Beijing Coma (56 page)

Shu Tong hadn’t returned to the Monument since he’d cleared it up. Various student groups had moved back onto it, and the place was a mess again.

‘They’ll all power-crazy,’ Old Fu said, sitting down.

Wang Fei charged into the tent and yelled, ‘General Secretary Zhao Ziyang is in the Square!’

‘I don’t believe it!’ everyone cried. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s just about to leave. He’s in that coach over there. Premier Li Peng is with him too.’ Wang Fei hadn’t had time to put his shoes on. He’d been sleeping on a camp bed in the propaganda office.

‘Shut up, there’s no time to waste,’ Old Fu said in a panic. ‘Quickly, go and see if anyone took notes or made a tape recording.’

‘Apparently a student jotted down his speech, but someone grabbed his notebook and passed it around, and now no one can find it,’ Wang Fei said.

‘So what did he say?’ Mou Sen asked, his eyebrows puckering as he hurriedly lit a cigarette.

‘He said that he’d come too late and had let the students down. And he said: “We are old men, but you are still young. You must think of your futures.”’

Xiao Li, who had just walked in, said, ‘I was standing beside the coach just now. Someone shone a torch onto Zhao Ziyang’s face, and I saw tears in his eyes. Apparently he pleaded with us to end the hunger strike.’

‘Tears?’ said Mou Sen, sweeping his hair back. ‘I don’t believe it. He’s a war-hardened revolutionary. He wouldn’t be crying over this!’

‘It’s very brave of him to come to the Square,’ I said. ‘We must end the strike at once. If we do as he asks, it will give him more clout.’

‘How long did he stay?’ Old Fu asked.

‘About ten minutes,’ Xiao Li said, sitting down. It was his sixth day on hunger strike. He’d passed out once, but looked as though he could carry on a little longer. He was in better shape than Mou Sen. I rose to my feet and felt a jabbing pain in the small of my back. Earlier that day, I’d pulled a muscle while unloading boxes of mineral water from a van.

‘Get Han Dan, Bai Ling and Cheng Bing over here at once,’ Old Fu said.

‘It’s a bit late in the night to make an announcement, Old Fu,’ said Mou Sen, noticing him switching on the broadcasting equipment.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘The students must be told about Zhao Ziyang’s visit. It changes everything. Xiao Li, you’d better stop your hunger strike. I’ll need you to help look after the equipment. We can’t afford for anything to go wrong now.’

When Bai Ling, Han Dan and Cheng Bing arrived, we all went to the broadcast minibus to speak to Lin Lu. Xiao Li then turned up with a transcript of Zhao Ziyang’s speech he’d managed to copy from someone’s notebook.

Mou Sen began to read aloud with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Han Dan coughed loudly and said, ‘Put that fag out!’ Mou Sen reluctantly crushed it out, then continued: ‘“If you don’t end the hunger strike, the hardliners will win the Party’s internal struggle and it will be the end of all of us . . .”’

Cheng Bing looked at Lin Lu and muttered despondently, ‘When you saw Zhao Ziyang on television a couple of days ago, you said he was brimming with confidence.’

‘It’s clear that the reformers have lost the fight,’ Lin Lu said gloomily. ‘I suggest that all members of the Hunger Strike Headquarters stop their fast.’

‘Well, I’m not giving up,’ Han Dan said sullenly.

Bai Ling had developed a high fever. She arched her neck, letting her head rest on her shoulder.

‘Fan Yuan was about to give his inaugural speech as chairman of the Beijing Students’ Federation just now,’ Han Dan said listlessly, ‘but when he heard that Zhao Ziyang had come to the Square, he resigned and ran away in terror. He’s so spineless.’

‘We must adopt a new form of struggle,’ Yang Tao said. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. I presumed he’d been in hospital.

‘If anyone from the Headquarters ends their hunger strike they must resign from their post,’ Cheng Bing said adamantly.

‘We are fasting for the sake of the Chinese people,’ Bai Ling said. ‘We can’t let them down.’

‘Hu Yaobang lost his job for sympathising with us in 1987, and if we don’t do as Zhao Ziyang asks, he’s going to be sacked as well,’ I said.

‘Three police trucks joined a student march yesterday,’ Han Dan said. ‘I’m worried that if we surrender now, before we’ve achieved our goals, many people who’ve come out to support us will get into trouble.’

