Beijing coma

Review by New York Times Review

A Chinese novel about dissidents whose lives changed forever at Tiananmen. THE Chinese character "rou," meaning "flesh" or "meat," is a three-sided figure with two sets of diagonal slashes inside, meant to resemble a flayed carcass. It's an instantly memorable, if unpalatable, image, and the same is true of the Chinese title of Ma Jian's new novel. "Rou Tu" ("tu" means "earth" or "land") translates, awkwardly, as "Meat Earth" or perhaps "Land of Flesh." It's not difficult to see why Ma's English-language publishers chose "Beijing Coma" instead. But once you've heard it, it's as difficult to forget "Rou Tu" as it is to shake the image of one of the narrator's comrades crushed by a tank on Changan Avenue in Beijing on June 4, 1989: "Her face was completely flat. A mess of black hair obscured her elongated mouth." Make no mistake: in "Beijing Coma" Ma Jian takes as a given Stephen Dedalus's dictum, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." And not just for his protagonist, Dai Wei - who has lain in a waking coma, conscious but paralyzed, since he was shot leaving Tiananmen Square - but also for most of the moving, breathing people who surround him. Trapped in Dai Wei's mind, we move chronologically through his childhood in the Cultural Revolution, his adventures as a lovesick college student and his involvement in the student movement, and then through China's transformative decade, from 1989 to the millennium, as he overhears it from a bed in his aging mother's apartment. Everywhere we look, China is, literally and figuratively, consuming its young. Early in life, Dai Wei is haunted by the story of Liu Ping, a 16-year-old girl who, during the Cultural Revolution, was killed and eaten by people in her village after the authorities instructed them that "if you don't eat the enemy, you are the enemy." Decades later, as he lies helplessly in bed, his mother becomes so desperate for money that she begins marketing his urine as a miracle cure and later sells one of his kidneys to a wealthy businessman. Of course, the primary act of Chinese self-cannibalism in "Beijing Coma" is the Tiananmen Square uprising itself, and here Ma Jian makes a very significant strategic choice. Instead of glossing over the protests and focusing on the bloody aftermath, he presents a day-by-day, sometimes minute-by-minute account of the immensely complex student movement that led up to the events of June 4. As head of security for student protesters from Beijing University, Dai Wei is ideally placed, for dramatic purposes, on the periphery of the leadership, observing his peers as they struggle and squabble, devising new strategies and slogans, trying to best one another's moral authority even as tanks roll into the square. This part of the novel - which is actually the bulk of the novel - involves a very large cast of characters, as well as a dizzying attention to detail, and as such it achieves the mimetic effect of leaving the reader as distracted, ennervated and confused as Dai Wei himself. Ultimately, it's a small price to pay. As venal and self-serving as these students can be, Ma never lets us forget the immense weight of history that rests on their shoulders. We grow to respect and love them not because they are ennobled by circumstances - they're not - but because they fervently believe, against all odds, that some good can emerge from the wreckage of their childhoods and the unbearable losses of their parents' generation. MOST of Dai Wei's friends who survive the aftermath of Tiananmen Square - torture, imprisonment, endless rounds of self-criticism - leave politics behind and embrace the guiding motto of the Deng Xiaoping era: "To get rich is glorious." One of them, Dai Wei's first illicit girlfriend, goes into real estate and buys his mother's building, intending to raze it as part of Beijing's redevelopment in preparation for the Olympics. Driven insane by her own imprisonment after a brief flirtation with Falun Gong, Dai Wei's mother refuses to budge, and the novel ends as the building is torn down around her and her son - two victims of the Chinese state, one mute, one mad, able to do nothing but place their bodies in the way of bulldozers. Anyone who has followed the news from China over the last decade can recall similar images. Here, as he does throughout "Beijing Coma," Ma stays close - painfully close - to the historical record. That indelible final image of protest, coupled with Ma's insistence on telling the story of the Tiananmen protests in such fastidious detail, makes "Beijing Coma" not only an extraordinarily effective novel but also an important political statement, appearing as it does immediately before the 2008 Olympics and a year before the 20th anniversary of the June 4 massacre. In a preface included in the Chinese edition, Ma makes his intentions explicit, arguing that it is the Chinese people who are truly comatose: "Inside Dai Wei," he writes, "there is a strong, resilient person who remembers, and only memory can help people regain the brightness of freedom." In this sense, for all its savagery, "Beijing Coma" is one of the most optimistic novels I've encountered in a long time. Ma Jian's narrator has lain in a waking coma since he was shot at the student protests. Jess Row is the author of "The Train to Lo Wu," a collection of short stories. He teaches at the College of New Jersey.