Beijing Coma

by Ma Jian (Author), Flora Drew (Translator), Ai Weiwei (Designer), Flora Drew (Translator), Ma Jian (Author), Ai Weiwei (Designer)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.50

  Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his time as a microbiology study at the Beijing University. As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred. The result is an outstanding work of fiction and an extraordinary insight into modern China.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.50

  Dai Wei is a medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Caught by a soldier's bullet, he falls into a deep coma; as soon as the hospital authorities discover he is an activist, his mother is forced to take him home. She allows pharmacists access to Dai Wei's body and sells his urine and his left kidney to fund special treatment from Master Yao, a member of the outlawed Falun Gong sect. But during a government crackdown, the Master is arrested and Dai Wei's mother - who has fallen in love with him - loses her mind. The millennium draws near and Dai Wei has been in a coma for almost a decade. A sparrow flies through the window and lands on his naked chest; it is a sign that Dai Wei must emerge from his dry cocoon. But China has also undergone a massive transformation in the time that he has been absent. As he prepares to take leave of his old metal bed, Dai Wei realises that the rich imaginative world afforded to him as a coma patient is a startling contrast with the death-in-life of the world outside.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $4.74

  May 1989. Tens of thousands of students are camped out in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. But what started as a united protest at the slow pace of their government's political reform has begun to lose direction: people from all over China are coming to join the demonstration, but the students at its heart are confused by the influence they suddenly wield, and riven by petty in-fighting. One of them, Dai Wei, argues with about everything from democracy to the distribution of food to protestors, little knowing that, on 4 June, a soldier will shoot a bullet into his head, sending him into a deep coma.As Dai Wei lies immobile in his mother's Beijing flat: his body has become his prison, but his memories offer a means of escape. We watch him fall in love, drop out of school, arrive at university - and become increasingly politicized. From his coma, Dai Wei can't see or move but he can hear what's happening in the world beyond: his mother's struggle to keep him alive; the government's attempt to suppress all memory of the Tiananmen massacre; his friends' involvement in China's frenetic capitalism. As the almost minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $15.23

  Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his time as a microbiology study at the Beijing University. As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred. The result is an outstanding work of fiction and an extraordinary insight into modern China.