The cure for a Beijing coma
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The Olympics are not supposed to be about politics -- but of course that’s a fiction. Reminders of Chairman Mao’s presence have been minor in Beijing (or have they? above) just as Adolf Hitler himself did not play a dominant role during the Berlin Games in 1936. Even for people aware of the political situation in China today, the parallel between the Berlin Olympics and Beijing’s is remote though undeniably eerie: authoritarian regimes trying to polish their glossy apples of modernity; the startling feats of certain athletes -- Michael Phelps, for instance, breaking records in the pool just as Jesse Owens once did on the track.
The best literary answer to the narcotic forgetfulness induced in TV viewers of the Olympics is the deadly serious, yet very comic ‘Beijing Coma’ by Ma Jian, which I’ve been reading over the last two weeks.
Jian’s narrator, who wakes up from a coma that was a result of injuries suffered at the massacre in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 protests, is hearing voices. He remembers, in particular, one voice, that of his father who in the story has been released after 22 years in the “reform-through-labor” camp system.
The father is describing a fellow prisoner’s method of surviving: “One day three rightists who worked in the camp’s cafeteria were sent to the local town to fetch a batch of yams. When they returned Old Li waited outside the cesspit, and after the men [went to the bathroom], he scooped out the excrement, rinsed it in water and picked out the chunks of undigested yam. He managed to eat about a kilo of them. He knew the three men were so starving, they wouldn’t have been able to resist munching a few raw yams on the way back from the town. There were three thousand inmates in the camp. We’d been on starvation rations for half a year. . . .”
-- Thomas McGonigle
Thomas McGonigle is a contributor to the Times’ Books coverage and the author of several books, including ‘The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.’