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* China is a vast graveyard, thinks college student Dai Wei when he learns of his violinist father's horrendous treatment during the surreally brutal Cultural Revolution. China is one huge prison, Dai Wei's long-suffering mother declares more than a decade later. Dai Wei has been in a coma ever since he was shot in the head during the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square. He cannot open his eyes, speak, or move, but he is conscious and sensate, listening intently, traveling the long, winding river of memory, and finding solace in the companionship of a sparrow. A courageous and clarion writer, Ma Jian draws on Kafka and the Chinese epic The Book of Mountains and Seas in this mythic, soul-bruising, powerfully allegorical masterwork. He combines reportorial exactitude with potent lyricism and unnerving physicality in his blow-by-blow dramatization of the doomed student protests and heartbreaking cast of terrorized young people starved for learning and love. With particular sensitivity to women, Ma Jian maps the tyrannical madness that flows from the Maoist bloodbath to Tiananmen Square to the persecution of the Falun Gong. Epically detailed yet deeply mysterious, Ma Jian's compassionate and magnificent novel exposes China's catastrophic moral paralysis, and celebrates the inalienable freedom of the mind and spirit.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The outcome of this bleak, wrenching generational saga from Ma Jian (Stick Out Your Tongue and The Noodle Maker) is known from early on: the politicization of Dai Wei, a diligent molecular biology Ph.D. student at Beijing University, ends in Tiananmen Square with a bullet striking him in the head. As the book opens, Dai Wei is just waking from a coma that has continued over 10 years following the June 4, 1989, massacre--still apparently unconscious, but actually aware of his surroundings. The narrative then alternates between Dai Wei's very conscious observations as a nonresponsive ``vegetable'' over the years of his coma, and his childhood and student life. Ma Jian evokes the horrors of an oppressive regime in minute, gruesome detail, particularly in quotidian scenes of his mother's attempts to care for Dai Wei, which eventually lead her to a member of the banned Falun Gong movement. The book's behind-the-scenes portrayal of the nascent student movement hinges on repetitious ideological bickering and sexual power plays. Lengthy expositions of Dai Wei's condition slow the book further, but Ma Jian achieves startling effects through Dai Wei's dispassionate narration, making one man's felled body a symbol of lost possibility. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Unconscious for ten years after being injured during the Tiananmen Square protests, Dai Wei wakes up to a whole new China. Former dissident Ma now lives in London. Reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An unconscious protagonist is the central figure around whom a tapestry of political and personal histories is woven, in the latest from Chinese author Ma Jian (stories: Stick Out Your Tongue, 2006, etc.). Dai Wei, a student at Beijing University, is active in the pro-democracy protest movement that met violent reprisals in the 1989 catastrophe in Tiananmen Square. Dai Wei is shot in the head, rendered comatose, given token medical treatment, then released into the custody of his widowed mother. Then, in a flexible narrative that moves smoothly between immobile death-in-life and the remembered circumstances of childhood and youth, Ma Jian recreates years of mounting tensions between idealistic youths and the agents of a government determined to stifle all difference and dissent. As Dai Wei's body functions independently, his mind responds to news and gossip brought by a decade's worth of visitors (e.g., former classmates who arrive to help "celebrate" his birthday), and revisits his brief, turbulent past. Heady arguments with passionately politicized fellow students are juxtaposed with plaintive glimpsed images of random sexual experiences and unfulfilled romantic relationships. Vacillating awareness of his mother's embittered caretaking jostle against fragmentary memories of his late father (a stubbornly independent anticommunist, whose fate prefigured Dai Wei's own). The novel is overlong, marred by Ma Jian's tendency to abandon drama for extended argument (especially in scenes featuring student protestors). But the arguments are generally vigorous and compelling, and cohere into a rich context that explains the comatose Dai Wei's deeply rooted will to live--and prepares for the ironic conclusion, in which this Asian Rip Van Winkle awakens, after a decade "lived" only in memory and imagination, on the cusp of the new millennium, into an altered world. A complex, confrontational, demanding--and ultimately rewarding--work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpt Through the gaping