Beijing Coma (3 page)

I picked up the thermos flask and poured some hot water into a pot of jasmine tea, inhaling the tobacco smoke that my father was exhaling. I was thirteen, and had already smoked a few cigarettes on the sly by then.

My father took a sip of the tea and said, ‘Mmm, that tastes good!’ He had a cigarette in his left hand and a pair of chopsticks in his right.

‘I posted several packets of that tea to the Shandong camp.’

‘You shouldn’t have bothered. I had to give them all to our education officers. Drinking tea as good as this while undergoing ideological remoulding would have been considered an act of defiance.’

‘Didn’t you give violin lessons to one of their children?’ my mother asked.

‘That was down in Guangxi Province on the farm supervised by Overseas Chinese. Director Liu was a nice man. He moved back to China from Malaysia after Liberation. It was brave of him to ask a rightist like me to teach his daughter. He even invited me to stay for supper a couple of times. His daughter, Liu Ping, was very talented. With good coaching, she could have become a professional violinist. Once my rehabilitation has been sorted out, I’d like to go back down to Guangxi and pay them a visit.’

My father kept a photograph he’d taken of them pressed inside the pages of his copy of the
Selected Works of Mao Zedong
. Liu Ping was in a white skirt, and was standing between Director Liu and my father holding her violin in her arms. She looked about twelve or thirteen.

My mother shot me a glance and said, ‘You mustn’t repeat anything you hear in this room to your classmates.’

‘I know, Mum. Dad, can you speak English?’

‘
Of course!
’ my father replied proudly in English. ‘I’ll give you lessons. I guarantee that you’ll come top of the class in all your English tests.’

‘Dad, Chairman Mao said that we must be “united, serious, intense and lively”,’ my brother exclaimed as he chewed on his last peanut.

‘You shouldn’t go around spouting Mao Zedong’s words like that. Just content yourself with memorising them.’ An anxious look flitted across my father’s face.

‘Anyway, you got the quote wrong,’ I said to my brother. ‘What Chairman Mao said was that we should “unite together, study seriously and intensely, then go home with a lively attitude”.’

Suddenly, all the lights went out.

‘Not another power cut,’ my mother groaned.

I went to my camp bed in the corner of the room to fetch my precious torch. I kept it hidden under my pillow so that I could read my
Selected Stories from the Book of Mountains and Seas
after everyone had gone to sleep. When it was dark, the torchlight made the battered basket hanging on the wall look like the face of a mysterious ghoul. The dried sprigs of spring onion that stuck out through the holes were the ghoul’s dishevelled hair.

‘Hey, I wonder what happened to the company’s stage designer, Old Li,’ my father muttered. Back in 1958, my father and Old Li were both sent to the same labour camp in Gansu Province.

‘You didn’t hear? He was skin and bone when he was released from the camp. On his first night back, he gobbled a whole duck, four bowls of rice and downed half a bottle of rice wine. He went out for a walk afterwards and his stomach exploded. He collapsed on the street and died.’

‘I lost touch with my fellow Gansu inmates after I was transferred to the Guangxi farm. We rightists weren’t allowed to write to each other. In Gansu everyone thought that Old Li had the best chance of surviving the camp. After we’d been working on the fields all day, most of us would lie on the floor and rest, but he’d still be rushing around, full of energy. He once climbed into the stable and ate a bowl of horse feed and some seeds that had been soaking in fertiliser. His mouth swelled up horribly. Sometimes he’d even eat maggots he found crawling around the cesspit.’

‘He was the best-looking man in the company. The soprano, Xiao Lu, nearly killed herself when he was sent away.’

‘He was very ingenious. One day, three rightists who worked in the camp’s cafeteria were sent to the local town to fetch a batch of yams. When they returned, Old Li waited outside the cesspit, and after the men went for a shit, he scooped out the excrement, rinsed it in water and picked out the chunks of undigested yam. He managed to eat about a kilo of them. He knew the three men were so starving, they wouldn’t have been able to resist munching a few raw yams on the way back from the town. There were three thousand inmates in the camp. We’d been on starvation rations for half a year, but Old Li was the only one of us who managed to still look healthy. He even had enough energy to fetch water every morning to wash his face.’

