Beijing Coma (7 page)

When I woke again it was already dark outside. My mother had removed my trousers and applied red ointment to the purple whip marks on my legs.

She told me that I’d slept for thirty-six hours. ‘They let you off lightly. If they’d had any sense they would have wiped out the Dai line! Nothing good will ever come of the sons of a rightist!’ She pulled a tray over. ‘Here’s some cake and milk for you.’ Then she grumbled, ‘I brought you into this world. I should be the one to decide how you get punished. They had no right to beat you up like that.’

The cake I was chewing dissolved quickly in my bitter saliva.

‘Mum, I swear on Chairman Mao’s life that I’ll study hard from now on. So they didn’t label me a “wrong-footed youth” then?’

‘I don’t think so, but you’re on their records now. And because of you, your friend Lulu was taken in for questioning as well.’

My limbs went limp. I had betrayed her. I shouldn’t have given her that copy of
A Young Girl’s Heart
, or given her name to the police, or told them that I’d touched her. I felt sick with regret.

‘You’ve grown up too fast,’ my mother said, her expression hardening. ‘Those decadent traits should have been knocked out of you long ago. Your father was poisoned by Western ideas. It’s his fault you’ve turned out this way. There are so many bad people around today, corrupting society with their bourgeois lifestyles. They talk about sexual liberation, sexual freedom – their only aim is to poison the minds of our youth, allowing imperialist countries to change China through peaceful evolution. If you don’t step up your political studies, you’ll end up on the wrong path. That boy who gave you the pornographic book has been taken in too. I suppose you did a good deed, exposing his evil crime to the police. That must be why they treated you so leniently.’

My mind went blank. Everything that happened in the police station was a blur. But I remembered writing my self-criticism. I remembered that.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, it’s all my fault,’ I said, feeling a sudden urge to open the window and jump out.

My mother has no idea how much I still hate myself for all the harm I caused back then.

Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I dropped out of school and went south to the coastal city of Guangzhou, where China’s market economy had just started to take off. I wanted to regain my peace of mind, and make a bit of money too. I peddled pornographic magazines for a while, then bought some electrical goods that had been smuggled over the border from Hong Kong and sold them outside a foreign-currency shop. I had a foreign cigarette filter dangling from my mouth and a digital watch on my wrist. Once I’d saved enough money, I began making trips back to Beijing, bringing cheap southern goods which I then sold at a high mark-up on the black market. In just six months I grew thirty centimetres. I looked like a man of the world.

During my second trip back to Beijing, my cousin Dai Dongsheng and his wife came to stay. His wife had fallen pregnant with a second child, in contravention of the one-child policy. Fearing persecution from their local birth-control officers, they’d left their two-year-old daughter with a neighbour in Dezhou Village and come to Beijing hoping to find a private hospital that would agree to help deliver the baby.

‘Look how you’ve grown! You’re a young man now,’ Dongsheng said. On his previous visit, I’d had to raise my head when speaking to him, but now he had to look up at me.

‘What do you expect? I’ll be seventeen this year.’ My voice was deeper now too. I handed him a cigarette.

He had the typical rough, gnarled hands of a peasant. Because he was the grandson of a rich landlord, he’d been denied a place at middle school, and had been forced to scrape a living off the land since the age of fifteen.

His wife sat on the sofa that my brother and I had constructed a few days before. The bulge of her belly was as round as a terrestrial globe. She had the pure, unaffected beauty that only women from the countryside have. Her expression was honest but slow-witted. Dongsheng had aged a lot since I’d last seen him. He sat awkwardly at the end of my mother’s bed, his legs pressed together and his hands folded politely on his lap. At his feet lay a fake leather bag printed with the words
LONG LIVE MAO ZEDONG THOUGHT
. The salted carp and two balls of red wool that they’d brought for us were lying in the middle of the table. The room stank of fish, and the dusty, rancid smell of train stations.

My mother had fried some sunflower seeds and laid them out in teacups. When I couldn’t think of anything more to say to the couple, I turned on the television set I’d bought for my mother. Their eyes immediately moved to the screen.

