Belle Yang reviews Beijing Coma by Ma Jian:
After police ransacked his home and interrogated him for bourgeois activities, dissident writer Ma Jian found solace traveling the wild, minority-inhabited regions of China. Upon his return to Beijing, he was further harassed and so left for Hong Kong in 1986, where he began a memoir, Red Dust, and a story collection, Stick Out Your Tongue. Now banned in China, his work reflects on the vagabond’s eternal search for the elusive ideal of home.
His 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. After taking a friend, whose legs had been crushed by a tank, to a hospital mired in the blood of the dead and dying, Dai Wei goes back to the streets, where the conflict is still raging. Seeing his former Hong Kong girlfriend emerge like a vision of the Goddess of Democracy, he runs toward her, but a shot is fired, and she falls to her knees. As he wonders whether she has been hit, a bullet explodes in his head.
Read more about the book from CDT. Read also reviews of the book from:
– Los Angeles Times
– Toronto Star
