Beijing Coma (10 page)

What used to annoy me most about my father was the way he ate. He didn’t let one grain of rice slip his attention. If a scrap of food dropped onto the table, he’d scoop it up at once and toss it into his mouth. After every meal, he’d furtively sweep discarded bones and fruit peel into his lunch box. A few hours later he’d take the box into a corner of the room and quietly chew on the contents. My mother would try to hunt out his secret stashes, but never managed to find them all, so there was always a smell of mould and decay in the flat. But after I read the following passage of his journal, I forgave him his eccentric behaviour: ‘. . . There were some dried shreds of sweet potato and pumpkin pulp lying outside the pigpen today. As soon as we spotted them, we pounced on them and stuffed as much as we could into our mouths. The guard on duty was a young man. Nicer than most. At least he didn’t beat us. He just sneered and said, “That’s disgusting! And you call yourselves intellectuals . . .”’

I knew I couldn’t tell my mother what I’d read. If she’d known that her husband had been reduced to living like a dog, it would have made a mockery of her efforts to join the Party.

A page of my father’s journal was devoted to a fellow rightist called Zhang Bo. ‘. . . When I refused to beat up my friend Zhang Bo, the officers handcuffed my hands behind my back. They didn’t take the cuffs off for a month. At mealtimes, I had to lick my rice porridge off a sheet of newspaper, like a dog. I couldn’t lie down to sleep. I couldn’t even wipe the shit from my arse. I wasn’t a security guard. How could they ask me to attack my own friend? . . . Everyone knew that Zhang Bo was short-sighted. When he scribbled “Mao Zedong” on his matchbox he couldn’t have seen the words “Bring Down Liu Shaoqi” printed on the other side. He was daydreaming at the time. It was an innocent doodle. The camp leaders accused him of urging the Chinese people to “Bring Down Mao Zedong”. How ridiculous! . . . Even if it had been deliberate, it was a minor mistake. He certainly didn’t deserve to be executed for it.’

My father listed the objects that Zhang Bo left behind: ‘One pair of leather shoes; one checked woollen scarf; one fruit peeler, handle missing. His closest relative is called Cai Li. Address: Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Hongqiao District, Shanghai.’

My father had suffered a lot for refusing to beat up this man. He was clearly less of a coward than I’d assumed him to be.

I didn’t dare mention my father’s journal to A-Mei, either. The only person with whom I discussed it was Mou Sen. He said that the suffering our parents endured would cause our generation to question the autocratic system we lived under.

A-Mei and I boarded a train to Guangxi Province. It was the first time we’d taken a train together, and the first time I’d travelled with a girl.

Southern University had broken up for the summer, and I’d decided to go to the neighbouring province of Guangxi to visit the Overseas Chinese Farm where my father was sent in 1963. When the Vietnam War broke out in 1965, the area was in the direct line of attack. The authorities were afraid that the rightists incarcerated in the farm might take advantage of the chaos to escape across the border, so they moved them to my father’s native province of Shandong.

A-Mei wanted to visit her aunt in nearby Liuzhou, and I hoped to make a side trip to Guilin to visit Director Liu, who had been so kind to my father, and his daughter Liu Ping. In my mind’s eye, Liu Ping had taken on the features of an angel, with her hair in bunches, her small, delicate ears, and her arms stretched out like wings. Besides, Guilin, with its green peaks and winding rivers, was a famous beauty spot, and I thought A-Mei would enjoy the trip.

A-Mei and I weren’t officially a couple, but I’d taken her out for a meal at the small restaurant outside the campus gates. I’d ordered pigs’ trotters braised in peanut sauce, which was a local speciality I hadn’t tasted before. It was delicious. I’d also taken her swimming at the Guangzhou sports centre, and had held her hand while crossing the road.

After her first trip back to Hong Kong, she brought me a carton of Marlboro cigarettes. She said that everyone else was buying them in the duty-free shop, and she didn’t want to miss out on a bargain. But I knew that she was just trying to help me make some money, because you could sell those cigarettes outside Guangzhou train station for fifteen yuan a pack, which was enough to buy me lunch for a week.