The candle on the table shone into my father’s blank eyes. The flames reflected in his pupils grew gradually smaller and smaller.

‘That’s disgusting!’ My full stomach churned when I heard him speak of people eating excrement and maggots.

‘If you kids mention any of this to anyone, you’ll be arrested and made to live like that yourselves. Do you hear me?’ My mother placed her hand over her mouth and whispered to my father, ‘Don’t speak of those things in front of the children. If any of it got out, our family would be finished.’

I shone my torch onto my mother’s foot. Her big toes were splayed away from the rest of her feet, and moved up and down as she spoke. Under the white torchlight, my father’s feet looked dark and wrinkled. Most of his gnarled toenails were cracked.

‘We mustn’t mention to anyone that we’re thinking of moving abroad,’ my mother continued. ‘If the government launches another political crackdown, it might be enough to get us arrested. By the way, your brother’s son, Dai Dongsheng, came and stayed with us for a few days a while ago.’

‘What was he doing here?’ My father pushed the red candle deeper into the mouth of the beer bottle.

‘It was just after the responsibility system was introduced in the countryside a couple of years ago, allowing farmers to sell some of their produce on the free market. Your brother sent Dongsheng here with more than fifty kilos of ginger to sell. I took a bag to the opera company, and managed to sell ten kilos. Then I sold another five kilos to some friends. But, without telling me, the boy took a bag out onto the street and set up a stall. Not only did the police confiscate all his ginger, they also gave him a hundred-yuan fine. In the end, I had to pay for his train ticket back home.’

‘So how is my brother?’ My father had long since severed his ties with his elder brother who lived in Dezhou, our family’s ancestral village in Shandong Province. During the reform movement in the early 1950s, when Mao ordered land to be redistributed to the poor and classified landowners as the enemy of the people, my grandfather, who owned two fields and three cows, was branded an ‘evil tyrant’. My father’s brother was forced to bury him alive. Had he refused, he himself would have been executed.

‘Still not right in the head.’ My mother didn’t like talking about him either.

‘He shouldn’t have gone back to Dezhou during the land reform movement.’

When my cousin, Dongsheng, came to stay, I learned that, before Liberation, his father had been a lawyer in the port city of Qingdao.

‘He wanted to make sure your parents didn’t come to harm,’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t blame him. The land reform work team made him do it. Forcing a man to kill his own father – what a way to test someone’s revolutionary fervour! Wasn’t it enough that they confiscated your father’s land? And your mother didn’t come out of it very well either, going off and marrying the team leader.’

My cousin told me that, when the work team held a struggle session in Dezhou, my grandmother jumped at the opportunity to denounce my grandfather. He had three wives, and she wanted to be freed from him. She married the team leader just a few hours after my grandfather was buried alive.

‘That’s not fair! She was forced to marry him.’ My father hated anyone criticising his mother. But both he and his brother broke all contact with her after she married the team leader.

The noises in the room seemed much louder now that the lights were out.

In the darkness, my father turned to my mother again and said, ‘You drew a line between you and your capitalist family as soon as the Communists took over, but you still haven’t been awarded Party membership.’ When my father’s face turned red, he sometimes had the courage to stand up to my mother.

‘That’s because I’m married to you. If you hadn’t been labelled a rightist, I would have been invited to join the Party in the 1950s. You ruined my life.’ When my mother got angry all her toes splayed out, making her feet look much wider.

My father fell silent and tucked his feet under the bed. They’d only spent two days together, and already they were arguing.

‘The Party may have treated you unjustly in the past,’ my mother continued, ‘but now that Deng Xiaoping and his reformers are at the helm, everything will change. The new General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, is determined to redress past wrongs. He’s been leading the campaign to rehabilitate rightists. If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be sitting here with us today. Did you hear what I said, children? Hu Yaobang has saved our family.’

