Beijing Coma #4

As the story goes on, we meet A-Mei, Dai Wei's new girlfriend. She is attending college at the same place as Dai Wei, and later they move in together. During a holiday, Dai Wei travels to Guanxi, while A-Mei goes home to Hong Kong. Dai Wei traveled to Guanxi, because his father wished him to meet some of the people he knew at the labour camps their, and to see if they were still around.

He talks to a lady who worked at all the camps, and who knows Dai's father, but she tells him everyone is dead. When Dai asks who the murderers were, she responds, "Who were the murderers? You could argue the only murderer was Chairman Mao" (67). I think this really shows the contrast from the beginning of the book, where people were afraid to even copy books, to the current time frame where people freely oppose the government.

Dai Wei returns back to college once the holiday is over, but A-Mei does not come back. A week after she was supposed to return, he gets a call, in which A-Mei says that her parents will not allow her to be with him, as he is a political criminal, and they eventually break up. I think it's interesting that the people from Hong Kong seem to have different stadards than everyone else in the country of China.

Beijing Coma #2

As the book continues, so does Dai Wei's story of his life. He talks about how oppresive the government was, and even recollects on how he was arrested one time. He says that he was arrested for copying a book, which apparantly was illegal at the time, for his girlfriend, which was also illegal to have. The officers take him to the station to interrogate him, and as they are doing so, they start to beat him. They force him to talk about everyone who was involved, and they also force him to write out every illegal thing he had done in his life, which he does out of fear. I find it strange that he has such a harsh punishment, for such a petty crime.

The story then jumps to when Dai Wei is off to college in Gangzhou, and his father has since been deceased. The father's dying wish was for Dai Wei to read his diaries, so he does, and they are filled with democratic and revolutionary thoughts. At school, Dai Wei is studying to become a doctor. One day, the body of an executed criminal is brought in, and the class disects it. The teacher asks him a question about what a certain part of the brain is, and he responds, "The archicortex is basically the hippocampus, down here... It's the older, more primitive part of the brain and is connected with memories and emotions.. If this part of the brain is damaged, the patient falls into a vegetative state" (67). I find it very ironic that he is talking about the part of the brain thathe presumably was injured in, leaving him recollecting his memories from the vegetative state he is know in. I believe this is a very pivital line to the story because it links it all together.

Beijing Coma #1

The book Beijing Coma by Ma Jian is one of very important events surrounding the ways government has affected the country of China over the years. It follows the story of Dai Wei, a pro-democracy protestor who was shot in the head at the riots at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and is in a coma. He is telling his story starting from his childhood, and I presume he will continue all the way up to the current day events. One thing that confuses me is how he is able to tell stories while he is in a coma, and how he can sometimes hear what people are saying around him. I comend Ma Jian for this intriguing way to tell a very important story. Dai Wei starts his life story when he was just a young boy, and his father had just come back from a work camp to try convert his liberal political views into a more socialist mindset. The day he returns, the father feels like he's been at home for years. After talking to his sons, the mother tells him, "Don't corrupt your sons with your liberal thoughts, Dai Changjie. All the activists involved in that Democracy Wall Movement last year are now in jail" (7). I believe this really epitomizes the fear the people in China had in that period in history, and also shows how the mother does not want her sons to get into trouble through their differing politics.

As the book continues, the family starts talking more about their plans for the future. The father tells them about how he had almost moved to America before the Communists had taken over China, and how he wanted to move their as soon as possible. Although the mother agrees with the father that it would be in their best interest to move to America, she tells him, "Don't praise foreign countries in front of the children. Now that you're back, you'll have to read the papers every day and make sure you keep up with the changing political climate. We can't let our family be torn apart again" (9). This really shows how conservative the mother wants the family to be, and how she is still living in fear that the 'Party' will take one of the family members away. With the knowledge that Dai Wei becomes pro-democratic later in his life, one can really see where he gets all of his controversial views, which is from his father. It seems that everyone in their village calls Dai Wei's father a bourgeois rightist, as if he's a villain, when all he wants is the freedom that many people in the world take for granted.