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Beijing Coma - Ma Jian

**spoiler alert**

There are three major periods of Beijing upheaval in this amazing novel, and Dai Wei survives them all: first Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and finally the beautification of Beijing for its Olympic bid, which brings his mother’s housing complex to rubble around him. Through all of this turmoil, Dai Wei is ever the observer, watching as the Cultural Revolution wreaks havoc on his parents’ marriage, as his friends orchestrate the protests at Tiananmen Square, and as his mother struggles in vain to remain in her home. He is, in this regard, an omniscient third-person narrator, allowing us a snapshot of many characters’ lives as he witnesses the conversations, deaths, romantic encounters, and psychological struggles that defined these periods in recent Chinese history.

We encounter characters who are of sound body and deadened mind, and vice versa. No one, however, escapes with both body and mind intact. Of particular interest is Dai Wei’s mother, who devotes her entire life to caring for his comatose body. His mind, however, is sharp as he travels the neural pathways of his own history and somatic systems. Even with eyes closed and body immobilized, he can sense his mother’s frustration and despair. After she is arrested for her participation in a peaceful Falun Gong demonstration and her would-be lover Master Yao is imprisoned, she returns as broken as Dai Wei’s friends after Tiananmen. She wishes her comatose son dead so that she can have some semblance of a life, but ultimately finds herself echoing the student demonstrators she once so vehemently opposed: “Down with Fascism!” The inclination to be free, Ma Jian insinuates, is innate, regardless of ideology and generation.

Few novels have driven home for me the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as vividly as this one, despite its focus on Tiananmen Square. Ma slips in some harrowing, eye-popping anecdotes about Red Guard brutality and inhumanity. Of course, the main event in this book is the unjustifiable brutality against peaceful student demonstrators.