BEIJING COMA by Ma Jian

Book Quote:

“When I walked inside the broadcast tent, a long-haired student from the Central Academy of Art was waving his hands animatedly. ‘…We’re going to build a huge statue called the Goddess of Democracy,’ he said. ‘It’ll be amazing.’ “

Book Review:

Reviewed by Kirstin Merrihew (JUN 13, 2009)

The novel Beijing Coma follows the fictional Dai Wei, a PhD candidate at Beijing University who became a student leader of the protesters in Tiananmen Square during the momentous and tragic month of June, 1989. As the Chinese army was ordered to storm the Square to take back control and subdue the ring leaders by any means necessary, many of Wei’s friends and associates were gunned down or simply run over. That famous actual video of the tank column stopped dead before a single brave man was an aberration. As Wei saw: “As the smoke cleared, a scene appeared before me that singed the retinas of my eyes. On the strip of road which the tank had just rolled over, between a few crushed bicycles, lay a mass of silent, flattened bodies. I could see Bai Ling’s yellow and white striped T-shirt and red banner drenched in blood. Her face was completely flat.”

In the chaos and slaughter, he searched for his former girlfriend. “Then I saw her: it was A-Mei, in a long white dress, her freshly washed hair floating softly around her shoulders. Why was she standing in the line of fire like that? I pulled the blood-stained letter from my pocket, waved it in the air and ran towards her….There was a loud gunshot, flecks of black light, then I saw her fall to her knees.”

Beijing Coma does not censor itself when luridly describing the visceral details of the dead and dying in the Square, but in this review, I will refrain from quoting the most hellish bits. However, such editing isn’t a repudiation of the author’s decision to depict the massacre (or other situations) with bloody, gory precision. It’s just a personal belief that these mental pictures belong in the novel, not here on this review website. Ma Jian had every reason to write as graphically as he did. He was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953 and lived and worked on the Communist mainland until 1987 when he, as a dissident, moved to Hong Kong. He returned to Communist China a number of times, and “supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square.” After Hong Kong reverted to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 (under a “one country, two systems” plan), he moved to Germany and then London and continued to write about his distant homeland. Ma Jian unflinchingly, glaringly uses his fiction to reveal the monstrous cruelties that could and did actually take place in totalitarian China. He doesn’t shy away one iota from the barbarity of the suppression in the Square — the whole truth of which the Chinese authorities have tried to keep under wraps. Many Westerners haven’t yet realized what the full, immediate brunt and the long-term consequences were, especially to those (and their families) who directly took part in the Tiananmen uprising.

Ma Jian did not witness first-hand the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre (so he relied on others for accounts) because, as he relates in this interview (http://www.pwf.cz/en/authors-archive/ma-jian/2445.html), his brother fell into a coma (from which he never really recovered) after an accident in their hometown in late May. Ma Jian, of course, went to him. This family sorrow led the author to also place his main protagonist and narrator, Wei, in a coma precipitated by a bullet wound in Tiananmen. After witnessing A-Mei fall, Wei remembered “…my head exploded. My skeleton was shaken by a bolt of pain. I’d been struck too….My hand reached out to my head but couldn’t find it.”

We readers aren’t technically in Tiananmen Square with Wei either. We are in Wei’s head, intimately sharing his vivid recollections. We actually “meet” Wei well after the brutal suppression in the Square, well after he’d been shot. By the time we enter his thoughts, he had been in a coma for some time. Inside himself, Wei regained gradual awareness of his surroundings, and was able to access memories, although these abilities waxed and waned to a degree and weren’t apparent to most people on the outside. Beijing Coma follows Wei’s inner recollections of the days that led up to June 4, 1989. He, having had nothing to do but think and feel, reconsidered every scrap of memory he could piece together, leaving the reader with an in-depth chronology of the weeks, days, and hours leading to the confrontation on the Square. He also painstakingly traced his existence as a “vegetable” over nearly two decades. Wei lay in various locations including a hospital, a suspect clinic, and several cold and dingy apartments. As an enemy of the State, the government was not particularly concerned with his welfare or that of anyone taking care of him, including his mother. As he lay alone, sometimes abandoned for several days (and susceptible to abuse by strangers and supposed friends alike), he catalogued the slightest physical changes that could herald a chance to break out of his bodily prison. He also flashed back to his childhood and pre-Tiananmen school days.

