Beijing Coma (60 page)

‘This is an urgent announcement,’ Chen Di said. ‘Citizens in the western suburbs need our help. Can a hundred student marshals go there as soon as possible . . . The army has reached the Hongmiao intersection already, but has been halted by a wall of protestors. An old woman lay down in front of the trucks and shouted, “If you want to go any further, you’ll have to drive over my dead body.”’

I rushed back and forth, trying to ensure the broadcast station and the northern side of the Monument were well protected. Student marshals from Qinghua University and the Central Institute of National Minorities were guarding the south side. Dong Rong and Mao Da assembled a large band of students and went off to help man the barricades in the western suburbs.

Most of the students and hunger strikers had left the buses and shelters by now and had gathered round the Monument. Although no longer divided into distinct university groups, the crowd was well-organised, with the student marshals and male students on the outside, and the girls safely protected within.

Tang Guoxian and Wu Bin paced up and down waving their megaphones and torches in the air. I was weak with exhaustion and could feel my eyes drooping. I went to find Tian Yi, hoping I could sit down with her for a while.

She’d just written a bulletin for the propaganda office, and was now lying down in a breezy corner of the Monument’s upper terrace. Her face was as grey as a sheet of newspaper. Her camera was still hanging around her neck.

I opened her lunch box to check whether she’d eaten the strawberries I’d given her. They were untouched and covered in mould.

Nevertheless, she leaned over and said, ‘Mmm, they smell delicious. I don’t have to eat them. The smell is enough!’

‘I’ve got some instant noodles for you, but there’s no hot water.’ The dirty pamphlets on the ground flew into the air as people walked by. I lay down beside her on the cold paving stones.

‘Look, my hair’s falling out,’ she said, rubbing her head. ‘Have you seen my bottle of conditioner?’

‘Why don’t you go back to the campus to have a shower?’ I said, still struggling to stay awake.

‘I’d be accused of desertion. Anyway, it’s too late now. I wouldn’t find a taxi at this time of night.’

‘I can’t help out any more. I’m exhausted. Ke Xi wants to be commander-in-chief again. I don’t know where he gets his energy from!’ I turned onto my side and glanced at my watch. ‘My God! It’s midnight. The government said the army would be here by now.’ As I dozed off, the crowd’s chants rang through my ears. ‘You can cut off our heads or shoot us, but we’ll never leave Tiananmen Square!’ Nuwa then spoke over the loudspeakers, sounding as confident and carefree as a Voice of America presenter. ‘The government wants to destroy our broadcast station. Everyone must protect it and make sure their evil plan doesn’t succeed . . .’

The wind slams the rain against the windows of the covered balcony.

I feel the damp enter the room and seep into the biscuits on the table, my father’s ashes, and the old shoes lying in the corner. I’d love to slip my feet into a pair of damp trainers. But shoes are made only for upright bodies. Prone bodies must remain barefoot in bed.

The damp air from the landing also moves into the flat and absorbs the smell of the turnips rotting in the kitchen.

My mother begins the first day of April by breaking into song. She sings again and again, ‘
I say farewell to life, to life!
’ struggling to hit the top note. In the past, she had no problem reaching that high C. Then she stops singing, and in her most theatrical voice begins to recite the telephone directory to me, reading out the numbers of everything from hairdressers to universities.

Has her yearning for a telephone driven her mad? She only submitted her application two months ago. Many people have to wait a year before they get connected.

My brother is moving to England. He has already booked his plane ticket. He’s going to start a four-year degree course at the University of Nottingham.

‘If this rain doesn’t stop soon, our visitors won’t be able to make it here. It’s two o’clock already.’ My mother closes the telephone directory at last and touches my forehead. Yesterday she cut my hair with a freezing pair of clippers. I can still smell the kerosene she lubricated them with.

I hear a soft knock on the door. It’s someone with tact, not a rude policeman or an elderly busybody.

‘Come in, Master Yao. Isn’t this rain terrible? It hasn’t stopped since last night!’

