Beijing Coma (15 page)

I glanced to the side and saw the ring left by a cup on my bedside table. The splashes of antiseptic lotion next to it matched the urine stains on my sheets. A fly that had lost a wing was crawling around the oily crumbs trapped in a crack in the wood.

The draught blowing in from the corridor smelt of soiled sanitary towels. I closed my eyes and remembered my mother telling me how she gave birth to me in a hospital corridor.

The corridor outside looked like the interior of a long cement pipe. Most of the light from the blue bulbs hanging from the ceiling was sucked away by the dark-green walls. There was a white spittoon on the maroon floor. The lacquer along the central strip of the floor had been worn away, exposing the grey cement underneath.

I lay in the damp bed, waiting for my body to recover. Five days went by. I tried not to think about A-Mei, but her voice kept coming back to me, repeating softly, ‘If we’re going to break up, we might as well get it over and done with.’

It was only when I developed hepatitis that her voice began to fade away, and my breathing was able to return to its normal rhythm.

There was a thin nurse who would flit by like a shadow. She stirred the air when she walked into the room. As the brightness of her dress changed in the moving light, I’d be reminded of the female scents I’d breathed in the past. I didn’t have the strength to ask her not to walk so close to me.

In the end, it was my father’s journal that saved me. When I remembered the misery and death he described, my suffering seemed trivial. During my last three days in hospital, I thought only of the angelic Liu Ping, and the monstrous men who’d carved her up and eaten her. And I murmured to myself, ‘Dai Wei, you must stop wallowing in your emotions and do something with your life. Do something that will make this country a better place . . .’

My mother is talking to someone. ‘Today is 4 February 1990,’ she says. ‘He’s been in a coma for exactly eight months, officer. Even if he did wake up now, he’d be a cretin. He wouldn’t be able to tell you anything.’

I must be back in the flat now. I presume my mother has put me on the iron bed. I have no recollection of being removed from the hospital. I wonder who carried me up the six flights of stairs.

‘He’s just pretending to be dead, the brat,’ the officer says, tapping my face. ‘He’s afraid that we’ll fling him in jail when he wakes up.’

The change of location seems to have had a beneficial effect on me. The noises around me sound clearer and my sense of smell has improved. I can smell the scent of tree-bark in the breeze blowing in through the window and the stale odours in the flat. These odours are the familiar smells of home: my father’s ashes; the insoles, socks and gloves drying out on the radiator; all the things that have fallen behind the radiator, such as scraps of steamed bread, plastic caps of ballpoint pens, the bits of paper that once wrapped meat pies, fried chicken or pickled cabbage; my mother’s clothes and skin, and the disinfectant she sprinkles over the floor.

‘The bastards!’ my mother says as soon as the police officer leaves the room. ‘They turn their guns on innocent people, then brand whoever gets shot a criminal. What kind of morality is that?’

Images of the flat and its immediate surroundings fill my mind, pushing out thoughts of A-Mei, the Guangzhou hospital, and my vague recollection of the Beijing hospital I have just left.

I strain to catch distant noises. It sounds as though it’s snowing. I imagine the cold, hard scene outside the window: the white ice on the ground streaked with yellow debris emitted from the tall chimney of the electricity generator. In the morning, before the ash has fallen from the roofs and the branches of the big locust tree in our compound, the ice is still slippery. Food hawkers from the suburbs fire up their woks in the street outside and sell fried flatbreads. Large green flies dart through the fragrant smoke rising from the charcoal embers. In the afternoon, the flies move to the crates of yogurt stacked on the street corner. Every day, the same two elderly men sit beside the crates, trying to catch some rays of sun. One of them neither talks nor smokes, but just stares blankly at the people passing by. Occasionally a van turns off the main road and drives down the street to collect rubbish or deliver soft drinks to the grocery shop, blocking the way of cyclists, who wait behind it in the freezing cold, ringing their bells impatiently . . .

