floor dorm that said BEIJING UNIVERSITY ORGANISING COMMITTEE: RECEPTION. Bai Ling was in charge of this office. When I entered the dorm she was speaking animatedly to a group of businessmen who’d hoped to have a meeting with Ke Xi. They wanted to offer him advice and financial support. One restaurant owner had arrived with a truckload of mineral water he wanted to donate to the movement, and was waiting for Bai Ling to find someone to help unload the crates.

Tian Yi was in the dorm next door. The sign outside said BEIJING UNIVERSITY ORGANISING COMMITTEE: ADMINISTRATION. She glanced up at me briefly, then returned her attention to the committee meeting minutes she was sorting through. Han Dan, who was now secretary of the Organising Committee, had appointed her his deputy.

Sister Gao had been appointed chairwoman of the security office and spokeswoman for the news centre, but she hadn’t been allocated a room of her own yet, so she’d come to help Tian Yi sort out the freshly printed leaflets which were piled up on the bunk beds.

The occupants of the dorm had moved out, and taken all their belongings and photographs with them. All that remained were four sets of metal bunk beds which were now stacked with piles of white and red paper, and boxes of ink bottles and calligraphy brushes. Now that the room was almost bare, the grime and dust on the large windows was more noticeable.

Two students tore open some boxes and placed a typewriter and a mimeograph machine onto one of the bottom bunks. The room suddenly resembled a black-and-white photograph I’d seen of a rebel faction’s den in the Cultural Revolution. I guessed that those machines had cost over a thousand yuan.

The sheets of white paper on the desk that Tian Yi was sitting at were even more neatly stacked than the ones on her desk in her dorm.

Just as I was about to ask her to accompany me to the Haidian electrical store, she grabbed the hand of a boy who was walking out of the room and said, ‘When I said no, I meant no!’

The boy was holding a box of business cards that had been donated by sympathetic onlookers during the rally at the Square.

‘But you can photocopy them if you want,’ she said, sitting up straight. ‘I’ll get someone to help you.’

I felt obliged to come to Tian Yi’s aid, so I said to the boy, ‘Yes, those cards are for everyone. You can’t take them away.’

‘I collected them myself when I was in the Square,’ the boy said.

‘We’re not asking you to give them to us,’ said Tian Yi. ‘We just need to keep the originals here, so that people can have access to them. They will be vital to the student movement.’ She sounded like a female revolutionary.

‘But I need them for the records office I’m setting up,’ the boy retorted, holding the box tightly in his arms.

‘That’s very presumptuous of you! The administration office is supposed to be in charge of the records.’ Tian Yi’s tone was becoming sterner.

‘You — you really are too bureaucratic,’ he stuttered angrily.

It seemed ridiculous that an anti-bureaucratic struggle had already erupted in this half-hatched, illegal organisation.

‘Well, let’s get the leader to decide,’ Tian Yi said, settling in to her new role.

They marched off to Ke Xi’s room, Tian Yi striding ahead and the boy following behind her. I decided to tag along too.

Ke Xi was cleanly dressed and had just had a haircut. Instead of coming to me for a quick trim, as he usually did, he’d gone to a barbershop and had it clipped short at the back, in the conservative style of a Communist Youth League member.

He was pacing around the room, talking to his subordinates. ‘You must be patient,’ he said. ‘As I’ve told you before, the students who are still attending classes are not our enemies. We need to bring them onto our side. Unity is strength. Set up picket lines outside the classrooms, and urge them to join the boycott. You’re the core members of the student movement. This is the time to show us what you’re made of!’

The guys he was lecturing to looked like computer science students. As they turned round and headed for the door, the people waiting outside swarmed into the room and occupied the vacated benches. Mimi was writing down every word Ke Xi uttered.

Tian Yi couldn’t squeeze herself through the crowd, so I barged my way forward, tapped Ke Xi on the shoulder and said, ‘Ke Xi, this student here is setting up his own records office. He wants to take away the business cards he collected, and he refuses to let anyone have copies. Can you try to talk him round?’

‘What business cards?’ Ke Xi said, moving his eagle eyes towards the boy. A student standing next to me handed Ke Xi a cigarette and lit it for him.

‘I’m a history student,’ the boy said, pulling a few business cards out of the box and handing them to Ke Xi. ‘I collected these cards myself in the Square.’

Ke Xi passed the cards to me, glanced into the box and said, ‘These cards should be kept in the records office, but the administration office should retain copies of them.’ He sucked on his cigarette. ‘That’s the only solution.’

I flicked through the cards and spotted ones from the Beijing Daily , the Hong Kong International Trade Bulletin , the Beijing Bureau of Statistics and the Changsha Yellow Mud Street Bookshop.

‘Is that settled now, then?’ Tian Yi said to the boy. ‘I’ll photocopy them at the printers then return them to you.’ Tian Yi grabbed the box back from the history student and squeezed herself out of the room.

‘Dai Wei, how are things going your end?’ Ke Xi asked me, ignoring the many visitors, including foreign journalists, who’d crowded inside to talk to him. He hadn’t visited Shu Tong’s dorm since the argument he’d had with Wang Fei a few days earlier. Both he and Han Dan supported the mass march planned for the 27th, but all the science students, apart from Old Fu, were against it. The Organising Committee was going to vote on the matter in the afternoon.