hole where the covered balcony used to be, you see the bulldozed locust tree slowly begin to rise again. This is a clear sign that from now on you're going to have to take your life seriously. You reach for a pillow and tuck it under your shoulders, propping up your head so that the blood in your brain can flow back down into your heart, allowing your thoughts to clear a little. Your mother used to prop you up like that from time to time. Silvery mornings are always filled with new intentions. But today is the first day of the new millennium, so the dawn is thicker with them than ever. Although the winter frosts haven't set in yet, the soft breeze blowing on your face feels very cold. A smell of urine still hangs in the room. It seeps from your pores when the sunlight falls on your skin. You gaze outside. The morning air isn't rising from the ground as it did yesterday. Instead, it's falling from the sky onto the treetops, then moving slowly through the leaves, brushing past the bloodstained letter caught in the branches, absorbing moisture as it falls. 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 knew the grimy windowpanes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtains. 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 cold egg. Your blood is getting warmer. The muscles of your eye sockets quiver. Your eyes will soon fill with tears. Saliva drips onto the soft palate at the back of your mouth. A reflex is triggered, and the palate rises, closing off the nasal passage and allowing the saliva to flow into your pharynx. The muscles of the oesophagus, which have been dormant for so many years, contract, projecting the saliva down into your stomach. 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. 'Waa, waaah . . .' A baby's choked cry cuts through the fetid air. A tiny naked body seems to be trembling on a cold concrete floor . . . It's me. I've crawled out between my mother's legs, my head splitting with pain. I bat my hand in the pool of blood that gathers around me . . . My mother often recounted how she was forced to wear a shirt embroidered with the words wife of a rightist when she gave birth to me. The doctor on duty didn't dare offer to help bring this 'son of a capitalist dog' into the world. Fortunately, my mother passed out after her waters broke, so she didn't feel any pain when I pushed myself out into the hospital corridor. And now, all these years later, I, too, am lying unconscious in a hospital. Only the occasional sound of glass injection ampoules being snapped open tells me that I'm still alive. Yes, it's me. My mother's eldest son. The eyes of a buried frog flash through my mind. It's still alive. It was I who trapped it in the jar and buried it in the earth . . . The dark corridor outside is very long. At the end of it is the operating room, where bodies are handled like mere heaps of flesh . . . And the girl I see now - what's her name? A-Mei. She's walking towards me, just a white silhouette. She has no smell. Her lips are trembling. I'm lying on a hospital bed, just as my father did before he died. I'm Dai Wei - the seed that he left behind. Am I beginning to remember things? I must be alive, then. Or perhaps I'm fading away, flitting, one last time, through the ruins of my past. No, I can't be dead. I can hear noises. Death is silent. 'He's just pretending to be dead . . .' my mother mumbles to someone. 'I can't eat this pak choi. It's full of sand.' It's me she's talking about. I hear a noise close to my ear. It's somebody's colon rumbling. Where's my mouth? My face? I can see a yellow blur before my eyes, but can't smell anything yet. I hear a baby crying somewhere in the distance and occasionally a thermos flask being filled with hot water. The yellow light splinters. Perhaps a bird just flew across the sky. I sense that I'm waking from a long sleep. Everything sounds new and unfamiliar. What happened to me? I see Tian Yi and me hand in hand, running for our lives. Is that a memory? Did it really happen? Tanks roll towards us. There are fires burning everywhere, and the sound of screaming . . .And what about now? Did I pass out when the tanks rolled towards me? Is this still the same day? When my father was lying in hospital waiting to die, the stench of dirty sheets and rotten orange peel was sometimes strong enough to mask the pervasive smell of rusty metal beds. When the evening sky blocked up the window, the filthy curtains merged into the golden sunlight and the room became slightly more transparent, and enabled me at least to sense that my father was still alive . . . On that last afternoon, I didn't dare look at him. I turned instead to the window, and stared at the red slogan raise the glorious red flag of Marxism and struggle boldly onwards hanging on the roof of the hospital building behind, and at the small strip of sky above it . . . During those last days of his life, my father talked about the three years he spent as a music student in America. He mentioned a girl from California whom he'd met when he was there. She was called Flora, which means flower in Latin. He said that when she played the violin, she would look down at the floor and he could gaze at her long eyelashes. She'd promised to visit him in Beijing after she left college. But by the time she graduated, China had become a communist country, and no foreigners were allowed inside. I remember the black, rotten molar at the side of his mouth. While he spoke to us in hospital, he'd stroke his cotton sheet and the urinary catheter inserted into his abdomen underneath. 