‘Look, that foreign woman’s wearing a gold watch and a gold necklace,’ Dongsheng’s wife said.

The news programme was reporting on Deng Xiaoping’s meeting with Mrs Thatcher, and his proposal that Hong Kong should return to Chinese sovereignty. Dongsheng said, ‘If Hong Kong is returned to China, we’ll all be able to travel there soon.’

‘You can go there now, if you want,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen lots of Hong Kong people in Guangzhou. They look just like us.’

The expressions of surprise on their faces gave me a pleasant feeling of superiority. I’d bought my first ticket to Guangzhou with the money my mother had given me to buy a bicycle. I didn’t stay at a hotel while I was there. It was so hot, I was able to sleep on the streets. I wandered through the Western Lake night market every evening, and visited China Hotel’s duty-free shop to look at the imported watches, cigarette lighters, ballpoint pens and multicoloured bottles of perfume. On my last day in Guangzhou, I only had thirty yuan left in my pocket. I went to a street stall and bought four packs of playing cards with photographs of naked women printed on the back. I brought them to Beijing with me, and made a fortune selling them outside our local cinema.

‘How many children are Hong Kong people allowed to have?’ the wife asked.

‘As many as they like,’ I said. ‘Many pregnant women in Guangzhou escape across the border and give birth in Hong Kong, then return with the babies a few months later. And since the babies have Hong Kong citizenship, the families can travel back and forth whenever they want after that.’

‘That’s a good idea!’ the wife said enthusiastically.

My mother came in from the kitchen and said, ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s been to Guangzhou a couple of times, and suddenly he thinks he’s grown up. The only thing that’s changed is that he now goes around with that stupid cigarette filter in his mouth. He hasn’t even had his first shave yet!’

‘Yes I have, Mum.’ Although my voice had deepened, it was still prone to tapering off into undignified squeaks, so I had to keep it constantly under control.

My mother sat on the sofa and asked the couple what plans they had for the future. ‘When is the baby due?’ she said.

‘Middle of next month,’ Dongsheng replied. ‘Our county has been named a Family Planning Model County, so the birth-control officers are especially strict. If a woman becomes pregnant with a second child, they force her to have an abortion. My wife managed to keep her pregnancy secret. Before she left the house, she always tied a cloth around her tummy to hide the bump. Last month she vomited while walking down the street. We were sure someone would report us. That’s when we decided to run away.’ After he said this, he removed the cigarette from his plastic filter, held it between his fingers and sucked a last deep drag.

‘We didn’t dare catch a train from our local station,’ the wife continued. ‘We’d heard that birth-control officers patrol it, trying to stop women who’ve fallen pregnant illegally from fleeing the county. If they come across a pregnant woman who doesn’t have a permit, they drag her off to the station’s family planning clinic and abort the child there and then. Apparently, at the end of each day, there are two or three buckets of dead foetuses in the clinic.’ When the wife spoke, her eyes were brighter than her husband’s.

‘If you don’t have a birth permit for this child, the Beijing police will arrest you too.’ My mother looked anxious. She didn’t know what she could do to help.

‘We can’t go back,’ the wife said. ‘Our house has probably been ransacked. When the birth-control officers discover that a couple has gone on the run, they come with big vans and take away all the family’s valuables: the radio, the mirror, the wooden chests. I’ve got a feeling that this baby’s a boy. Whatever they say, I’m not getting rid of it.’

‘If a couple manages to evade detection and give birth to a second or third child, the birth-control officers force them to pay a huge fine. They’re brutal. If you can’t afford to pay the fine, they beat you up.’

‘Government regulations strictly forbid the officers to use force,’ my mother said, trying to defend the Party.

‘We heard that the police are less violent in the cities. That’s why we came here. In the countryside it’s terrible. The people’s militia have guns, loaded with live bullets. In some neighbouring villages, if a woman gives birth without a permit, the newborn baby is strangled to death. Some families dig holes in the ground so that the women can give birth in secret.’ Dongsheng’s attention was drawn to the television screen again, and the clip of General Secretary Hu Yaobang’s visit to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone near the Hong Kong border.