‘If we end the hunger strike, we can still stay in the Square and continue our struggle,’ Mou Sen said.

‘We could set up a rotation system, with each student fasting for just one day,’ Bai Ling suggested, furrowing her brow. ‘We mustn’t let the hunger strike fizzle out.’

‘The Square’s in such a filthy mess now,’ Old Fu said. ‘After yesterday’s rainstorm, it looked like a refugee camp.’

We continued to argue for a while until Lin Lu brought the discussion to a close and said that we should hold a plenary camp meeting in the morning.

Mou Sen went back to the tent to tell Chen Di and Nuwa to broadcast an announcement about Zhao Ziyang’s visit. The loudspeakers on the broadcast minibus hadn’t been correctly plugged in yet.

Seeing that the sky was getting lighter, I left the minibus and went to find Tian Yi. I wanted to tell her to end her strike and convince her that it wasn’t worth sacrificing her life just to get this bloody government to sit down and talk to us.

The noise of the fireworks outside causes a memory to resurface. Suddenly I recall the night Tian Yi came to this room to say goodbye to me before she left for America. How could I have forgotten that visit? I knew it was her, the moment I heard her measured tread on the stairs. My mother opened the door and said, ‘You’re covered in snow, Tian Yi. Come in and take your coat off. I’ll put it on the radiator for you.’

‘No, don’t,’ Tian Yi said. ‘It’s a wool blend. It will shrink . . .’

Psychologists believe that memories too painful to deal with are pushed into the subconscious by the brain’s self-defence mechanism. The information is never lost, it merely becomes inaccessible. But it seems more likely that my lapses in memory are due to my brain injury rather than repression.

‘I’ve brought you a wall calendar with photographs of the South Pole,’ Tian Yi said to my mother. ‘It’s this year’s most popular calendar.’

‘It’s beautiful. But where can I hang it? There’s no room left on this wall.’

‘Look, you can put it up there, next to that Châteaux of Europe calendar.’

They sat down on the sofa with their cups of tea and grumbled about rising prices. Tian Yi then told my mother that many of my old classmates had got in touch with her to ask about me. She’d brought a list of their names and addresses.

‘You remember Shao Jian?’ she said. ‘He works for a big Beijing internet company now. Mimi was in the same dorm as me. She’s opened a beauty parlour. If you have any problems, just get in touch with them.’

‘Yes, Shao Jian. He came here with another boy. Now, what was his name? I’m getting so forgetful. He told me he knew Professor Ding, the woman who set up Tiananmen Mothers.’

‘That must have been Fan Yuan from the Politics and Law University. Did he leave you his phone number?’

‘I don’t think so. But here’s Kenneth’s number. When you see him, don’t tell him about the police harassment I’ve had. And remind him not to mention politics in his letters. In fact, it would be best if he sent his letters to Dai Wei’s brother rather than to me.’

Tian Yi cracked twenty-nine pumpkin seeds between her teeth. I counted them. I imagined the empty shells hidden in the folded palm of her hand.

I try to remember what happened next, but my thoughts return to the moment I heard her ascending the stairwell. When she reached the landing outside our flat, I heard a thump followed by a long silence. I presumed she’d bumped her head on the leg of the stool perched on the tall stack of charcoal briquettes, and was glancing up to see what she’d hit. The landing is crammed with things my mother can’t bring herself to throw away. Everyone in the building keeps piles of scrap outside their front doors as well, but my mother’s pile is the largest. A moment later, I heard Tian Yi cough then knock gently on the door . . . I’ve lost the sequence again. My mind is so jumbled, it’s hard to untangle the threads. Since my memories of Tian Yi are quite recent, her image is floating in and out of focus in the central regions of my temporal lobes. But A-Mei has spread through the entire neural network of my cerebral cortex. I have thought about her so often these last years that she’s even entered my bone marrow.

Now I remember how Tian Yi’s visit ended.

‘Could I have a few moments alone with Dai Wei, Auntie?’ she asked. ‘There are some things I want to tell him.’

‘Yes, go in. I’ll close the door for you.’

At last we were alone together. The room was hot. I could hear mucus collect inside her nostrils, and sensed she was about to cry.

