Although Milan Kundera has famously written in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, it is still very difficult to explain how and why a period of Chinese history could have disappeared so completely from the national memory. 23 years has passed since the blood-stained night in 1989 and all the memories about the Tiananmen Massacre has been conveniently deleted from people’s past. But Ma Jian, the writer of Red Dust and Stick Out Your Tongue, did not believe the amnesia hypothesis. His fiction Beijing Coma, paperback published by the Vintage Press in 2009, was set to fight against forgetting.

The title of Ma Jian’s fiction, Beijing Coma, is wordplay. We all live like Dai Wei, the protagonist, in a comatose state: Dai Wei, who was shot in the head when fleeing the massacre in Tiananmen Square, is conscious in mind but imprisoned by his comatose body; we, however, are the prisoners of our comatose minds. People trade in their political ardour for economic growth.

Lying in his sickbed for 10 years, Dai Wei witnessed the world change around him. His friends, with whom he protested on the Tiananmen Square for democracy, had given up their political pursuit and given in to the reality. His mother, who was once a fervent defender of the Communist Party, had been disillusioned by the close observation of the police and the refusal of the government to pay for Dai Wei’s medical cost. His house, where his mentally unstable mother tends to him, was to be demolished to make way for his first love girlfriend’s estate development plan – a shopping mall for the Olympics.

Past memories of the square haunt Dai Wei all the time. In fact, his flashback is the second narrative of the novel, accounting the events of the 1989 spring day by day, minute by minute. Well-placed on the periphery of the protest student leadership as the security head, Dai Wei was the witness of the protest leadership’s struggle and squabble. Egotistical, fractious and competitive, the leadership presented by Dai Wei’s memories was far from perfect, but nevertheless their eagerness to promote democracy made them likable then. However, when the same bunch of people visited their comrade in a vegetative state 10 years later, Dai Wei sadly found that “no one talks about the Tiananmen protests anymore.”

The slaughter on the square that spring might has faded away in people’s memory, but oppression never has and never will. In the finale, Ma Jian skilfully wove the past slaughter and the current oppression together. The demolition of Dai Wei’s house echoes his painful memory of the massacre. The scene of Dai Wei’s friend Bai Ling being mowed down by the tanks recurred. “Her face was completely flat. A mess of black hair obscured her longated mouth,” our protagonist vividly remembered, lying motionless. The next minute, his house was torn down despite no agreement between his mother and the developers having reached.

Though positioned as a fiction novel, Beijing Coma is more faithful to history than many non-fictions. The author Ma Jian himself has participated in the pro-democracy movement in 1989, but he left Beijing to tend to his brother who just had a car accident a few weeks before the massacre and narrowly escaped the bloody slaughter. To make the description of the events on the square as accurate as possible, Ma Jian spent 10 years researching, calling up witnesses for their accounts and writing.

The story of the protagonist Dai Wei and his family is a miniature of the contemporary China. The Culture Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, the Bourgeois Liberalization in the 1980s, the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 and the crackdown of Falun Gong in 1999, every single major landmark in the contemporary Chinese history is reflected in Beijing Coma. The contents might resemble ambitious history records, but Ma Jian’s style of writing is far from tedious and trifling. Indeed, the tone of Beijing Coma is bitterly humorous. In order to pay for Dai Wei’s medical cost, his mother had to sell one of his kidneys to a wealthy businessman and marketed his urine as miracle cure.

History is the nightmare from which we all try to awake, but the choice remains, as Ma Jian tried to show in Beijing Coma, between a comatose body and a comatose mind.