The lights suddenly came back on again. My mother stood up and barked, ‘Turn the lights off. It’s time for bed!’

Fractured episodes from the past flit back to me. My mind returns to that summer night when my parents were reunited. I can see my mother’s angry face – the corners of her mouth twisting into a grimace, beads of sweat dripping down between her eyebrows. The red candle’s flame flickered from side to side as my parents fanned themselves. My father used a piece of cardboard. Although the breeze it created wasn’t strong, when it blew on my face my skin felt cooler. The images waver like scenes from an old, scratched film projected onto an open-air screen shaking in the breeze.

The next image is not of my father, but of Lulu, whose skin always smelt of pencil shavings and erasers. When her face first appears, I hear the sound of gunfire, then everything falls silent again. The streets are empty. A bicycle zooms past. There are red and yellow banners emblazoned with slogans strung across the telegraph poles flanking the road. Someone walks by, their arms folded across their chest, and spits onto the pavement . . . It’s a cold winter day now. Lulu is skipping down the pavement, kicking a bottle-top along as she goes. The black plaits on the sides of her head and the satchel on her back swing from side to side as she moves. She’s wearing blue trousers and a pair of padded corduroy shoes. She zigzags behind the moving bottle-top. When she loses her balance, she flings out her arms like a bird and wriggles her little fingers. She kicks the bottle-top as hard as she can, but because it’s so flat, it never goes very far. I’m following her on the other side of the street. The cabbage I’m kicking doesn’t travel very far either, and makes even less noise than her bottle-top. In an attempt to attract her attention, I kick the cabbage into a gate, and scrape my shoes noisily against the lower metal bar.

We are walking home after school. The sun is setting behind us. The long shadows of our bodies and of the trees lining the road stretch on the pavements before us. Then darkness falls and a terrible fear grips me. I leave Lulu alone on the street and race back home as fast as I can.

The night often caught me unawares. It would slip out from under tricycle carts and from around street corners, and blot out the dusk. I would have to grope my way home. But it always knew which route I’d take, and would follow behind me all the way. The further I ran the darker it became. Faces grew indistinct. My body seemed to shrink into the gloom. The entrance to the opera company’s dormitory block opened its black mouth to me. I knew I’d have to drag myself through it in order to get back to our room. Sometimes there would be a light shining in the stairwell, so faint that all I could make out were the bicycles propped against the banisters and the Chairman Mao slogans painted on the walls. Usually there was no light at all, because the residents had a habit of stealing the bulbs when no one was looking, and since the batteries of my torch often ran out, I’d have to walk upstairs in the pitch dark. I hated the dark – that vast, untouchable substance.

Whenever I reached the entrance, my scalp would go numb, and I’d cry out: ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ If Lulu was back already, she’d poke her head out from her family’s room on the ground floor – sometimes all I’d see were her leg and half her face – and make strange noises to frighten me. She knew all my fears and weaknesses. I hated her. Sometimes, I’d kick her door as I passed.

I remember when we were about nine or ten her mother, who worked in the opera company’s accounts office, took her away for the whole summer. When I saw her again on the first day back at school her face was tanned. Her body had sprouted up like a needle mushroom after the rain, but her head was still the same size. It looked as though it had been planted onto someone else’s body.

On the way to school, her longer legs allowed her to stride out in front of me. The red skirt that reached down to her knees, and her left arm with its Young Pioneer red armband, moved with great lightness. I’d watch the petals printed on her skirt shudder over her bottom. On the straight path that ran through the yard it was impossible for me to keep up with her. Whenever she heard me move closer, she’d quicken her pace. My only chance to catch up came when the path turned into the main road. She’d always stop there and glance back to see if I was still behind, and I’d take advantage of this moment to sprint over to her. One time when she turned round she tossed me a plum, but I didn’t catch it. The purple fruit rolled down the path, then came to a stop. ‘You idiot!’ she cried out, taking a few steps towards me. ‘No wonder you haven’t been allowed to join the Young Pioneers.’ When she spoke to me I could see her white teeth . . .