Beijing Coma (74 page)

‘Have you seen all those new food stalls in the street outside? One of them sells deep-fried locusts.’

‘The district office doesn’t bother to send anyone to collect the rubbish. At night, there are so many rats in that street, I don’t dare walk down it.’

‘Sesame cakes cost two yuan each in the market now, and rice dumplings are three yuan a jin.’

‘It’s silly to waste money on expensive food. Whether you eat mung beans or lobster, it all looks the same when it comes out the other end!’

‘On the last anniversary of 4 June, the police bought me a train ticket to my parents’ village. They didn’t want me to be in Beijing in case I did something to commemorate the victims of the crackdown. They followed me all the way there and all the way back, so it was impossible to relax. Whatever they say this year, I’m not leaving my flat.’

‘The police took us to a guest house out in the countryside. They wouldn’t even tell us the name of the village. We spent the whole week in our room, watching television all day.’

‘Maybe they took us to the same guest house! They bought me a tomato and egg stir-fry one day. It was so salty, I spat it out.’

My mother takes a sip of tea, puts the cup back down on the radiator and says, ‘This flat is guarded like a prison. Sometimes I long to run away.’

‘What would happen to your son if you left?’ says Gui Lan. ‘You’re lucky to have him by your side . . . I’ll have to move home soon. Construction workers walked down our lane yesterday and painted the word “demolish” on every house. The government is planning to pull down the whole district.’

‘How much compensation are they offering you?’ my mother asks.

‘3,000 yuan a square metre. So all I’ll get is 18,000 yuan, which isn’t nearly enough to buy a new flat around here.’

‘Why don’t you move to Tongxian?’ An Qi says. ‘It’s only an hour away by bus. Our block is dilapidated. I keep asking the neighbourhood committee if it’s going to be pulled down, but they tell me there are still no plans.’

‘Don’t worry. You live inside the second ring road. The government said that everything inside the third ring road will be demolished, so they’ll get to you eventually.’ My mother comes over to check whether the enamel basin my urine tube empties into is full. Although her constant jabbering is infuriating, I know that no one else would have had the patience to look after me like this for all these years.

‘I hope I can move into a flat like this, with central heating and running water,’ Gui Lan says. ‘My room in the courtyard house gets so cold in winter. And I hate having to use the dirty communal toilets at the end of the lane.’

‘We used to live in a traditional courtyard house,’ An Qi says. ‘We had to share it with eight other families. It was so cramped.’

‘At least in those single-storey houses you don’t have neighbours above you or below you,’ my mother says. ‘And there are no stairs to climb. When I get older and my joints seize up, I don’t know how I’ll make it up these six flights of stairs.’

‘I’d like to live in one of those modern apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows, like the ones you see in the television adverts.’

‘I read in the papers that the authorities are going to tear down all the ancient buildings in Beijing apart from the Forbidden City, and replace them with high-rise tower blocks made of concrete, steel and glass. It will look just like New York.’

It’s dark outside by the time the two women leave the flat. The sound of them shuffling paper and cracking pumpkin seeds between their teeth still hovers in the air, together with the smell of the cucumber omelette my mother fried yesterday.

In the evening, my mother sits on a chair at the end of my bed and rubs my clenched toes. Then she takes out my father’s journal again. After flicking through a few pages she begins to read out loud. ‘“People who have beds to lie on are so lucky. They can dream their lives away . . .” Huh, that sounds just like him. Your father was very cocky as a young man. He kept bragging that he’d be a famous violinist one day. But look what a frightened little mouse he became in the Cultural Revolution. “People who have beds to lie on are so lucky!” Ha! He wouldn’t say that if he could see you lying here now!’

The mirror frame my father never finished making is underneath this bed, together with a broken wooden chair he picked up on the street. I remember him saying it was a Ming Dynasty chair, and that people in America would pay a lot of money for it.

