Beijing Coma (9 page)

Tang Guoxian was in the bunk next to mine. He banged on the wall and cried up to Wang Fei, ‘It was a girl you wanted to pull – not the light switch! Ha!’ He was tall, high-spirited and sporty, and always liked to bash something when he laughed. If you didn’t get out of his way in time, his big hands would land on your face.

‘I definitely don’t have an unconscious,’ Wu Bin said from his bunk. He had a shaven head, scornful eyes and a thin black moustache. He was always rambling on about Hitler’s SS, Soviet double agents, or Sherlock Holmes. He’d often go missing for a couple of days. A rumour spread that he was a spy planted by the local police. Whenever he was around, everyone watched what they said.

‘If you didn’t have an unconscious, where would you get all your ambition from?’ said Wang Fei. ‘Didn’t you say you wanted to be a great detective one day? Ambition is fuelled by unconscious desires.’ Wang Fei always spoke his mind, and often ended up offending people. The month before, he’d got beaten up outside the cafeteria by some political education students.

‘Read us another passage, Mou Sen,’ Sun Chunlin said. His bunk was nearest the door, so he was the first person to be able to enjoy a breeze when it blew in.

Wang Fei circled the room slowly, then leaned down and swiped the book from Mou Sen’s hands. Sun Chunlin ran over, shouting, ‘Don’t break it!’ then grabbed it back and began to read another passage: ‘“If the unconcious, as an element in the subject’s waking thoughts, has to be represented in a dream, it may be replaced very appropriately by subterranean regions. – These, where they occur without any reference to analytic treatment, stand for the female body or the womb. – ‘Down below’ in dreams often relates to the genitals, ‘up above’, on the contrary, to the face, mouth or breast . . .”’ When he reached the end of the page he said, ‘Guangzhou Bookstore received only a hundred copies of this book. They sold out in an hour.’

‘Dreams are no more than a chaotic series of nerve impulses. I never have dreams,’ Wu Bin said, rubbing his triangular eyes. The week before, after his scholarship money had come through, he’d avoided us for days, afraid that we might bully him into taking us out for a meal.

‘I dreamed of a man’s corpse once. There was green moss growing on the skin.’ Mou Sen smoothed his hair back. He was the only science student whose hair was so long it hung over the eyes.

‘That signifies you have an unconscious urge to kill your father! Ha!’ Tang Guoxian punched the wooden frame of his bunk and roared with laughter. The room’s temperature seemed to soar again.

‘Freud was a genius!’ said Sun Chunlin, taking another gulp of tea.

‘Be careful you don’t get yourselves accused of spiritual pollution,’ Wu Bin said, grabbing a bottle of lemonade someone had left on the table. ‘If the university authorities call me in and ask me about this conversation, I’ll tell them I didn’t hear a thing.’ Wu Bin was very selfish. If he wanted something – whether it was someone’s comb, tiger balm or new pair of shoes – he’d simply help himself to it, without bothering to utter a word of thanks.

The only time he showed any generosity was when he stole a chicken that belonged to Mrs Qian who worked in the university cafeteria. He cooked it on a small electric hob in the corridor and shared it with everyone in our dorm. He’d killed the chicken after the university’s governor called for a clean-up of the campus, complaining that poultry and dogs belonging to the university’s staff had been fouling the paths and lawns. Mrs Qian didn’t realise that the staff weren’t allowed to rear animals on the campus.

A few minutes after Wu Bin ran into our dorm with the dead chicken, Mrs Qian turned up at our door. She saw one of us slicing up some ginger, and guessed that we were planning to make a stew out of her beloved pet. By then, Wu Bin had taken the chicken to the men’s toilets and hidden it in the water tank. Assuming that her pet was still alive, Mrs Qian whistled and clucked, trying to coax it out from its hiding place. When there was still no sound from it after half an hour, she reluctantly gave up and walked away.

‘See, you do have an unconscious after all, Wu Bin!’ Wang Fei said. ‘You’re afraid that if you get into trouble with the university authorities, you won’t be granted Party membership! I tell you, the Communist Party is a rotting corpse. Don’t be fooled by the cloak of reform it’s draped over itself. Underneath, it’s still the same.’