Master Yao tells my mother that he not only knows An Qi, but also an old friend of hers from the National Opera Company. It’s hard to tell his age from his voice. His speech is clipped and precise.

They walk into my room and perch on the end of my bed.

‘I can tell your son possesses the root of wisdom,’ Master Yao says.

Last night my mother kept mentioning that she’d invited a qigong master of national repute to come and see me.

‘This son of mine, he’s so tall, so clever. He can turn his hand to anything, just like his father could.’ I’m surprised to hear my mother speak well of my father, for once.

‘It must be difficult, looking after him all on your own.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you can imagine! A mother looking after a grown-up son – it turns the philosophy of
The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars
on its head. I can never leave the flat for more than half an hour. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for three years . . .’

I often can’t tell whether I’m awake or asleep. My internal body clock doesn’t function properly any more. When I sense light beyond my eyelids, more thoughts tend to come to my head. Occasionally, I have a gut feeling that it’s morning or evening.

‘Sometimes his hands go stone cold. I have to keep massaging him to stop his joints seizing up. Look at his left foot. It’s been clenched for so long, the bones have bent.’

‘There are associations for the handicapped. Haven’t you got in touch with any?’

‘Yes, and charities too: national ones, local ones. I’ve contacted them all, but none of them will help. I phone them up and they say they’ll write to me, but they never do. If you don’t have back-door connections, you don’t stand a chance. There are so many handicapped people begging them for help, why should they choose to help us?’

‘I don’t know how you cope. You should get a live-in maid.’

‘Of course I’d like to, but I couldn’t afford it. I have to ask my relatives to help pay for his medicine. I’ve spent over 100,000 yuan on him in the last three years. My neighbours used to be very nosy, always coming up and asking questions. But after I asked to borrow some money from them, they suddenly stopped visiting. When I knock on their doors now, they don’t answer. They’ve even stopped reporting my activities to the local police.’

I was never close to my mother. I can’t remember even touching her hand. When I cut her hair, the smell of sweat on her thick neck repulsed me. Now I have to endure the humiliation of her washing my naked body every day and removing my soiled incontinence pads.

‘Where’s the wound? Let me see.’

‘Here. Feel it. It’s soft. The piece of missing skull is still in the hospital’s refrigerator.’

Master Yao rubs his cold finger over the wound above my ear. When he presses down, I feel brain tissue being pushed aside and a few nerves quiver a little. No matter how warm the rest of my head is, the wound always feels like the cold mouth of a cave.

I know I was shot in the head, and that the bullet didn’t explode. And I know the shot was fired from a handgun by someone standing at eye-level to me on the pavement to my side. He must have been a plain-clothes policeman. A soldier wouldn’t use a handgun.

‘An Qi told me what happened to him. I don’t care about politics. We qigong practitioners are only interested in performing good deeds. I can tell your son is a survivor. I’ll do my best to help bring him out of his coma.’

‘How lucky I am to have found someone as kind as you! I must admit, I still don’t understand how the government could have killed all those students in cold blood. After the crackdown, I spent three days searching for his body. I went to one hospital after another. Each one was like an abattoir, with corpses everywhere. I feel sick just thinking about it.’

‘I was still working at the Beijing Hotel at the time, in their accounts office. On the night of 3 June, plain-clothes policemen came and told all the hotel’s shops and boutiques to close early, and asked the reception to give them the room numbers of every foreign journalist who was staying there. I knew something serious was about to happen . . . I’ll start with some pressure-point massage. Once his channels are unblocked, it will be easier for me to transmit my qi to him. Look at these red spots on his nails. They’re a sign of obstructions to the blood-flow in his brain. The darker the spots, the graver the problem. When they turn black, he won’t have long to live.’

‘You’re right. His nails look very strange . . .’

‘Can you open the window?’

‘But it’s still raining outside.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The room must be well ventilated when I transmit my qi or he won’t be able to absorb it properly.’