‘“. . . Everyone is sent to work in the fields, irrespective of age or rank. I’m so frail, I collapse from exhaustion after a couple of hours. The officers award flags at the end of the day, depending on how much soil we dig. We get an entire steamed roll for a red flag, half a roll for a yellow one, a quarter of a roll for a blue one, and only an eighth of a roll for a black one. We have to dig four cubic metres of earth to get a red flag. Very few people can manage it. If you dig all day, hoping to get a red flag, but end up with a yellow one, you faint from hunger. If you’re very unlucky and only get awarded a blue flag, you could end up dead. The rightist Old Zhang died of starvation while sucking the tiny piece of roll his blue flag got him. He didn’t even have the energy to swallow it . . .”’

My mother goes to shut the window. An insect on my shoulder flies into the air, settles back down again then crawls up my neck. I imagine lifting my hand and swatting it.

‘No wonder he was like a hungry ghost when he returned from the camps, scavenging scraps of food from the rubbish bins,’ my mother mumbles, as she picks up the journal again. ‘“Beethoven had a passion for life, and felt disgust for mundane, worldly affairs . . .” He insisted the orchestra play Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony when the American conductor visited. It was so reckless of him . . . “Everyone should have the right to choose their own path in life . . .” Did you hear that? That’s enough to get us branded “relatives of a counter-revolutionary” all over again!’ She slams the journal shut. ‘Why did your father never speak to me of these things?’

Perhaps tomorrow she will reach the page where he describes having to resort to eating human flesh. When she reads it, maybe she’ll understand at last why he returned from the camps a broken man.

There’s a knock at the door. My mother invites the visitor inside and asks him his name.

‘My surname is Huang,’ the man answers. ‘Master Yao told me your son is ill, and asked me to see if I can help.’

‘Oh, you’re Old Huang. Yes, Master Yao told me about your special gifts. I’ve heard you can speak the Language of the Universe.’

‘So many buildings around here are being demolished. Most of the roads are blocked off. It took me ages to find this compound . . . I studied medicine when I was younger. My ancestors were all doctors. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far . . . Let me take a look at the patient.’ He and my mother walk into my room.

‘His temperature is very low . . .’ he says, turning my hand over. ‘So many horizontal lines.’

‘That’s the sun line you’re pointing at,’ my mother says brusquely.

‘This is his health line. He’s clearly suffering from a serious case of exhaustion.’

‘He’s slept solidly for six years, and he’s still exhausted?’ my mother laughs coldly.

‘He has a black line along the middle of his forehead.’

‘That’s just the light. There are no black lines on his face.’

‘No, there’s definitely a dark line. That signifies calamity is about to strike.’

‘Well, he managed to survive a bullet in the head, so I guess he could probably survive anything.’

‘But his complexion is quite good.’

‘He looks worse than my husband did when he was lying dead in hospital.’ My mother is losing her patience.

‘What does he eat?’

‘Nothing. I pour a glass of milk into him every day, and give him three bottles of glucose solution. He’s barely more alive than a corpse.’

The man sits down, and I feel the metal springs of the bed contract.

‘Look at the colour of this!’ he says, holding my urine bottle up to the light. ‘That is very fine quality urine.’

‘Since I’ve been giving him the vitamin fluids, his urine has turned golden yellow.’

‘I’d like to have a taste. Will you fetch me a cup?’

‘
What?
’ my mother gasps. ‘That’s too peculiar. If you’re thirsty, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve been drinking urine for ten years. I’ve tasted all kinds, but I can tell that his is top-quality stuff.’

‘What do you mean, “top quality”? This is piss you’re talking about, not alcohol.’

I chuckle inwardly to myself. Perhaps the three bottles of glucose solution that I’m fed each day have turned my urine into a sweet beer.

My mother continues to express reservations about his strange request, but is finally won over when he tells her that Chinese emperors used to drink the urine of infant boys for medicinal purposes. He says he drinks his own urine last thing at night and first thing in the morning, and that after years of doing this, his hair has become blacker and his mind more alert. He advises my mother to pour some of my urine into a glass of fruit juice and take a sip. He points out that, in the womb, foetuses drink some of the urine they pass out into the amniotic fluid. He says that urine is the body’s vital essence, and has the power to cure a thousand diseases.

‘Look at the little red spots on his nails,’ my mother says. ‘I’ve been told they’re a sign that a virus is attacking his brain.’

‘No, they just indicate blockages in his blood’s qi. As long as they don’t turn black, you don’t have to worry. Fetch me a cup, will you?’