‘The book doesn’t belong to me,’ Sun Chunlin said, passing it to Mou Sen again. ‘I’ll have to give it back tomorrow. If we all squeeze up on your bed, we can read it together.’ Sun Chunlin came from a privileged background. He was one of the few students who owned a bicycle. His uncle was head of the Municipal Department of Communications. He always had cash on him. The imported digital watch on his wrist sparkled whenever he walked past.

I ran over to Mou Sen’s bed and squeezed in next to Wang Fei. The previous month, I’d had to wait until two thirty in the morning for my turn to read
The Second Wave
. I finished it in two hours, then woke Mou Sen and passed it to him. But Freud’s book was much thicker, and looked as though it would take all night to read, so everyone was desperate to get their hands on it first.

‘Ask your Hong Kong girlfriend to buy you a copy!’ Wang Fei jibed, trying to push me off the bed.

‘Shut up! You never read books, but as soon as you hear the words “sexual climax” you suddenly become interested.’ I looked at the haircut I’d just given him. After years of cutting my brother’s hair, I’d become quite proficient at it.

‘Why don’t you just stick to
The Book of Mountains and Seas
and plan your expedition!’ Tang Guoxian said, then roared with laughter. He was a champion marathon runner. Although I was as tall as him, I was much less strong. He was always pouring ridicule on my ambition to be an explorer.

In the end, Wang Fei and Sun Chunlin lost interest, so I read the book with Mou Sen. He’d planned to go to a private screening of
Casablanca
at the Guangzhou University campus, but soon changed his mind when he saw the book. He insisted that we read it on my bunk. He said that he found my pillow more comfortable than his, and was able to think more clearly when he rested his head on it, so I had no choice but to let him squeeze up next to me. We turned to the first chapter. Whenever he stopped to take notes, I’d read on to the end of the page, then close my eyes and wait for him to catch up.

Since the police had forced me to write the self-confession, I’d developed an aversion to writing. I rarely kept a journal. The only time I wrote anything now was when I copied Mou Sen’s lecture notes.

It was getting dark outside. After an hour of having our heads pressed together, our ears were beginning to hurt. We decided to take turns reading the book aloud to each other. To save time, we lit just one cigarette and passed it between us. We kept going until five in the morning. Everyone else in the dorm was fast asleep behind their mosquito nets. When we could stay awake no longer, we nodded off, our heads resting on
The Interpretation of Dreams.

I dreamed that, just as I was about to drown in a river, I discovered I could fly. I flapped my arms and soared into the sky, yelling at the top of my voice.

‘Shut up!’ Mou Sen hissed. ‘I was in the middle of a good dream.’

‘Stop kidding yourself – you’ll never write a novel,’ I mumbled. He was always talking about his dreams, and would jot them down as soon as he woke up. He said that dreams were where writers got all their inspiration from.

I liked Freud’s ideas, especially his theories about the repression of memories from the conscious mind.

After reading Freud, I understood why I’d hated my father so much. Unconsciously, I’d viewed him as my enemy and oppressor. As long as he was around, I’d felt unable to hold my head up high.

I also understood why my mother remained married to my father, despite all the misery he caused her. As a young woman, she’d cut herself off from her ‘bourgeois’ family. When her father jumped off the roof of a tall building after the Communists appropriated his factory, she didn’t even go to identify the corpse. To prove her loyalty to the Party, she abandoned her mother and siblings. But when my father got into trouble, she couldn’t let go of him. She knew that if she lost him, she would have nothing left.

Around the time I met A-Mei, I picked up a literary journal in the library and read a translation of excerpts from Kafka’s novel,
The Castle
. Mou Sen had told me that if you didn’t read Kafka, you’d never grasp the underlying principles of biology.

When I finished reading the excerpts, I was reminded again of my father. The protagonist is a surveyor who is summoned to a castle to conduct a land survey. But when he arrives in the village governed by the castle, he finds that he’s neither needed nor understood. Some of the villagers even suspect him of being an impostor. The surveyor strives to gain recognition of his status, but is thwarted again and again by illogical bureaucracy. He moves in with a barmaid he dislikes, hoping that her relationship with an important official will help him gain access to the castle. In his struggle to resist his fate he is forced to become cunning and base, but inside, his frustrated spirit is writhing.

