Assalamu alaykum . Welcome to a new episode – a mini episode – of Book Nomad. Today, I’m going to briefly discuss some of the thoughts that came to me while I was reading the novel Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, who is a Chinese writer, based in London now, in exile.

[00:00:27] This book is much longer than I realised when I started reading it. I decided to read it on the Kindle. Actually, the first time I saw it was in a bookshop but for some reason, the length didn’t strike me at that point. I mean it’s not an unheard of length, it’s I think just under 600 pages, but that is still longer than average, I suppose. It’s translated from Mandarin Chinese. And I don’t actually know when it was published, let me see… Beijing Coma was published in 2008. So, pretty recent. Although, if I remember correctly, in his afterword he said he spent a long time writing this book, I think over 10 years. And it is sort of semi-autobiographical in that a lot of the experiences of the protagonist are things that happened to him.

[00:01:40]So to give a very brief overview of this book,  it tells sort of two parallel stories at the same time. Essentially, it starts with the protagonist, who’s called Dai Wei  discovering that he’s in a coma, or rather waking up from a coma, but only mentally so he can’t move at all. And then the book progresses, using flashbacks. So it sort of switches between flashbacks, and what’s happening in the present day from what he can perceive in his state. So as I said he’s unable to move at all, or giving any indication to the people around him that he’s conscious, but he’s able to think and he can hear everything, but his memories are sort of coming to him in waves. So that’s kind of the process we’re going through.

[00:02:44] We know from the beginning that his coma is due to a bullet that entered his brain. And that he was shot at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. During the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which happened in 1989, and was the end of several weeks of student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing which is a very symbolic place. I believe it’s where Mao established the modern Chinese state and the Communist state. And it’s also located next to the Forbidden City, which is where the emperors, at least in the Qing Dynasty lived because Beijing was not always the capital of China. But anyway, this is not a Chinese history lesson. And if it was, I would not be the one teaching it since my knowledge is very limited. But on that topic this book does, in a way, kind of give you an overview of modern Chinese history, obviously told from the perspective of someone who is very vocal in his views the actions of the governments in modern history let’s say in that he’s very critical of their actions. And we see this through the book, but also yeah, I mean, I found it. I have some vague ideas of things that have happened in modern Chinese history – the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward as it’s called – but this book, I suppose, gives a very personal account of it.

[00:05:07] The main character is the son of someone who was labeled a rightist, which means essentially anti-Communist, pro-American, “anti-revolutionary” and his father  was in a so-called reform-through-labour camp for 20 years, I believe, and we see the legacy of this: how it affected the protagonist, as a child, and as an adult, how it affected his mother, so the wife of the father who was in the camp. Because when one person was labelled a rightist then the family by association was also punished in a way, in that people would distance themselves from from them. And they would also have limited access to certain public services, whether officially or unofficially again by association. So we get sort of a brief view of the Cultural Revolution which is when this character was growing up and it’s also when the writer grew up.

[00:06:31]And then we see the protagonist at university, slowly getting involved in this kind of- I would say it’s interesting because the writer was actually in Tiananmen Square for part of the protests, but wasn’t there on the day when the massacre took place, because – and he says this in the afterword – his brother went into a coma and he went to help take care of his brother at that time. So he wasn’t there, but he he did see some of what happened in the square in the weeks leading up to it. And this book, as I said, is very long and in its length, I feel like it gives a very day to day kind of view of what it was like in the square.

[00:07:42] Before I sort of quickly talk about the two main ideas that I came away from this book with, I’ll say what I didn’t like about it, which was very noticeable objectification of women. Just constant comments on how they look in completely unnecessary places, like there’s no relevance to what was happening. I found that really unpleasant and jarring. Yeah. I also think is too long. And I feel like that is a horrendously- I don’t know- not not a great thing to say, so let me rephrase. I feel like for me my reading experience- although I actually when I was reading it , I didn’t really get that feeling of “Oh come on, you know, when’s it gonna get to the next thing?” I didn’t have that feeling at all. I was quite happy to just go along with the story and let it unfold. But I think that might partly be because I had decided that I was just going to allocate two or three days to reading this book and doing not a lot else. But we don’t always have the luxury of that kind of time, and I do feel like there were quite a few places where it wasn’t really necessary to include as much detail as it did. But again, as I said, I didn’t feel a sense of impatience with it, except what I’ve already mentioned, descriptions of women and, yeah, if I were to edit this book, I’d definitely save some pages on those bits.

