The next stop on our Read the World tour brings us to China, and here we are reading Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, hosted by u/fixtheblue, u/lovelifelivelife and myself.

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Here is the Goodreads summary

Dai Wei has been unconscious for almost a decade. A medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he was struck by a soldier’s bullet and fell into a deep coma. As soon as the hospital authorities discovered that he had been an activist, his mother was forced to take him home. She allowed pharmacists access to his body and sold 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 was arrested, and Dai Wai’s mother—who had fallen in love with him—lost her mind.

As the millennium draws near, a sparrow flies through the window and lands on Dai Wei’s naked chest, a sign that he must emerge from his coma. But China has also undergone a massive transformation while Dai Wei lay unconscious. As he prepares to take leave of his old metal bed, Dai Wei realizes 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.

At once a powerful allegory of a rising China, racked by contradictions, and a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests, Beijing Coma is Ma Jian’s masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty, and deep rage, this extraordinary novel confirms his place as one of the world’s most significant living writers.

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Discussion Schedule

So this book does not have any chapters, however scattered throughout are little two line paragraphs spaced out from the rest of the text and highlighted in italics, so I have taken these lines as the stopping points. Hopefully they are easy enough to spot. I have put in the page numbers as per u/lovelifelivelife’s physical copy of the book.

It has been split into 7 sections and we will check in on Fridays.

15th September -up to 'While thoughts and desires travel through your temporal lobes, you listen to the noises inside your body, trying to gauge where you are.' (p94)

22nd September - up to 'Perhaps the rain has stopped. Everything sounds calm outside. All you can hear is the swish of bicycle wheels that grows louder and then fades away again.' (p188)

29th September - up to 'You are the earth dried by the hot sun, a tree abandoned by its soil.' (p283)

6th October - up to 'You want to fly through the dark like Hun Dun, the headless god who has six feet and four wings.' (p381)

13th October - up to 'While you wait to decompose, the iron bedstead creeps into your body, transforming it into a rigid tree.' (p475)

20th October - to ‘You lie on your bed like a stone on a riverbed, while time flows past above you.' (p570)

27th October - to the end (p666)

3rd November - Bonus read - Stick Out Your Tongue

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Bookclub bingo

If your taking part in r/bookclub bingo, Beijing Coma works for Historical fiction, translated, 2000’s, POC