Ma Jian Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Ma Jian explains his reason for writing Beijing Coma: "The Tiananmen tragedy was a defining moment in 20th Century history, but in China, no one is allowed to discuss it. Remembering has become a crime. Today, the Chinese are a people who ask no questions, and who have no past. They live as in a coma, blinded by fear and newfound prosperity ... I wanted to write a book that would bear witness to recent history and help reclaim a people's right to remember."

Ma Jian on Beijing Coma

In April 1989, I left Hong Kong, where I'd been living in self-imposed exile for two years, and caught a train back home to Beijing. Photographs of crowds marching through the dusty streets of the capital had been plastered across the world's newspapers. Chinese students had launched a movement for freedom and democracy. I wanted to be part of it. At last, it seemed as though Communist China was changing.

For six weeks, I joined the students on their marches, crashed out in their cramped dormitories, shared their makeshift tents during their occupation of Tiananmen Square. I watched them stage a mass hunger strike, dance to Simon and Garfunkel, fall in love, engage in futile power struggles. I was ten years older than most of them. Their passion and idealism impressed but also worried me. Denied knowledge of their own history, they didn't know that in China political protests always end in a bloodbath.

When the government quelled the protests with the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4th, I was 1000 kms away, in the coastal town where I was born. My brother had run into a washing line while attempting to cross a road, smashed his head on a concrete pavement and fallen into a...