Mainland China is an enormous country. With 9.6 million square kilometers it is the third largest country in the world after Russia and Canada. The 1.33 billion population is the world’s largest, ahead of India by 1.5 million and the U.S. by over 4 times. There are some 56 ethnic populations recognized by the government, many of whom, even if speaking the national language, Mandarin, are often scarcely intelligible to one another. From the Xinhai revolution in 1911 through the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989 the country has gone through successive waves of convulsion. To outsiders the May Fourth Movement of 1919, is hardly known. The alliance between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang against the regional warlords in the 1920s, the subsequent campaigns pitting Communists against Nationalists, followed by their united front against 14 years of Japanese occupation, and return to war against each other have little exposure in the West, except among historians.
Mao’s Great Leap forward (also called the Great Chinese Famine) from 1958 to 1961 is said to have cost 36 million lives. It still may not be written or spoken of on the mainland. Though many studies have appeared in scholarly books and journals outside of China only in 2008 did the definitive historical work appear, not yet in English translation. But history and documentation, however vital, are necessarily views from the outside, concerned with getting objective facts compiled and in order. To understand the actual, breathing humans who undergo such events, we almost always depend on fiction and to a lesser extent, memoirs. These have been in woefully short supply from China. Only slowly are novels and short-stories being written, and then, sporadically making their way into western markets and to the reading public. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, in 2006, by Mo Yan, translated by the acclaimed Howard Goldblatt in 2008, and To Live, 1993, by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry in 2003 are both powerful, human tours through the years of the war and the great famine.
The Cultural Revolution got more press attention in the West during the time of its unfolding, 1966 – 1976 (depending on what marks the end-point) than the preceding wars and famine, though there were large ideological filters on what was available. Fictional treatments did appear more quickly following the Cultural Revolution than following the Great Famine and more have become more widely available in translation. We even have a commercial book titled Chinese Fiction of the Cultural Revolution, already translated, and with an annotated bibliography. Many readers have read and enjoyed Dai Sijie’s, 2000, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress translated from the French in 2001. Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. His most recent translated novel, One Man’s Bible, 1999, translated by Mabel Lee, deals more richly with the Cultural Revolution than his 1990, Soul Mountain. Both have won a wide readership.
The event that may have marked the end of these terrible decades of privation, civil war, mutual massacre –and yes, cannibalism – riveted both China and the west in June of 1989. It has come to be known in the west as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The Chinese government naturally enough, prefers something more innocuous, like the June Fourth Incident. The events of the days leading up to June 4, when the tanks rolled in and “the Tankman” achieved instant fame by standing in front of the lead tank, a frail human body against a line of tanks, were well chronicled –as well as at-the-moment reporting can do. It has also been documented extensively in academic papers and books for professional readers. Most impressively for the general reader we now have a first rate fictional treatment not just of the few days the world saw, but of the weeks, months and even years leading up to what young Chinese men and women saw as the Chinese Democracy Movement and the hours that brought it to an end.
Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian, (2008, translation by Flora Drew, 2008) is not yet a War and Peace, though there are elements of the great novel in it. The focus is much narrower in time, and in numbers and social strata of the participants, though it is much more detailed as to their movements and thoughts during the time witnessed. The narrator, Dai Wei is, throughout the novel, in a coma as a result of a bullet to the brain on June 4; he is unable to care for himself, unable to speak or move. He can only hear and smell, and think. His narration — his thoughts — run in two directions: from the early days of his life and the beginning of the student protests, with quick jumps back to their inspirations — the May Fourth Movement, for example — up to the night of the shootings; and from the time of his being shot forward through the ten years in a coma, commenting on his own difficult physical and emotional state, his mother’s deep worry and cruel remarks (thinking he can’t hear), and such of China and his friends as he can make out from mother’s and visitors’ conversations. The two narratives are separated in the otherwise undivided book of 703 pages, by italicized, short personal reflections, either of the state of his body, in medical terms, or of the 2,200 hundred year old Chinese classic of myth and travel — The Book of Mountains and Seas which appears often throughout out the book.
The opening words, italicized, are mysterious. They become understandable only after after reading much of the book.
Through the gaping hole where the covered balcony used to be, you see the bulldozed locust tree slowly begin to rise again. This is a clear sign that from now on you’re going to have to take your life seriously. (more…)