It is very late by the time my mother is finally able to say goodbye to this strange visitor. She shuts the door, sits down beside me and mumbles to herself, ‘He’s quite a character, that man . . .’

In the kitchen, I can hear water from a wet mop dripping into the sink.

In the early afternoon, Old Fu stormed into the tent and said, ‘I told you, you’re not to broadcast anything that might shake the students’ morale.’

‘Now that Mou Sen has resigned, we don’t know who’s supposed to be vetoing the scripts,’ Tian Yi said, looking up at him.

‘I read out that statement,’ Nuwa said. ‘What was wrong with it?’ She’d just broadcast a statement from the Provincial Students’ Federation announcing they’d decided to merge with the Beijing Students’ Federation to form a National Federation of Students.

‘You should think carefully before you broadcast sensitive news like that,’ Old Fu said.

Sensing that an argument was brewing, I stepped out of the tent.

The sunlight was scorching. Everyone was wearing straw hats or baseball caps, apart from a few bare-headed peasants who’d travelled up from the countryside. I saw several new faces in the crowd outside. They stared at me and the tent like curious tourists. There were fewer people in the Square that day. The flags and banners were rumpled and frayed. As I stood in the sweltering heat, I could feel sweat pouring from my thighs and groin. I turned round and retreated back into the shade of the tent.

‘Broadcast it again if you want to!’ Old Fu said, pushing his way out. ‘I don’t care any more.’

‘I’m not your damn mouthpiece, you know!’ Nuwa shouted.

‘Calm down, everyone,’ Bai Ling said, walking in with Wang Fei. ‘Wherever I go, people are having arguments.’

‘We left the Capital Joint Liaison Group meeting early,’ Wang Fei announced, sweat streaming down his face. ‘Shan Bo, that teacher from Beijing Normal, proposed that Ke Xi should take over as the student leader. He said he’s China’s Lech Wał
ę
sa.’

‘What a wanker!’ Wu Bin said. ‘If Ke Xi became leader, our movement would disintegrate.’ His eyes were as black and shiny as tadpoles. His shaved head was shining too.

‘Ke Xi got up and bragged that all the students revere him,’ Wang Fei said. ‘It made my skin crawl.’

‘He said, “I may not be as politically accomplished as you intellectuals here, but I’m the most famous student in the Square. And with Mr Shan Bo to guide me . . .” ’ Bai Ling gave such a good impersonation of Ke Xi that Tian Yi chuckled, then I chuckled, and soon everyone was roaring with laughter.

‘The intellectuals are as prone to personality cults as the Communist Party,’ Chen Di said. He looked clean and fresh. He never seemed to sweat.

‘They got into a futile argument about whether the movement is a momentary aberration, or belongs to China’s long tradition of popular protest,’ Wang Fei said. ‘We couldn’t take it any more, so we got up and left.’

‘We mustn’t let those intellectuals come to the Square and stir up trouble again,’ Tian Yi said, fanning herself with a pamphlet.

‘I’d prefer to be crushed by the army than destroyed by the Joint Liaison Group,’ Wang Fei said, whipping off his sweaty vest.

‘So who’s in charge of vetoing the scripts now that Mou Sen’s gone?’ Nuwa asked. Her short hair was in a mess. There was a big tuft sticking up at the back.

‘Well Tian Yi’s chief editor, isn’t she?’ Wang Fei said. The jeans he’d borrowed were too short for him.

‘I didn’t ask you,’ Nuwa said curtly. She’d been in low spirits since Mou Sen had left the Square.

‘Hey, Wu Bin, I’ve heard you lot want to set up a special operations unit to control the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters,’ Wang Fei said, then sucked his cigarette and blew out a ring of smoke.

‘It’s the Square we want to control, not you lot,’ Wu Bin said calmly.

‘The only students supporting the Provincial Students’ Federation are from Wuhan Iron and Steel University and the Fushun Petroleum University,’ Wang Fei sneered. ‘What can you hope to achieve?’

‘There are 100,000 students from the provinces here now, and fewer than two thousand students from Beijing. So it’s inevitable we’ll take over control of the Square sooner or later.’