‘The police dragged him out of hospital last month. They’d found out he was involved in the student demonstrations, and didn’t want news of his condition leaking out. He’s been put under constant surveillance. Two officers visit me every day to remind me to take him to the public security office as soon as he wakes up. Not even Tian Yi dares visit him any more.’

My mother is talking to Yanyan, an old friend of mine from Southern University.

‘I’ll get in touch with her . . .’ Yanyan’s voice takes me back to the autumn night in 1986, when she, Wang Fei and Mou Sen came round to this flat for a beer. They’d just arrived in Beijing. It’s hard to believe that fours years have elapsed since then.

After my stint in the Guangzhou hospital, I managed to pull myself together and graduate from Southern University with distinction. Wang Fei and I came up to Beijing University to do PhDs in molecular biology. Mou Sen went to Beijing Normal University to do a PhD in Chinese literature. He’d found the courage to turn his back on science and follow his passion. Yanyan secured a job as a reporter for the
Workers’ Daily
.

‘Insects are always crawling into his ears and nose, so I had to buy these tweezers,’ my mother says, touching my face. ‘His arms are covered in red blotches. He looks like a sick fish . . .’

I remember setting up the amplifiers in the canteen one afternoon during our first term at Beijing University. Frustrated by the slow pace of political reform, the students had set up unofficial ‘salons’ to discuss the taboo subjects of freedom, human rights and democracy. Some fellow science graduates and I had formed a discussion group called the Pantheon Society, and had invited the renowned astrophysicist Fang Li to give a lecture on China’s political future. He was an outspoken critic of the government. The students held him in high esteem. We nicknamed him China’s Sakharov. The previous month, the Democracy Salon, a rival forum founded by some liberal arts students, had invited the respected investigative reporter Liu Binyan to give a speech. So our society felt we needed to invite someone of Fang Li’s stature to gain the upper hand.

My first two months at Beijing University had gone well. I’d been assigned a tutor and begun preliminary discussions on my dissertation, ‘Primitive Biology in
The Book of Mountains and Seas’
. In my free time, I pored over science journals in the library or helped organise the Pantheon Society’s numerous open meetings.

I was looking forward to Fang Li’s lecture, and had prepared some questions for him, such as, ‘Why do the people of southern China have so little interest in politics, and has this political apathy been instrumental in their region’s economic success?’ But after setting up the amplifiers, I had to go and buy a winter supply of cabbages for my mother. I queued for two hours in the freezing cold, then hauled the twenty cabbages back to the flat and stacked them up on the landing outside our front door. By the time I made it back to the campus, Fang Li’s lecture had almost finished. The canteen was packed. I stood outside an open window and caught the final words: ‘If the government is serious about reform, it must grant us freedom of speech and freedom of the press. These are fundamental human rights. Although they are not everything, without them we have nothing!’

When the audience broke into applause, I tried to squeeze myself inside the door. I didn’t want to be accused of shirking my duties.

‘Give Fang Li a teaching post at Beijing University!’ the students shouted over the applause. Wang Fei held up the banner he’d prepared beforehand and yelled, ‘Give us freedom of expression!’ Everyone stood up and echoed his cry. It suddenly felt very hot inside the canteen.

Shu Tong, the founder of our Pantheon Society, asked the students to shout after him, ‘Up with Democracy, down with Tyranny!’ then cleared his throat and said, ‘Now, it’s time for questions from the floor.’ Shu Tong was a shrewd and canny physics graduate from Shanghai. He was plump and pale-skinned, with well-groomed hair parted on one side, and a faint moustache that hung below his nose like a fine-tooth comb. He liked to cultivate the appearance and demeanour of a top Party leader.

‘Economic development isn’t dependent on political reform,’ Bai Ling said, rising to her feet. ‘The success of the Shenzhen Economic Zone is proof of that. China needs to build up its economy. That’s the priority now. It doesn’t matter whether we call our system capitalist or socialist, as long as it raises people’s living standards.’ Bai Ling was a psychology major. I often spotted her at our open meetings. She was tiny. She’d cut her hair into a short bob, but it didn’t make her look any taller.

