When the novel Beijing Coma by the Chinese writer Ma Jian came out last year, I had little interest in reading it. Something about the structure of the novel — which is narrated by a man in a coma who is able to perceive, though unable to respond, to what is going on around him — struck me as gimmicky. I probably would have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t been short on reading material at the end of my recent trip. When I traded my copy of Netherland for my friend’s Kindle, Beijing Coma jumped out as the most appealing choice in her “library.”
The narrator of Beijing Coma, Dai Wei, was a (fictional) leader of the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the violent crackdown that ended the protests, he was shot in the head. His injuries sent him into a coma that lasted about 10 years. Ma Jian’s novel, which takes place during the coma, weaves together Dai Wei’s recollections of his early life with the events he witnesses from his sickbed. Most interesting is his day-by-day account of the student protests at Tiananmen, from the early inspiration (Hu Yaobang’s death in April 1989) to the infighting between student leaders that threatened to derail the movement. The six weeks of demonstrations at the Square are now usually overshadowed by the June 4 crackdown; Ma’s novel really focuses on the students’ early idealism and political values.
Living on a university campus in China today, it is almost impossible to imagine a political movement like Tiananmen happening again. The government has been very successful in quashing political discussion and any emergent sources of dissent. Beijing Coma addresses this development as well: From his coma, Dai Wei sees his mother develop an interest in Falun Gong for its supposed healing powers — and then watches as she and her friends are interrogated by police and eventually arrested for participating in an antigovernment cult. At the same time, China’s economic development also takes its toll on Dai Wei and his mother. Their apartment complex in downtown Beijing is due to be torn down and replaced with a high-rise. I won’t spoil the dramatic ending, but suffice it to say that the pair does not leave quietly.
The novel had one annoying stylistic device that at times almost overwhelmed my interest in the plot: Every time the story switched from flashback to the present and back again, the shift was indicated by an italicized passage that was disconnected from the broader story. Occasionally these were quotations from Dai Wei’s favorite book, The Book of Mountains and Seas; more often they were vaguely biological descriptions of what was going on in his comatose body. They were perplexingly irrelevant, and I eventually decided to more or less ignore anything in italics in favor of getting on with the story.
Italicized passages aside, however, Beijing Coma is a worthy read for its depiction of the flowering of political discussion in China in the late 80s, and the subsequent changes — both political and economic — in China.
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