Master Yao holds my foot in his hand, and with his thumb makes firm, circular movements on the back of my big toe. A pain signal shoots up to my head, causing the patch of dead cells around my wound to twitch, and for a moment I see a vision of my daughter. She’s standing in the rain, clutching an umbrella with her small hands, her eyebrows exposed under her newly cut fringe.

Since Tian Yi told me about the abortion, I often imagine what my daughter might look like now, had she lived. She wouldn’t be a miniature version of Tian Yi. She would have a round face, large eyes and two small dimples on her cheeks.

‘People only care about money these days. If you don’t bribe the doctors with red envelopes of cash, they won’t bother to treat you . . .’

Just as Master Yao gets up to leave, Mimi and Yu Jin arrive. They’re sitting on the sofa now, talking about Tian Yi.

‘She sent me an email with lots of articles about new treatments for coma patients,’ Mimi says to my mother. ‘They’re in English, but I can translate them for you.’

‘What’s an email? Do you mean a telegram?’

‘No, it’s a letter you can send through a computer. It arrives almost instantly.’

‘How amazing. I’d like to learn how to send them.’

‘As long as you can write Chinese in the Roman alphabet, it’s very easy.’

‘If you want to learn, I’ll lend you a home computer,’ Yu Jin says. He’s sitting on my brother’s bed in the covered balcony having a cigarette. I hear him kick his short legs as he speaks. I’m terrified the balcony will collapse and he’ll plummet four storeys to the ground. My mother will never be able to learn how to use a computer. She has trouble switching on the radio sometimes. I used to spend a lot of time in the computer room at university, reading research articles stored on the large, cumbersome machines there. It’s strange to think that, just a few years on, people now have computers in their own homes.

‘Has Tian Yi got used to life in America?’ my mother asks. ‘I’ve heard Western food is very hard to digest.’

‘Foreigners are like rabbits. They like to munch on raw lettuce!’ Mimi always throws her head back when she laughs.

Mimi’s jaw dropped when she saw Sister Gao walk towards us. ‘We were told you’d been kidnapped,’ she said. ‘How did you escape?’ There was a piece of garlic skin stuck to her lip.

‘I don’t know what happened. Someone dragged me off to hospital last night and put me on a drip. Can you pass me one of those cucumbers?’

Sister Gao sat down and wiped the sweat from her face with a tissue. We were on the Monument’s upper terrace, having an early lunch.

‘Well thank God you’re here now!’ Tian Yi said.

‘The new student marshals nearly didn’t let me up here,’ Sister Gao said breathlessly. ‘None of them seemed to know who I was.’

‘You should have come up through your private entrance in the south,’ I laughed, alluding to the power she wielded in the Voice of the Student Movement’s tent.

‘A plane flew over at ten this morning and dropped a bundle of leaflets into the Square,’ Tian Yi said, then quickly put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from retching. She’d vomited twice since giving up her fast.

‘All the student groups seem to have disbanded,’ Hai Feng said. ‘There’s no one on duty at the Beijing Students’ Federation’s command centre. You lot had better take control, or we’ll be in deep trouble when the army turns up.’

I glanced over to the Federation’s command centre on the opposite side of the terrace. All I could see were a broken table and some empty cardboard boxes.

Below it, in the mid-distance, Bai Ling was leaning out of a window of the broadcast minibus, shouting, ‘Fellow students, let us devote our lives to defending our constitutional rights . . .’ Her mouth was too close to the microphone, so her words were muffled.

By now, we were broadcasting entirely from the minibus. We’d moved all our equipment into it, so that we could continue transmitting if the army came to drive us out. The broadcast tent was now only used for editorial work.

Zhuzi, who was sitting next to me, said that Bai Ling was a heroine, and that everyone in the Square looked up to her. But as head of security, Zhuzi was more powerful than her. He was in charge of all the student marshals in the Square as well as those guarding the major traffic routes of the city. In the event of a crisis, he would be able to take control.

‘The government has cut off the water and electricity supplies to the Square,’ Lin Lu yelled, taking the microphone from Bai Ling. ‘This is an emergency situation! Comrade workers of Beijing, we need your support!’ The white minibus then drove to the other side of the Square.