Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the spring of 1989, China was roiled by mass protests that flared up sporadically inside its borders. Although these showings of dissent swept up participants from all corners of society, the brunt of international attention lay on the student protesters who hunkered down in Tiananmen Square, a plaza in Beijing -- the largest of its kind in the world -- that adjoins the Forbidden City. Never since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 had so many citizens felt emboldened to air their grievances publicly. A heterodox fraternity of students, professionals, laborers, and even a smattering of the police and military agitated for varying concerns such as an end to profiteering and government corruption, greater freedom of expression, and, more vaguely, the speeding up of democratic reforms. During the heyday of these civic convulsions -- before the government implemented its large-scale crackdown -- demonstrators were heartened by reports that important segments of the country's ruling elite sympathized with their demands.

Ma Jian's Beijing Coma (his third novel to be translated into English), offers an ambitious retelling of the Tiananmen Square protests. The book also looks back to the abject days of the Cultural Revolution and forward to China's jockeying to host the 2008 Olympics.

What is most striking about Ma's wide-angle approach (besides his understanding of the sociopolitical context that fuelled the protests) is his grasp of crowd dynamics and political waffling. It's his understanding of these two elements that gives the book its aura of eyewitness immediacy. These attributes substantiate for the reader how popular movements are susceptible to rumors, infighting, and an array of intrigues; and also how such happenings can uncover latent qualities in their participants -- whether good or bad -- that an overarching summary is prone to omit. On a more literary level, the novel is enhanced by asides that give it an aesthetic foundation and keep it from reading as a straight-shooting protest novel.

One encounters throughout the book many fine-grain observations like this one by the novel's narrator, Dai Wei, on different students' walking habits: "Students from the countryside, still not accustomed to wearing heavy shoes, took steps that were too large. Students from mountainous regions walked with their knees bent and chests tilted forward, as though climbing a steep slope."

Readers of Faulkner may detect an echo in Beijing Coma's opening sentence ("Through the gaping hole where the covered balcony used to be, you see the bulldozed locus tree slowly begin to rise again") with that which begins The Sound and the Fury ("Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting"). As with the mentally disabled character, Benjy, whose consciousness Faulkner takes us inside, the internal monologue that commences Beijing Coma is articulated by one who is profoundly cut off from the world. Unlike Benjy, however, who was born to his condition, Dai Wei was reduced to a mute, vegetative state by a bullet wound to the head, sustained on the night of the government's seizing of Tiananmen Square and its environs. Utterly dependent on his mother -- a former chorus singer for the National Opera Company -- Dai Wei chronicles their lives internally, interpreting the present and reconstructing the past. As is the case with so much of Faulkner's work, it is the past that threatens to engulf the present.

The most wrenching sections of the book, by a fair margin, are those that recall episodes from China's Cultural Revolution. The abiding trait of that era was the suppression of anyone labeled "counterrevolutionary." Because Dai Wei's father -- a onetime principal violinist for the National Opera Company -- was fingered as a "rightist," he was imprisoned in various labor camps for 22 years. The deprivations that he and his companions endured are an affront to the mind. Here is one of the milder incidents that Dai Wei comes across in his father's journal:

There where some dried shreds of sweet potato and pumpkin pulp lying outside the pigpen today. As soon as we spotted them, we pounced on them and stuffed as much as we could into our mouths. The guard on duty was a young man. Nicer than most. At least he didn't beat us. He just sneered and said, "That's disgusting! And you call yourselves intellectuals!..."

If there is an albatross to Beijing Coma's narrative equilibrium, it is that the descriptions of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, which occur early on in this almost 600-page novel, are so unsettling they almost upend the rest of the book's momentum. Yet while the prolapsed descriptions of the activities that take place in the Square, at times, lack the dramatic force of the stories about China's political purges, the same is not true with respect to the depiction of Dai Wei's mother, Chen Huizhen's plight to care for her son.