‘What if it’s a girl?’ I asked, lighting another cigarette. Ever since my mother had given up complaining about my smoking, I’d been able to get through a packet of cigarettes a day.

‘An astrologer told us it’s a boy,’ Dongsheng said. ‘We’ve given him a name already: Dai Jianqiang.’

‘Look, another kick!’ the wife said. ‘He’s been moving all the time these last few days. Girls never move this much.’

‘You can sleep here tonight,’ my mother said dejectedly. ‘We’ll come up with a plan tomorrow. Dai Wei, go and turn off the kettle.’

A smile passed over Dongsheng’s face. His wife smiled too, and said, ‘We’re sorry to put you to so much trouble.’

‘Who’s looking after your father now?’ my mother asked.

‘His mind’s unstable, but he’s able to look after himself,’ Dongsheng replied. ‘If we have a boy, I’ll pick up a job here, make enough money to pay the fine, then we can all go home and be together.’ He paused and stared at the screen again. ‘Look at those tall buildings in Shenzhen. How do people manage to live in them? You’d wet your pants before you had time to make it outside to the latrines.’ He finished his cigarette and spat a glob of phlegm onto the floor.

‘The buildings are equipped with lifts. And anyway, all the flats have toilets.’ I glanced at my mother’s face. She hated people spitting onto the floor.

‘They’re living in the sky,’ the wife said, smiling. ‘If they opened the windows, the birds could fly straight in.’

‘Dai Wei will be going to university soon, I suppose?’ Dongsheng said.

‘I’m revising for my high school exams,’ I said, wiping away his spit with the sole of my shoe. I didn’t mention I’d dropped out of school. I hadn’t been back again since the November morning when Lulu was called onto the stage during assembly.

We had just completed our mass morning exercise routine. The headmaster called Lulu onto the stage at the front of the football pitch. I watched her standing up there, her head bowed low. Her thin, pale neck looked beautiful against her red down jacket. We hadn’t spoken to each other since the police had taken us in for questioning.

The headmaster told her to remove her hat. ‘Look at this, students! A high school student wearing nail varnish and rouge! What a disgrace!’ He ran his finger down her cheek, then removed his glasses and examined it closely, searching for traces of rouge.

Finding nothing there, he then rubbed Lulu’s mouth, and this time, despite his poor eyesight, he was able to detect some colour on his finger. ‘Red lipstick? This is a serious case of “bourgeois liberalism”, young girl! How can you hope to join the revolutionary classes after you leave school if you put stuff like this on your face? And look at these waves in your hair. Are you trying to turn yourself into a curly-haired lapdog of imperialist America?’

I wanted to disappear into the ground. I’d never imagined that my actions would get Lulu into so much trouble. The thousands of students in the football pitch who were staring at Lulu’s red lips opened their mouths and let out mocking cries of derision.

After my first trip to Guangzhou, I was able to buy a television, a new bicycle for my brother and a rayon coat and nylon umbrella for my mother.

After my second trip, I came back to Beijing with twenty pirated tapes of romantic ballads sung by the ‘decadent’ Taiwanese singer, Deng Lijun, and made more than two thousand yuan selling them on the black market. I also brought over a thousand cigarette lighters with pictures of naked women stuck onto them. They’d cost me five fen each in Guangzhou, and I was able to sell them for ten times the price in Beijing. I asked the vendor I’d bought them from to post me some more, but he was arrested for trading in obscene products and sentenced to five years in jail.

On my last visit to Guangzhou, I bought twenty copies of the Hong Kong edition of
Playboy
magazine, and posted them to Beijing wrapped inside a long cotton dress. On the train back, a man from Hunan Province who was sitting next to me was arrested for possession of pornographic playing cards. He’d hidden the cards in a shoebox. When two police officers strolling down the carriage spotted the box on the floor and asked him whom it belonged to, he was too afraid to speak. The officers opened the box, and after they saw what was inside, they put him in handcuffs and dragged him off the train. On his seat he’d left behind a copy of
The Book of Mountains and Seas
– the book I’d loved so much as a child. I put it in my bag then ate the packet of Silly Boy sunflower seeds that he’d also left behind.