‘I have something to tell you, Dai Wei,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to wake up and not know what’s happened. I’m leaving the country. I’m going to America. For four years, maybe longer . . . I’ve brought you a tape. It’s Mahler’s Second Symphony – the Resurrection. I hope you’ll listen to it sometimes.’

I remembered we’d heard that piece on the radio. I’d told her I liked it and she’d made a note of its name in her diary. But I knew that if she’d played the tape, I probably wouldn’t have recognised it.

She slipped her hand into mine. After a while, I felt it move. She’d held my hand on her previous visit, but my mother had been in the room at the time, so she’d kept her fingers still. But this time she moved her thumb, slowly rubbing it up the palm of my hand to the mound below my index finger.

‘I may never see you again,’ she said, ‘but I will always think about you, and the times we spent together . . .’ Although I was locked deep inside my body, her voice sounded crystal clear. She began to sob quietly.

‘I’d always hoped we could go abroad together,’ she continued. ‘I never gave you a straight answer when you asked me to go to America with you, but I’d secretly made up my mind that if you went, I would go too. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love another man . . .’

I knew that this separation was final. Even if I did wake up from this coma, I’d be a different person from the one she knew.

‘Fate brought us together and fate has torn us apart. If you wake up one day, it’s possible you might not even know who I am . . .’

She didn’t realise that the changes she’d caused to my neuronal synapses during our time together were irreversible and that I could never wipe her from my mind.

She placed her other hand over mine. Her fingers were cold.

I felt blood rush to my groin and my penis begin to harden. Unfortunately, Tian Yi didn’t notice this sign of life.

‘After that last time we made love, near the Great Wall, I fell pregnant. I kept the foetus inside me for five months. I only got rid of it after I was told there was little chance of you ever waking up from your coma. It was a girl. I’m so sorry, Dai Wei . . .’

Those words are still hovering in my temporal lobe. If I recall them a few more times, they will enter my long-term memory and become fixed in my mind for ever.

She left very abruptly. I seem to remember her placing her hand on my cheek. The skin on my face was still numb at the time, but my instincts told me that the slight pressure I sensed was her hand pressing down. Then I felt a second pressure. Perhaps it was her lips, because I could smell her breath this time. Her face was very close to mine when she whispered her last words to me: ‘Take care of yourself, Dai Wei.’

‘Auntie, do you have my three notebooks?’ she asked as my mother walked into the room. ‘I remember Dai Wei telling me he’d brought them back here.’

‘Oh, yes, there is a bag somewhere,’ my mother said, kneeling down and rummaging under my bed. ‘He came back one night to drop it off. He told me there were private journals inside, and I wasn’t to open it.’

I’d also put some of my books and clothes in the bag. I’d decided to move them out of my dorm in case I got arrested.

‘Yes – these are the notebooks,’ Tian Yi said. ‘How sweet of him – he brought back my mirror and tapes as well. This illustrated edition of
The Book of Mountains and Seas
is his favourite book. If you have time, you should read him some passages from it. He loves hearing about all those strange and fabulous creatures . . .’

‘Oh, here’s the journal my husband left for him. I’ve been looking for it for years . . .’

Then Tian Yi left. Ever since she disappeared from my life, I’ve thought of her as a clay figurine that keeps watch over me and that will accompany me to my grave.

At noon, we gathered outside the broadcast station, still shaken by General Secretary Zhao Ziyang’s visit the night before. The Square was as squalid and messy as a football stadium after a big match.

‘Let’s replace the hunger strike with a sit-in,’ Yang Tao suggested, squatting down and wiping the sweat from his forehead. ‘If the government uses the strategy of “catching the thief by blocking the escape routes”, we’ll simply counteract with the empty-fort strategy.’

‘The lifeline has broken down again, Old Fu,’ said Xiao Li, walking up. ‘The ambulances can’t get to the hunger strike camps.’ He helped himself to some strawberries a resident had just given us. I was glad to see he’d stopped his hunger strike. I put some strawberries into my lunch box to give to Tian Yi later, in the hope that I could tempt her to eat again.

‘If the hunger strikers refuse to give up their fast, we should move them over to the Monument and get the other students to form a protective ring around them,’ Yang Tao said. ‘That way, if the government sends the army in, we’ll have time to carry them out of the Square.’