‘I haven’t been to Shenzhen, but I’ve read a lot about it,’ Fang Li answered, pushing his glasses further up his nose. ‘Without a democratic political system in place, our economy will eventually flounder. The people’s wealth will be eaten up by the corrupt institutions of this one-party state.’

‘My name is Nuwa,’ another girl called out. ‘I’m an English literature major. Professor Fang, if we demand the right to elect our government and form opposition parties, won’t that make us counter-revolutionaries – criminals conspiring to subvert the state?’ She was a member of the university’s dance troupe. I noticed that she was wearing pink lipstick today. She raised her eyebrows and added, ‘Do you think you could give us a maxim and an aphorism?’

‘The Chinese people don’t want to be dictated to by the Communist Party,’ said Fang Li. ‘They want to be able to elect their public servants and hold them to account. Beijing University has a great democratic tradition. On 4 May 1919, three thousand students from this university gathered in Tiananmen Square to protest against China’s inability to stand up to the West. They argued that the only way to save the nation was to introduce democracy and science. The protest spawned the May Fourth Movement – the most intellectually vibrant period of Chinese history. Years of Communism crushed the May Fourth spirit, but I am confident that your generation will revive it, and bring China into a new age of enlightenment. For the first time in decades, students have been allowed to hold open discussions about China’s future. You must take advantage of this new political climate, and put pressure on the government to speed up the pace of reform. Remember, democracy is not granted, but won . . . My maxim is: “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself ”. My aphorism comes from Confucius’s
Analects
: “If I walk down the road with two other men, at least one of them will be my teacher.”’

Then Old Fu asked a question. He was the general secretary of the Postgraduate Student Association. Although he was only five years older than us, he had a wise, statesman-like air to him, which was why we all called him Old Fu. ‘I’m doing a PhD in physics, and have a very heavy workload,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get involved in politics and use my knowledge to help society in some way, but I don’t have the time to attend all these discussions and seminars.’

‘I’m a scientist too,’ said Professor Fang. ‘The future of our country is an issue that concerns every one of us, no matter which field of study we are pursuing.’ At this, everyone broke into applause again.

Having been stuck by the door for half an hour, I finally managed to edge myself further into the canteen. I raised my hand to ask a question, but Shu Tong didn’t spot me. What I wanted to ask was: ‘Who exactly did the Communists liberate? After the so-called Liberation in 1949, the Party drove one of my grandfathers to commit suicide, forced my uncle to murder the other, and locked my father up in labour camps for twenty years. They claimed they liberated the peasants. But the only peasants I’ve ever seen have been so destitute they don’t know where their next meal is coming from.’

It was another hour before the lecture finally came to a close. At the end of it, I felt more hopeful about China’s future and our ability to bring about change.

We returned to our dorms in high spirits. I wrote a letter to Tang Guoxian, my loud, sporty friend from Southern University, and enclosed some of the Pantheon Society’s political flyers. I told him that Mou Sen found the atmosphere at Beijing Normal depressing, and spent most of his time hanging out in my dorm at Beijing University playing games of Mahjong that would last for two days at a time.

Tang Guoxian was still at Southern University. Wu Bin had taken up a research fellowship at the Wuhan College of Engineering. Sun Chunlin, who’d lent me
The Interpretation of Dreams
, had left academia and gone to make his fortune in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Through his uncle’s backdoor connections, he’d managed to gain a managerial post in a road construction company there.

At the end of November, Sun Chunlin came up to Beijing on a business trip and took our Southern University gang out for an expensive meal. Mou Sen brought Yanyan, the
Workers’ Daily
reporter, with him. He confided in me that she’d agreed to be his girlfriend.

When the sun goes down, a sharp wind blasts through the winter night. It brushes over my skin, sucking the warmth from my clothes and blankets, and soon the room is freezing cold.