Whenever she went to Hong Kong after that, she’d bring me a couple of cartons. After her third trip, she gave me a cassette of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto conducted by Karajan. Unfortunately I didn’t own a cassette player. So many people borrowed it from me that, after a week, the tape snapped.

I suppose we were in what’s called ‘the early stages of courtship’.

The train carriage was packed full. We sat on the wooden bench, squashed up against the metal door. At each station we were bashed by the luggage of the passengers who squeezed in. When the men sitting opposite us tore the legs off their deep-fried chickens and opened bottles of beer with their teeth, grease and alcohol splashed onto A-Mei’s sandals. She tucked her feet away under the bench and turned her face to the window. After a long and sleepless night, we finally made it to Liuzhou Town.

As soon as we arrived, we decided to set off for Fish Peak Hill. From a distance the hill looked more like a penis than a fish.

I took a picture of A-Mei with her instamatic camera. Through the viewfinder, I was able to stare straight into her eyes. I moved around her, trying to find the best shot, but she looked beautiful from every angle. When I held the camera still, she gazed back at me through the lens, raising her eyebrows to widen her eyes.

Halfway up the hill, we came to a cave. A cool breeze blew over us as we stood outside it. A-Mei told me that the hill had seven interconnected caves, like the seven orifices of a human head, and that, according to local belief, if you succeeded in passing through all of them you would achieve spiritual enlightenment. This was a very difficult task, though. Some of the holes were so tiny that only small children could crawl through them.

‘Let’s go inside,’ I said. ‘I love climbing into caves. What do you think this one is – the nose or the ear? It’s lucky I’ve brought my torch.’ I undid the top button of my shirt. On the train I’d undone all the buttons, much to A-Mei’s displeasure. She was a very proper and well-brought-up girl.

‘No – I’m frightened of caves,’ she said. ‘Let’s just follow the path to the top of the hill. Apparently, if you make it to the peak, you’ll enjoy years of prosperity.’

‘Why are you Hong Kong people so obsessed with money and prosperity? You’re such philistines.’ Whenever I accused the Hong Kongese of being uncultured, there was nothing she could say, because she herself had told me that people in Hong Kong never read books.

A group of tourists stopped right next to us to enjoy the cool breeze blowing from the cave. I asked one of them to take a photograph of A-Mei and me. Fortunately, A-Mei didn’t protest. After the photo was taken, we continued up the hill.

Later, when we were coming down the hill in the dusk, I put my arms around her and kissed her. She’d just paused to take a swig from her water bottle and I’d moved closer and asked for a sip.

At the bottom of the hill, we hugged each other again, but didn’t kiss. She looked at me, with a slightly nervous smile, and said, ‘Who are you?’ Then she stopped speaking in her broken Mandarin and muttered a few sentences in Cantonese.

‘I didn’t understand a word of that,’ I said.

‘You weren’t supposed to,’ she answered slowly.

Then I said, ‘I like you,’ after which she bowed her head and stared at her feet.

I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned into my embrace. We began walking again very slowly. A large lake stretched before us. The reflected peak of the hill behind us plunged straight down into the deep green water. I wanted to sink my hands and tongue into every cavity of her body. The only girl I’d touched since Lulu was a girl at a friend’s birthday party. I’d danced cheek to cheek with her, and run my hand down her back when the lights went out.

There weren’t many other tourists around, so I bent down and kissed A-Mei again. She stopped walking. Her body seemed to grow heavier.

‘That’s very daring of you!’ she said with a smile, gently pushing me away. In the dim light, I watched her fiddle with a lock of her hair. Her delicate hands were paler than her face. She looked up at me and didn’t move. I felt a sudden surge of love for this girl in the white skirt, who was so different from me. We were standing very close, staring into each other’s eyes. I put my arms around her and licked her hair, fingers, nose, ears, hair grip, eyebrows. I didn’t care what I kissed, as long as it was part of her.

From that moment onwards, she became the centre of my life.

We stayed in the spare room of her aunt’s flat that night. After I turned out the lights, I sat on the edge of A-Mei’s bed and put my hand between her legs. I sat there stroking her all night, until just before sunrise I saw the tiredness in her eyes, and returned to my bed to sleep.