Chen Huizhen's journey from being an apologist for the Communist regime to becoming openly critical of her government makes for riveting reading. Because of her husband's condemnation as a "rightist," Chen Huizhen was compelled to give birth to Dai Wei in a hospital corridor without medical assistance. Nonetheless, she holds faith with the ruling party's ideology throughout her husband's ordeal while enduring diminished career prospects. In fact, she goes so far as to visit "the university's Party committee office" near the start of the protests to let it be known that she does not support the actions of her son "and that she would support any action the government chose to take."

Gradually, this patriotic fervor is drained away. In part this is due to the burdens of having to negotiate back-channel medical treatments for her son, whom most doctors fear to treat, and to continual harassment by the local police, who are tasked with making sure that victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdowns -- and their families -- refrain from describing their ordeals in public.

To counterbalance the pressures of having to fend for her son, Chen Huizhen takes up Falun Gong. This leads to her undoing. Soon after the government decrees that practitioners of Falun Gong should be treated as social pariahs, she is arrested and made to inform on her peers. Dai Wei's descriptions of his body's deterioration during his mother's incarceration and his account of his mother's frayed sanity following her release are heartrending:

My mother doesn't bother to speak to me. She's come to the conclusion that I'm incapable of reacting to outside stimuli. I'm not sure if I'm able to react to internal stimuli any more either. My body chemistry no longer seems to respond to my emotional moods. If plants were capable of having thoughts, I wonder if they'd be able to sense the sadness of their roots and branches.

Though Beijing Coma is a serious novel about the travails of living in a totalitarian society, it is not unrelentingly dour. Ma deposits many gems of love, compassion, and goodness into his work, making the resilience of his characters all the more visible. (For example, though Chen Huizhen smarts beneath the ostracism of her neighbors, she is visited by Dai Wei's classmates even though an improvement in condition seems unlikely.) This humane work -- by a novelist whose future appearance on a Nobel Prize shortlist would be unsurprising -- merits the interest of any who are interested in the liberation of the captive mind. --Christopher Byrd

Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The American Prospect, The Believer, Guardian America, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.

From the Publisher

Knopf Canada is proud to welcome to the list one of the world’s most significant living writers. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty and deep rage, Beijing Coma is the epic new novel from prize-winning author Ma Jian. It is his masterpiece.

“One of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature.” Gao Xingjian, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Dai Wei is a medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989. Caught by a soldier’s bullet, he falls into a deep coma; as soon as the hospital authorities discover he is an activist, his mother is forced to take him home. She allows pharmacists access to Dai Wei’s body and sells his urine and his left kidney to fund special treatment from Master Yao, a member of the outlawed Falun Gong sect. But during a government crackdown, the Master is arrested and Dai Wei’s mother–who has fallen in love with him–loses her mind.
The millennium draws near and Dai Wei has been in a coma for almost a decade. A sparrow flies through the window and lands on his naked chest; it is a sign that Dai Wei must emerge from his dry cocoon. But China has also undergone a massive transformation in the time that he has been absent. As he prepares to take leave of his old metal bed, Dai Wei realizes that the rich, imaginative world afforded to him as a coma patient is a startling contrast with the death-in-life of the world outside.

“At the heart of Ma Jian’s stories there is both humanity and a piercing, if painful, literary truth.” The Guardian (UK)

The Washington Post - Belle Yang

[Ma Jian's] masterful new novel, Beijing Coma, is informed by his return in 1989 to take part in Democracy Spring. The hero, a student named Dai Wei, is an eyewitness to the killing of his friends in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989, by the People's Liberation Army, which was ordered by the government to put down pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square…Ma Jian, who now lives in London with his translator and partner, Flora Drew, offers the Chinese people an avenue through which to retrieve their souls and emerge from their collective coma. He gives us two choices: remain society's slaves or lose everything and find freedom. This book, inevitably, will be banned in China, but smuggled and pirated Chinese editions will be read avidly there.

The New York Times - Jess Row

…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.

Publishers Weekly

The outcome of this bleak, wrenching generational saga from Ma Jian (Stick Out Your Tongueand 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)

Tom Deveson - The Times (London)

[BEIJING COMA is] epic in scope but intimate in feeling, it uses one man's life to tell the story of China in the latter part of the 20th century . . . Magnificent.