The son of a a violinist who spent twenty years in a labor camp being “corrected” for being a “rightist” and a woman who craved normality and acceptance for herself and her children, Wei seemed to be on the track to a non-political adult life in the biological sciences. But at the university, he and the rest of the student body ravenously scrounged knowledge of all kinds. They had weathered the Cultural Revolution and its contractively punitive aftermath, and, as Wei explained, “Now that China had opened its doors to the West, we devoured every scrap of information that blew in.”

They also hotly debated every topic under the sun (as most college students tend to), including political ones. Early in the novel, some of the students disagreed about whether economic development (as in the experimental Shenzhen Economic Zone) was dependent on political reform. Bai Ling didn’t think so. A young man named Fang Li countered, “Without a democratic political system in place, our economy will eventually founder. The people’s wealth will be eaten up by the corrupt institutions of this one-party state.” Fang Li’s prediction could still come true for China, but as we have observed in the years since Tiananmen Square, so far the Communist system has been able to continue to restrict freedoms while dramatically expanding economically. Ultimately, the students were not content merely to jaw about reforming government. Their unbridled enthusiasms for applying Western democratic principles outstripped the ability of the Chinese rulers to adjust, and Wei and the others paid the price for young idealism. During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese youth turned more “revolutionary” than their elders; in 1989, the Tiananmen student leaders again went to “extremes,” this time for democracy. Often, the young want to act unreservedly for change; those in power typically prefer more “moderate” steps and fear the unleashing of such “radical” actions.

Having studied biochemistry and anatomy (sometimes, in his classes, dissecting the corpses of executed prisoners), comatose Wei could minutely track his own moribund body’s setbacks and breakthroughs as he lay paralyzed on iron-framed beds. He thought, in the second person: “Your body is a trap, a square with no escape routes.”Wei’s personal state also broadly symbolizes the helplessness of the freedom movement in China. For dissidents such as Ma Jian, or for his novel’s characters, this extended period of one-party rule has kept China from awakening to its true potential: the country is not “conscious” in all the ways it could and “should” be. It “survives” but isn’t fully alive.
I actually read Beijing Coma about a year ago. But for the longest time, I felt a need to digest it and also put some distance between myself and it. I couldn’t bring myself to write a review in a timely fashion when the hardcover was published. I let it sit. The book both awes and horrifies me. Ma Jian chillingly peers into so many de-humanizing Chinese windows, and the tortures and terrors revealed almost paralyze the reader’s mind too. The trampling of dignity, the pressure chamber of compliance, the relentlessness of violence all invade the mind reading the thoughts of prone Dai Wei. Yet, this novel of nearly six hundred pages also shines resplendently with the resilience, the determination, the courage, and the undaunted spirit of humanity. Consider this passage from pages one and two:

“Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You know the grimy windowpanes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtain. but the sparrow wasn’t put off. It jumped inside the covered balcony and ruffled its feathers, releasing a sweet smell of tree bark into the air. Then it flew into your bedroom, landed on your chest and stayed there like a warm egg.

“Your blood is getting warmer. The muscles in your eye sockets quiver. Your eyes will soon fill with tears….A bioelectrical signal darts like a spark of light from the neurons in your motor cortex, down the spinal cord to a muscle fibre at the tip of your finger.

“You will no longer have to rely on your memories to get through the day. This is not a momentary flash of life before death. This is a new beginning.”

Beijing Coma took Ma Jian ten years to complete. It is a work of austere frankness, and poetic beauty. It is one story of youthful vigor, love, and discovery all attempting to stay “healthy” in an ultimately poisonous environment. It portrays the hopefulness of individuals and movements, but also reproves it in the face of political reality. It fervently yearns for the best in human beings but faces the worst. Ma Jian, through his Dai Wei, feels compelled to ask the question, “But once you’ve climbed out of this fleshy tomb, where is there left for you to go?” Oddly, the “freedom” of Wei’s mind is greater in his frozen body than it would be if he got up and walked. Ma Jian’s tome leaves no doubt about why this has been, and continues to be, so.

This novel is a challenge to reader stamina and sensibilities, but it is worth every effort. It is a masterpiece commemorating the sacrifices of the Tiananmen movement and, more widely, China’s ongoing struggles to establish a State worthy of every citizen’s respect and voluntary participation. The ephemeral erection of the Goddess of Democracy constituted a glittering moment — an amazing moment — that galvanized the world, but didn’t shake Communist China’s hierarchy’s hold on power. It remains to be seen how history will use the Tiananmen Square legacy and whether the dream of a non-totalitarian country can be realized.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; Reprint edition (June 9, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ma Jian
EXTRAS:	Excerpt The New York Times review of Beijing Coma
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books on China: Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Out of Mao’s Shadow by Philip P. Pan