Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

‘I’m tired, I need to sleep,’ Shu Tong said, closing his eyes. ‘I’ll leave it to you and Tian Yi.’

Tian Yi was in the corner with Sister Gao. ‘The Communist Party emerged from the barrel of a gun,’ Sister Gao was telling her. ‘It’s a brutal, rigid organisation. As soon as we stepped out onto the streets, they accused us of creating turmoil.’ Ever since the 4 May march, she’d been advising us to wind up the student movement.

‘Yes, and President Yang Shangkun is a military man too,’ Tian Yi said, dazed from lack of sleep.

‘So is Vice President Wang Zhen,’ Sister Gao said. ‘This country is ruled by the military.’

The corridor was getting too noisy, so we went to sit down in my dorm. Five volunteers were proofreading articles for the next edition of the News Herald . Half of the bunk beds were piled with banners, flags and boxes of stationery. Two students who’d travelled up from Nanjing were asleep on my bed. Chen Di and Dong Rong were folding up some freshly mimeographed pamphlets. Mao Da and Qiu Fa had become so fed up with the chaos they’d moved into another dorm.

When Tian Yi and Bai Ling had finished rewriting the Dialogue Delegation’s petition, they turned to a transcript of the speech General Secretary Zhao Ziyang had just given at the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank. ‘Listen to this,’ Tian Yi said excitedly. ‘“China will not fall into turmoil” and the students are “not opposing our fundamental system, they are merely requesting we rectify a few flaws”.’

‘That’s fantastic!’ Liu Gang said, standing up. ‘We must broadcast it at once. Shu Tong, wake up!’

‘That shows that Zhao Ziyang disagrees with the 26 April editorial,’ Shao Jian said. ‘He’s on our side!’

Xiao Li walked in and read out an emergency proposal just posted by the hunger-striking graduate student in Block 46: ‘“Given the gravity of the current situation, we suggest that we: a) launch a mass hunger strike, time and place to be determined; and b) occupy Tiananmen Square during Gorbachev’s state visit to China. If we don’t escalate our protests, our movement is doomed.” Shall I turn that into a pamphlet?’ Xiao Li had been making mimeographed pamphlets from the most interesting texts he’d seen in the Triangle.

‘No, don’t,’ Shu Tong said. ‘If there’s a hunger strike, what will be the point of a Dialogue Delegation?’

‘But the whole purpose of the hunger strike is to force the government into holding a dialogue,’ Bai Ling said, glancing angrily at Shu Tong.

‘The Organising Committee has opposed the hunger strike, Bai Ling,’ said Wang Fei. ‘If the strikers make headway, they’ll become the voice of the students, and we’ll be mere supporters.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ Nuwa said, slapping his shoulder. ‘You’re supposed to be fighting dictatorship, but deep down you all want to be little emperors.’

‘It’s all very well having General Secretary Zhao Ziyang on our side,’ Shao Jian said, lighting another cigarette, ‘but Deng Xiaoping still holds the reins, and he thinks we’re dangerous counter-revolutionaries. Deng likes to portray himself as a reformer, but don’t be fooled. He’s sly. He was responsible for the Anti-Rightist Campaign, but he managed to make everyone believe it was Mao’s fault.’

‘The hunger strike might spread through the whole country,’ said Sister Gao. ‘If China falls into turmoil, it will be the end of Zhao Ziyang. Over the last few days, the police have retreated to the suburbs. Beijing is a ghost town. They’re waiting for us to start smashing and looting, then they’ll launch a crackdown. We must declare our support for Zhao Ziyang’s speech. It will boost the morale of the students and stop them from doing anything extreme.’

‘Who’s going to replace Han Dan now that he’s resigned?’ Liu Gang asked impatiently. ‘We’d better hold a meeting. Let’s get all the department representatives up here.’

Wang Fei and Nuwa had left the room. Wang Fei had seemed irritated by Nuwa’s criticism a few moments before. Their relationship was quite stormy. They often seemed to be on the verge of breaking up.

Everyone began wandering off. Tian Yi sat down in front of the typewriter and continued trying to teach herself to touch-type. ‘These little keys are upside down,’ she said. ‘They’re impossible to read.’

‘Foreign authors write their books on typewriters,’ I said. ‘If you practise long enough, you’ll get the hang of it.’

‘Those foreigners have twenty-six letters to deal with, we have two thousand,’ Tian Yi said, looking up at me. In the faint light of the room her face had a comforting glow.

As your cells struggle on inside your body, you feel, once again, that you have been buried alive.

‘Ah, you’re here at last, Dai Dongsheng,’ my mother says. ‘Come in and take a look at your cousin. He’s had terrible diarrhoea since the treatment started and it’s not getting any better. What can we do?’

‘He should stay here a few more days. I’ve just spoken to a nurse. She said the non-surgical treatment he’s getting takes longer to show results. He’ll need at least two courses, I should think.’

‘I can’t keep him here that long. The Beijing police might get suspicious and come and track us down. And I’m not sure about that Dr Ma. I followed him last night. He went to the graveyard behind the clinic and tore off some clumps of grass then dug up some roots and insects. They didn’t look like the ingredients of traditional Chinese medicine to me.’

‘He knows what he’s doing. The grasses and insects in the graveyard have supernatural powers. A fox spirit appeared to him in the graveyard a while ago and gave him some herbs to treat a woman’s swollen liver. He made a tincture from them and told the woman to drink it. It gave her acute diarrhoea for three days, but after that, her liver disease was completely cured.’

‘But if this goes on any longer, Dai Wei will be dead in a few days,’ my mother says impatiently.

The herbal soup this folk doctor has been funnelling into my mouth passes straight through me and gushes out the other end. After the first dose he gave me, my eyelids twitched and my stomach and intestines clenched. Blood rushed to my brain, stimulating my motor neurons. For a moment, I felt I could have stretched out my hand and grabbed something, even though I knew my hands were as clenched as chicken claws. Unfortunately, I haven’t had any such reactions to subsequent doses.

‘I’ve come to give you some good news, Auntie. The county Party secretary has asked you out for a meal.’

‘What for? And where would he take us? There aren’t any restaurants in Dezhou.’

‘You have relatives in America, don’t you? The local government wants people who have family abroad to persuade their relatives to return to this county and invest in the local economy. If they succeed, they’ll be rewarded with an urban residency permit. If you get Dai Wei’s great-uncle to set up a business in Dezhou, Taotao might get a residency permit for the county town.’

‘That old man is dead, and his son Kenneth is a professional musician. He wouldn’t want to move to this backwater. And besides, what kind of business could anyone set up here?’

‘A Taiwanese man has opened a noodle factory that employs more than fifty people. It’s doing very well. There’s a talc mine near here as well. So Dai Wei’s cousin could set up a talcum powder factory or a drug factory, if he wanted to.’

‘What use is talc to a drug factory?’

‘Drug factories put talc in their pills. Didn’t you know that? It’s quite safe to consume in small portions. If they didn’t add it, the pills wouldn’t be white or heavy enough, and no one would buy them.’