[00:09:50]The first thing that struck me after I’d finished this book. This is in relation to what I mentioned about his father and the legacy of his father how it affected his life. And even you see it again in the way his own actions – so the fact that he went into a coma because he was shot because he was part of these protests – how this affects his mother by association, again, and affects his access to health care, doctors don’t want to treat him because you know he was part of these protests which were very much looked down on by the government, obviously, but also people were not allowed to speak about it and not allowed to associate themselves with people who’ve been involved so as I thought about this it made me realise – not realise but it just reinforced the idea that China in the last maybe three, four generations- it just made me think about the trauma like if you say national trauma that it has gone through in different ways. From the Cultural Revolution, mass starvation and famine, people kind of not being able to, not wanting to talk about things that have happened. Even if people now don’t talk about it, either because it’s suppressed and erased , or people are ignorant about it due to that suppression, or there are people I’m sure who of course are not ignorant about it because they lived through it but they don’t talk about it because they’re scared or they don’t think about it. I think sometimes there’s this pressure to talk about everything like, especially if it’s sort of anti- government, kind of,  rhetoric. It’s like no you have to talk about it and it’s especially, and especially if we think about this specific context, these protests. When you read this book you see that some of these characters the students are very much inspired by American ideas of democracy and leadership. And obviously America loves that, because they love to represent themselves as the models for governance and social organisation, I guess you could call it. Went off topic there, now I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say.

[00:13:06]Yeah, right. So there is a certain idea that  you should always speak out but if you went through something like the kind of terrible trauma that some people went through, they just want to forget about it. They just want to try and survive, psychologically, emotionally, try and protect their families and I can understand why someone would not want to talk about it. Although I do see the importance of talking about these things but as I said, I understand why you wouldn’t. But regardless, I think, even if people are not fully aware of what happened in the past , there are many reasons why they would still feel the effects of this trauma, even if they don’t fully understand what happened, or where it comes from. Even if you erase history books, you can’t erase the emotional, social, psychological effects, spiritual effects that it has on society, on people, communally. It will be inherited.

[00:14:21]So yeah so that kind of inherited trauma was something that- yeah, it made me think about that when I was reading this book because there’s so many layers of it, and every country has their own version of this. And I’m talking about countries because in this context, that’s what it is but obviously there’s other versions of this.

[00:14:45] The second thing that struck me, which is not specific to China- it made me think of other contexts actually is when you have a protest- and I’m going by the way it’s described in the book which is fiction, but based on real events- the protest starts very small, and it’s not really started with the intention of it being a protest as such, as being like a political statement. It’s just a small group of students who wanted to show their sadness at the death of a prominent reformist politician who’d died. And it very quickly, kind of turned into this sit-in at Tiananmen Square, which then built momentum and other students got involved and then other universities got involved and eventually even other citizens got involved and it became really really massive, but this wasn’t planned initially, and the people who were leading it had no experience of any real type of social mobilisation like this.

[00:16:19] And there’s a key quote actually that I wrote down that was quite a nice way of showing how easily a situation like this can get out of control. One of the student leaders in the book says, “We were the chess players at the beginning, but now we’re pawns. And we’ve no idea who’s going to take us in the next move.” And this really kind of reinforced how volatile protests like this can be.

[00:16:50]So yeah, just, I think, because it’s so long and takes it really day to day, you can see that slowly that build up, not just of tension in the Square, but also the way power is shifting every day. So at the beginning, it was the initial small group of students who were controlling everything: they were controlling the message that was going out, they controlled who was involved; everything was very tightly and easily controlled, so they could make sure there were no, for example, no anti-government slogans being used so that it wouldn’t look like they were threatening the government that they were just asking for certain changes. But as it got bigger, this became harder and harder to control. And I think it gave a really good view, actually, of that process and what is involved in a movement like this.

[00:18:05]It’s very easy to get caught up in calls for protests and and seeing, you know, big protests on television, for example, but it’s also a very delicate situation to manage, and it can easily be misrepresented, can be infiltrated. So I think this perhaps is maybe for me, the biggest strength of this book is showing that the very personal experiences of people involved in, in an event like this. And also, how delicate it is.

[00:18:49]I don’t know if I could say I’d recommend people to read this book, unless they’re very specifically interested in the context: so the recent history of China, told from this particular perspective, obviously, and getting a very personal view of it. If that’s something that you’re really interested in then yeah, I think it’s worth reading. Otherwise, I’m not sure. [00:19:15]I haven’t read many novels from China, as I think I’ve mentioned before, so I’m not an expert on that, but I do feel like you might be able to find other books, if you’re not so passionate about learning about this specific situation and events. [00:19:38]Thank you for listening. I hope this was interesting, beneficial in some way, in sha Allah. [00:19:46]And assalamu alaykum.