Meena Alexander reads from Beijing Coma by Ma Jian at the 2009 Human Rights Book Fair.

Born in Qingdao, Ma Jian worked as a watch-mender’s apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a photojournalist. At the age of 30, he left his job and traveled for three years across China. His 1987 book, Stick Out Your Tongue, prompted the Chinese government to place a blanket ban on his future work. Ma Jian moved to Hong Kong that year. In Beijing Coma, Ma tells the story of the 1989 Democracy Movement via a fictional protestor called Dai Wei, who was left in a coma by the violence in the protests.
 

From Beijing Coma

As you shrink back inside your body, your childhood fears flicker through your mind. All the feelings you've felt in the past have been sheltering inside your flesh.

I can see my body soaking in the hot pool of a public bathhouse. My memories seem as muddled and random as the contents of a rubbish bin.... It was a cold winter night. With a padded jacket draped over my shoulders, I walked towards the bathhouse, carrying my soap and towel in a plastic string bag. I usually took my brother with me, but this time I was going alone. I’d made up my mind that tonight I’d lower myself straight into the hot water and wallow there for some time, rather than edging myself in hesitatingly before quickly jumping out again, as I usually did.

I glanced at the chestnuts roasting in the wok of a street stall outside the entrance, and breathed in their sweet fragrance. Just as I was about to enter the bathhouse, I caught a whiff of the mutton skewers cooking on the stall’s charcoal grill. The smell was so mouth-watering that I turned round and went to buy myself one. I sprinkled the mutton with cumin powder and sat down to eat it on a wooden stool under the street lamp.

I paid for the mutton skewer with the money a shopkeeper had given me for returning our old bottle-tops. My mother had let me keep it. After my father passed away, she often gave me small amounts of pocket money.

A strong wind was blowing around that street corner. It never seemed to let up.

I stared at the lamp on the other side of the street. The parts of the road that it illuminated were busier than the rest. The food stall’s awning rustled in the wind. The air below it smelt of hot brown sugar, mutton and charcoal smoke. People on their way home from work stopped off to buy punnets of dried tofu.

Behind me was a brightly lit shop window, pasted with wedding photographs. The peasant squatting below it turned up the sheepskin collar of his jacket and hunched his shoulders against the wind. All I could see of his face were his sparkling eyes. He was selling a basket of large, pink-fleshed radishes. The radish he’d sliced in half and displayed on the top of the pile was as red as a lamb’s heart.

When I finished the skewer, I pushed through the large quilt that hung across the bathhouse’s entrance, and stepped into the lobby. Immediately, my skin softened in the warm, humid air. There was a synthetic scent of moisturising cream which stung my eyes, and behind it, a fouler stench that reminded me of boiled pigskins. Having just consumed so much greasy mutton, I was struck by a sudden wave of nausea.

Two large portraits of Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng hung in the lobby. Below them was a freshly painted red box in which to post reports of political misconduct and bad behaviour. Next to the box, two women were gazing into a mirror, combing their wet hair. Some of the water dripped onto the ground, the rest ran down the backs of the yellow-and-white jumpers they were wearing. Women were queuing up behind them to comb their hair in front of the mirror. The men didn’t bother to check their appearance. When they walked out into the lobby, they’d just shake their heads, run their fingers through their damp hair then stride outside into the cold.

After I bought myself a ticket, I took off my clothes and headed for the hot pool. White steam rose from its surface. I spotted a space close to the door, gritted my teeth and lowered myself in. I splashed the scorching water onto my face and shoulders in a calm and confident manner, trying to look as though I’d done this many times before. As expected, the other men in the pool shifted their gaze to me, eyeing me with curiosity as I edged myself deeper into the water. They stared at my legs, the strands of hair that had only recently sprouted from my testicles, then glanced at my small, pale nipples.

I had made it. I was an adult now, no longer a child who was afraid of hot water.

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