Sense Accessibility

Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

by John Vettese

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

When you have nothing but time to think, where do your thoughts wander?

Dai Wei, the Chinese revolutionary at the center of Beijing Coma, has been in a vegetative state since being shot in Tiananmen Square in 1989. He can sense the outside world through sounds and smells, but has lost all ability to function in it. So, from the gurney in his mother's flat, he spends more than a decade combing through his memory, reliving the minutiae of his life: the books he read, the women he bedded, the schoolmates who influenced his worldview, a leftist father he never quite understood.

Ma Jian unfolds two stories in alternating parallels, but more time is spent on the one whose outcome is a foregone conclusion — the one that ends with Dai taking a bullet to the head. Working forward when we know this ending could have taken the author in any number of interesting directions, and while the boy-to-man life story is certainly rife with commentary and subtext, there seems to be an inordinate amount of dwelling on its lurid details, the "women he bedded" element. Comatose guys, by this account, apparently spend no less time thinking about their dicks than conscious ones. Still, when Ma pulls Dai's thoughts away from the bedroom, the depictions he crafts of revolutionary Beijing are striking. The students are at once impassioned and completely naïve, righteously dedicated to bringing democracy to their country when they don't seem to fully understand what democracy means. Furthermore, the culminating account of the Tiananmen massacre is disquieting in its blunt realism, and Dai hammers home the idea of a man trapped in his memories of an event the Chinese government would prefer to forget.

But the story that ultimately gets shortchanged in doing this is the real-time parallel, where Dai in the gurney is cared for by his doting mother. Once a staunch party loyalist, she saw the government's actions against her son and gradually begins to question a China that seems no less of a cruel autocracy than it was under Mao. We know from his narration that Dai Wei can hear this and process it. But his story might have been more compelling if he'd allowed it more time in his thoughts.

(john.vettese@citypaper.net)