In the morning I left A-Mei with her aunt and caught a long-distance bus that delivered me to Wuxuan at three in the afternoon. It was a bustling, crowded market town. The dusty road outside the bus station smelt of diesel engines and dung. Small street stalls were selling clothes, hats and fake leather shoes that had been bought in the markets of Guangzhou. The dirty, crumbling walls behind them were pasted with peeling posters of foreign women in bikinis and tigers leaping across rocky mountains. Hung from a cable suspended between a door frame and a telegraph pole, like a piece of skewered meat, was a poster of a blonde woman leaning on a limousine. I asked for directions, and soon found my way to the headquarters of the Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee, where I met up with Dr Song, an old university friend of A-Mei’s aunt. Dr Song had been a surgeon at Wuxuan County Hospital, but during the national campaign to rectify past wrongs launched by the liberal-leaning leader Hu Yaobang, he was transferred to the Revolutionary Committee to research the history of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi Province.

He checked my student card, read the introduction letter from A-Mei’s aunt, and said, ‘Why waste your summer holidays coming here? You could be visiting the tourist sites of Guilin. And why on earth would you want to visit a reform-through-labour camp?’

I told him that my father had come to Wuxuan in 1963 and had spent two years working in the Guangxi Overseas Chinese Farm nearby. I wanted to visit it, but didn’t know exactly where it was.

Dr Song looked surprised. ‘What was your father’s name?’ he asked, checking my student card again.

‘Dai Changjie. He played for the National Opera Company’s orchestra.’ I didn’t want to disclose that he’d been branded a rightist. It was very dark inside the low-ceilinged brick hut. I turned my eyes to the brightness outside the window. There was so much dust on the panes that everything looked blurred. Most of the sky was hidden by a row of brick huts.

‘Was he the rightist who played the violin?’ As the thought came to his mind, the wrinkles above his eyebrows twitched for a moment.

‘Did you know him?’

‘Yes. I remember many of the inmates of that farm. Your father came to visit me once, when he was ill. He had a stomach inflammation. He’d developed the condition in the Gansu labour camp. How is he now?’

‘He died three years ago, from stomach cancer. Just a year after his final release.’ After these words left my mouth, my throat felt sore and dry.

‘Was his rightist label removed?’

‘Yes, a few months before he died. Did you know Director Liu, the farm’s education officer?’

‘It’s a good thing your father was transferred to Shandong,’ Dr Song murmured, looking away. It was as if he was speaking to himself.

‘Why?’

‘He might have been eaten, eaten like the others.’

He spoke so softly that it was hard for me to fully understand what he was saying.

‘They ate Director Liu,’ he mumbled. ‘When we went to inspect the farm last month, we retrieved two dried human livers from a peasant who lives nearby. He’d kept them all these years. Whenever he fell ill, he’d break off a small piece and make medicinal tonics with it. One of the livers belonged to Director Liu. Although it had dried out, it was still about this big.’ He looked up at me and gestured the size with his hands.

‘They ate him?’ I remembered a passage in my father’s journal that described an act of cannibalism he’d witnessed in the Gansu camp: ‘Three days after Jiang died of starvation, Hu and Gao secretly sliced some flesh from the buttock and thigh of his corpse and roasted it on a fire. They didn’t expect Jiang’s wife to turn up in the camp the next day and ask to see the corpse. She wept for hours, hugging his mutilated body in her arms.’ As the image shot back into my mind, my teeth began to chatter.

‘You’re still young. You haven’t seen much of the world. I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘I’m a biology student, and have taken courses in medicine, so I’m not easily shocked. But I just can’t imagine how anyone could bring themselves to eat another human being. My father told me that, of the three thousand rightists sent to the Gansu reform-through-labour camp, 1,700 died of starvation. Sometimes the survivors became so famished that they had to resort to eating the corpses.’

Dr Song walked over to the locked cabinet, picked up the two thermos flasks that were resting on top of it, gave them a shake, removed the stopper from one of them and poured some hot water into an empty cup. Then he brought out a small canister of tea, scooped out some leaves, dropped them into the hot water and placed a lid on the cup.