'Technically speaking, he's a vegetable,' says a nurse to my right. 'But at least the IV fluid is still entering his vein. That's a good sign.' She seems to be speaking through a face mask and tearing a piece of muslin. The noises vibrate through me, and for a moment I gain a vague sense of the size and weight of my body. If I'm a vegetable, I must have been lying here unconscious for sometime. So, am I waking up now? My father comes into view again. His face is so blurred, it looks as though I'm seeing it through a wire mesh. My father was also attached to an intravenous drip when he breathed his last breath. His left eyeball reflected like a windowpane the roof of the hospital building behind, a slant of sky and a few branches of a tree. If I were to die now, my closed eyes wouldn't reflect a thing. Perhaps I only have a few minutes left to live, and this is just a momentary recovery of consciousness before death. 'Huh! I'm probably wasting my time here. He's never going to wakeup.' My mother's voice sounds both near and far away. It floats through the air. Maybe this is how noises sounded to my father just before he died. In those last few moments of his life, the oxygen mask on his face and the plastic tube inserted into his nose looked superfluous. Had the nurses not been regularly removing the phlegm from his throat, or pouring milk into his stomach through a rubber feeding tube, he would have died on that metal bed weeks before. Just as he was about to pass away, I sensed his eyes focus on me. I was tugging my brother's shirt. The cake crumbs in his hands scattered onto my father's sheet. He was trying to climb onto my father's bed. The key hanging from his neck clunked against the metal bed frame. I yanked the strap of his leather satchel with such force that it snapped in half. 'Get down!' my mother shouted, her eyes red with fury. My brother burst into tears. I fell silent. A second later, my father sank into the cage of medical equipment surrounding him and entered my memory. Life and death had converged inside his body. It had all seemed so simple. 'He's gone,' the nurse said, without taking off her face mask. With the tip of her shoe, she flicked aside the discarded chopsticks and cotton wool she'd used to clear his phlegm, then told my mother to go to reception and complete the required formalities. If his body wasn't taken to the mortuary before midnight, my mother would be charged another night for the hospital room. Director Guo, the personnel officer of the opera company my parents belonged to, advised my mother to apply for my father's posthumous political rehabilitation, pointing out thatthe compensation money could help cover the hospital fees. My father stopped breathing and became a corpse. His body lay on the bed, as large as before. I stood beside him, with his watch on my wrist. After the cremation, my mother stood at the bus stop cradling the box of ashes in her arms and said, 'Your father's last words were that he wanted his ashes buried in America. That rightist! Even at the point of death he refused to repent.' As our bus approached, she cried out, 'At least from now on we won't have to live in a constant state of fear!' She placed the box of ashes under her iron bed. Before I went to sleep, I'd often pull it out and take a peek inside. The more afraid I grew of the ashes, the more I wanted to gaze at them. My mother said that if a friend of hers were to leave China, she'd give them the box and ask them to bury it abroad so that my father's spirit could rise into a foreign heaven. 'You must go and study abroad, my son,' my father often repeated tome when he was in hospital. So, I'm still alive . . . I may be lying in hospital, but at least I'm not dead. I've just been buried alive inside my body . . . I remember the day I caught that frog. Our teacher had told us to catch one so that we could later study their skeletons. After I caught my frog, I put it in a glass jar, pierced a hole in the metal cap, then buried it in the earth. Our teacher told us that worms and ants would crawl inside and eat away all the flesh within a month, leaving a clean skeleton behind. I bought some alcohol solution, ready to wipe off any scraps of flesh still remaining on the bones. But before the month was out, a family living on the ground floor of our building built a kitchen over the hole where I'd buried it. The frog must have become a skeleton years ago. While its bones lie trapped in the jar, I lie buried inside my body, waiting to die. Excerpted from Beijing Coma by Ma Jian. Copyright (c) 2008 by Ma Jian. Translation copyright (c) 2008 by Flora Drew. Published in May 2008 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Beijing Coma by Ma Jian All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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