My father was condemned as a rightist. Like Kafka’s protagonist, he had no control over his fate or his status. My mother was his legal wife. The family she gave him enabled him at least to sense that he existed in society. But there was no love between them. Six years after my father returned from America to Communist China, he was no longer a professional violinist. He lost his identity. He knew that at any moment he could be executed for saying something the Party didn’t like, or for carrying in his pocket an object they didn’t approve of. He was as vulnerable as a rabbit in a laboratory. Cowardice and stuttering became his only skills in life. Even though my mother and I pitied him, we regarded him as an outsider. We never really knew what was going on in his mind. But I will never forget the look of terror that haunted his face so often.

I suddenly wanted to find out everything I could about my father.

I pulled out his journal from a pouch in my suitcase. It was an ordinary-looking notebook. When I’d skimmed through it the day my mother gave it to me, I’d wanted to fling it in the bin. I hated how he laced his notes on life in the camp with ingratiating remarks about the Party. While writing his thoughts down, he’d been constantly terrified by what might happen if they were discovered. It had struck me as a very clumsy way to live one’s life.

But now I began to read the journal more closely. In the last third of it, which was written in hospital, I discovered, to my surprise, that he’d secretly found faith in God. I understood now why he’d said how much he regretted not visiting a church or reading the Bible while he was in America, and why he’d asked me to bury his ashes in the graveyard of an American church after he died, pressing the address into my hand.

He wrote that he felt the spirit of God looking down on him. He believed that the suffering he’d endured in the camps had been a test of faith. On the last page of the journal, he wrote: ‘Almighty Father, I’ve spent long enough in Hell. Rescue me now and lead me into Heaven.’

My father was treated like an animal in the camps. The only time he got to eat meat was the day Nixon arrived in China in 1972. Not wanting to be accused of mistreating political prisoners, the government ordered every labour camp to give its inmates pork dumplings for lunch. A few years later, conditions improved a little. The prisoners were issued with sheets of newspaper to wipe their bottoms with and so were able at last to read snippets of news from the outside world.

My father had returned to the motherland after Liberation out of patriotism. He’d wanted to help build a new China, and had no idea that, within a few years, he’d be reduced to total subservience. When he was finally released from the reform-through-labour system, he tried to find a place for himself in society, but discovered that he was an outcast, with no work unit or marketable talent. He spent all his remaining energy struggling to regain his urban residence permit. All he wanted was to be an ordinary citizen like any other.

I wondered where his God had been when he’d needed Him, and what right He had to test my father’s faith in that way.

While I read the journal, I saw parallels with the passages from
The Castle
. In both texts, the spirits of people excluded and oppressed by a mad and irrational system become twisted and warped. Although I didn’t say a word to anyone, something inside me had changed. I was determined that I would, at the very least, avoid my father’s fate.

My father started his journal in 1979, while he was in the camp in Shandong Province. Mao Zedong was dead by then. I doubt that he would have had the courage to keep a journal while the Chairman was alive. Sometimes the entries were just a few sentences long, such as: ‘Early November. Heavy snow. Chen Cun’s been moved to another camp.’ Or: ‘We’ve discovered that you can make a porridge out of wild speargrass seeds. But you can’t eat it while it’s still hot, or your stomach will explode. That’s how Wang Yang died.’

After his release, he became more courageous and began to write about his experiences in greater detail. One passage went: ‘During the “airing of views” meeting at the opera company that day, someone mentioned the photograph that showed me shaking hands with the American guest conductor after our orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in the Beijing Hall of Music. He said that I’d humiliated the Chinese people by trying to ingratiate myself with American imperialist forces. I explained that, in foreign countries, it’s customary for the principal violinist to shake hands with the conductor after a concert, and that besides, it was the American conductor who offered to shake my hand, not the other way round. The photograph had hung in the main meeting room for three years, as an example of a successful cultural exchange between China and the West. Everyone in the company had seen it. Our Party secretary accused me of gazing up at the conductor like a lapdog. I explained that the conductor was standing on a podium, so I had no choice but to look up at him . . .’ If one searched through the newspapers of 1954, I’m sure one could find a print of this photograph that changed my father’s life.