The Los Angeles Times

Beijing Coma doesn't just explain what happened in the spring of 1989. It lives all its breathless hope and anxiety, its immaturity and optimism and terror and monotony, its courage and tragedy, from inside the prison of Dai Wei's living corpse.

Chandrahas Choudhury - The Observer (London)

[A] great achievement.

Tash Aw - The Daily Telegraph

[BEIJING COMA] is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction.

Shirley N. Quan - Library Journal

Already released in Great Britain, where former Chinese dissident Ma now resides, this is a lengthy telling of protagonist Dai Wei's decade-long ordeal as a victim of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. A student in the protest, Dai is shot in the head (a piece of his skull remains in a hospital refrigerator) and lies comatose throughout the narrative, yet his senses remain sharp. Dai's memories of his past romances and active involvement with friends are interwoven with his present state as a "vegetable" being cared for at home by his mother. Descriptions of Dai's frustrating inability to communicate with others while still able to feel, smell, and hear are nothing short of heart-wrenching, as when Dai hears his mother is planning to sell one of his kidneys for money. As in his previous work, Stick Out Your Tongue, Ma does not shy away from commenting on oppression in China. Though this story is sometimes difficult to follow as it jumps between the past and the present, Ma brings a fresh sense of awareness of the Tiananmen tragedy to a new generation. Larger public and academic libraries may want to consider adding. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/15/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

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 theironic 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.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0374110174
  
• ISBN-13: 9780374110178
• Format: Hardcover, 592pp
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Pub. Date: May 2008
• Sales Rank: 18,876

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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 therelike 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 a 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 some time. 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 wake up.’ 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 that the 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 to me 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.


A portion of your brain is still alive. You wander back and forth through the space between your flesh and your memories.


I stare into my mind and glimpse a faint sketch of a scene. It’s the summer night in 1980 when my father arrived back home with a shaven head after he was finally released from the ‘reform-through-labour’ system in which he’d been confined for the previous twenty-two years. He walked into our single room in the opera company’s dormitory block and flung his dusty suitcase into the corner as though it were a bag of rubbish.

My mother hadn’t gone to meet him at the station, although she was almost certain that he’d be arriving on that train.

She gathered up the clothes, hat, belt and rubber-soled shoes that my father removed before he went to sleep that night, and threw them in the bin, together with his metal mug, face towel and toothbrush. She tried to throw away the journal he’d wrapped in sheets of news­papers, but my father snatched it back from her. He said he would need it for the memoirs he was planning to write.

My mother made him promise that the journal didn’t contain the slightest criticism of the Communist Party or the socialist system. After my father assured her that it didn’t, she agreed to hide it in the wooden chest under their bed.

My mother spent the whole of the next day scrubbing the room clean, trying to remove the smell of mould that my father had brought with him.

The celebratory supper we had that night was a happy occasion. My brother and I had glasses set before us, both filled with rice wine.
My mother climbed onto a stool to change the low-wattage bulb to a 40-watt one. It was so bright that you could see the spider’s web in the corner of the room.

My mother had curled her hair with heated tongs. She told my brother to clear away his homework. Once he’d done this, the table looked much larger. The four of us sat down together in front of a steaming dish of braised pigs’ trotters. There was also a plate of fried peanuts on the table, and a bowl of cucumber and vermicelli salad that I’d bought from the market.

I used to hate my father for the misery that his political status had inflicted on us. Because of him, I was ostracised and bullied at school. When my brother and I were walking through the school cafeteria at lunchtime one day, two older kids flicked onto the ground the plate of fried chicken I’d just bought, and shouted, ‘You’re the dog son of a member of the Five Black Categories. What makes you think you have the right to eat meat?’ Then they clipped me around the ears, right in front of my friend Lulu, who lived on the ground floor of our dormitory block.

My father raised his glass to my mother and said, ‘May you stay young and beautiful for ever!’

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Excerpted from Beijing Coma by Jian, Ma Copyright © 2008 by Jian, Ma. Excerpted by permission.
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