May 25, 2008
Geoff Pevere
The Book:
Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian
translated by Flora Drew
Knopf Canada,
592 pages, $34
On June 4, 1989, Dai Wei, the narrator of Ma Jian's epic historical novel Beijing Coma, takes a bullet in the head while attempting to flee the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square. Plunged into a decade-long coma by the wound, the former student activist, a key pro-democracy player in the demonstrations that so riveted real-world attention, is buffeted by memories – of his life, his loves, his political experiences and, most tragically, the terminal wound afflicting his country.
"I am still living, in what Buddhists refer to as the stinking skin-bag of the human body," Dai Wei ruminates after nearly a decade of semi-oblivion.
As the son of musicians persecuted as "rightists" during the Cultural Revolution – among other atrocities, his long-imprisoned father remembers seeing near-starved political inmates mutilate and eat the bodies of the freshly-executed – Dai Wei represents the latest generational turnover of doomed dissidence. But political activism, like human flesh, has a way of forgetting pain and regenerating itself, especially when stoned on its own sense of invincibility.
This is the book's most dramatically sustained and audacious metaphor. The trauma inflicted on Dai Wei's body is inextricable from that imposed on the nation. As the nation powers into the global economy, even Dai Wei's body becomes a commodity. At first his urine is sold as a kind of magic healing tonic, then his cash-strapped mother arranges for the removal and sale of his kidney.
In the same way that Dai Wei is left to lie in catatonic semi-consciousness as his memories swirl around the drain of cognitive decline, so the events at Tiananmen Square – anywhere from 300 deaths (state figures) to 3,000 (student calculations) – have disappeared into a vortex of revisionist cleansing.
Already notorious for writing novels banned in his homeland due to their criticism of China's policies on human rights and Tibet, the now London-based Ma Jian here launches his most sustained and intricate indictment of his former country.
Ma Jian was himself present at Tiananmen in the weeks of May leading up to the state's massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators – previously in self-exile for two years, he returned to China during the brief "Beijing Spring". As novelist, he painstakingly recreates the cycle of idealism, arrogance, confusion and despair that characterized the experience of demonstrators on the ground in the square.
Initially mobilized into action by the death of the reformist former Secretary General Hu Yaobang in April 1989, the largely university-based protesters quickly find themselves dissembling into competing factions and squabbling petty ideologues.
Although prone to sometimes numbingly pedantic debates over the most politically correct protocol, Ma Jian's young would-be revolutionaries are also painfully human. Some are characterized by their body odour and childish resentment, others by their stubborn idealism and romantic allure. (As much as he reflects on the events leading up to the tragedy, Dai Wei fixates on sex, love and the smell of a former lover's foot.) Arguing over the protocol of press conferences and wording of banners, buffeted by conflicting rumours of state response, the demonstrators leave themselves ripe for slaughter long before the rumble of tanks is heard at the perimeter gates.
As witness to, participant in, and ultimate casualty of the events, the flesh-imprisoned Dai Wei is especially vulnerable to torturous musings over what went wrong:
"A light so bright it's almost black hovers above my bed," he observes. "If I'm to die now, I won't feel many regrets. I've been lying here for ten years. I have retrieved every detail of my life. There is nothing left for me to remember. If I'm to die now, I won't feel many regrets, only grief and guilt about the students who died before me."
As horrifying as the author's rendering of the ultimate crackdown is – replete with harrowingly vivid descriptions of bodies crushed by tanks and ripped open by exploding bullets – the infamous slaughter isn't itself the primary object of critical regard in Beijing Coma. Ma Jian focuses more on the collapse that precedes the crush. If anything, this is what marks the novel as both daring and controversial.
It's one thing to damn the Chinese government for doing what it had already proven itself only too willing and able to do in the past. It's quite another to suggest that the demonstrators were nearly as complicit in their own slaughter as those who gave the order to shoot.
Set mostly in 1999, two years after the "handover" of Hong Kong and in the thick of the country's preparation for an Olympic bid – which leads directly to the demolition of the building where Dai Wei lies – Beijing Coma manages to shine a harsh light of history even through the smudged prism of the present. While occasionally choked by a dizzying overabundance of incident, character and detail, especially of the politically windy variety, the book still yanks atrocity out of the shadows and holds human arrogance and folly to account.
By the end of Beijing Coma, Dai Wei has learned that many of his former Tiananmen comrades have become successful 21st century Chinese capitalists. Like their country, they're marching forward, not letting history get in the way of progress.
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