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.

"The outcome of this bleak, wrenching generational saga from Ma Jian (Stick Out Your Tongue and The Noodle Maker) is known from early on: the politicization of Dai Wei, a diligent molecular biology Ph.D. student at Beijing University, ends in Tiananmen Square with a bullet striking him in the head. As the book opens, Dai Wei is just waking from a coma that has continued over 10 years following the June 4, 1989, massacre — still apparently unconscious, but actually aware of his surroundings. The narrative then alternates between Dai Wei's very conscious observations as a nonresponsive ''vegetable'' over the years of his coma, and his childhood and student life. Ma Jian evokes the horrors of an oppressive regime in minute, gruesome detail, particularly in quotidian scenes of his mother's attempts to care for Dai Wei, which eventually lead her to a member of the banned Falun Gong movement. The book's behind-the-scenes portrayal of the nascent student movement hinges on repetitious ideological bickering and sexual power plays. Lengthy expositions of Dai Wei's condition slow the book further, but Ma Jian achieves startling effects through Dai Wei's dispassionate narration, making one man's felled body a symbol of lost possibility. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

After police ransacked his home and interrogated him for bourgeois activities, dissident writer Ma Jian found solace traveling the wild, minority-inhabited regions of China. Upon his return to Beijing, he was further harassed and so left for Hong Kong in 1986, where he began a memoir, "Red Dust," and a story collection, "Stick Out Your Tongue." Now banned in China, his work reflects on the vagabond's... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) eternal search for the elusive ideal of home.

His masterful new novel, "Beijing Coma," is informed by his return in 1989 to take part in Democracy Spring. The hero, a student named Dai Wei, is an eyewitness to the killing of his friends in the early morning hours of June 4, 1989, by the People's Liberation Army, which was ordered by the government to put down pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. After taking a friend, whose legs had been crushed by a tank, to a hospital mired in the blood of the dead and dying, Dai Wei goes back to the streets, where the conflict is still raging. Seeing his former Hong Kong girlfriend emerge like a vision of the Goddess of Democracy, he runs toward her, but a shot is fired, and she falls to her knees. As he wonders whether she has been hit, a bullet explodes in his head.

We first meet Dai Wei in his 10th year in a coma, as wasted as an Egyptian mummy, one kidney sold to pay for his medical treatments. And yet — though his body is imprisoned in a society where the very air is owned by the party, and his soul is incarcerated in a fleshy tomb — he has absolute freedom to roam the geography of his favorite text, "The Book of Mountains and Seas," a pre-dynastic classic of geography and myth. As his mind wanders, he takes us through the interplay of the present, memory, myths, poetry and the cellular landscape of his body.

In elaborate detail, he mentally revisits the rise of Democracy Spring: from campuses, to marches and hunger strikes and the ensuing bravado, naivete, cowardice, friendship, factional warfare, sex and infidelity among the perilously undemocratic student leadership. Indeed, Ma Jian's critique of these young protesters is as sharp as anything in the novel. In his telling, the young commander in chief is flattened under a tank, even though the actual student leader at Tiananmen Square, Cai Ling, managed to escape to the United States. Ma Jian seems to suggest that even with her flight, Cai Ling's voice has been quashed by the regime because of her silence in her adopted country.

Yet all is not darkness in this multifaceted book. Droll internal dialogues charm us into falling in love with the outwardly comatose narrator. Dai Wei perceives his environment through his acute senses of smell and hearing. He imagines crying out to his mother: " 'Get me some bananas, will you?' I can smell bunches of them on the street stall outside." When friends visit, Dai Wei notices that people speak to him "as though they're leaving a message on an answerphone." Dai Wei wants to know more news from an old classmate, but unfortunately he lets out a fart, driving the young visitor away.

His mother berates Dai Wei for merely existing as a piece of wood and asks him to die. Yet even in her moments of hopelessness and madness, she is comical and oddly loving. She finds comfort through her therapeutic exercises with the outlawed Falun Gong movement until she's arrested, leaving Dai Wei temporarily without nourishment. In one rollicking episode, the media discover that Dai Wei's years in a fasting, vegetative state have given his urine magical healing properties. His mother invites urine connoisseurs to his bedside.

Dai Wei may be stuck in his iron bed, haunted by the tragedy of 1989, but this novel is thoroughly awake to the evils of the new China. During the 10 years he has been in what he calls "hibernation," China's citizens have become preoccupied with getting rich, a development that dismays him. "Do I really want to wake from this deep sleep and rejoin the comatose crowd outside?" he asks himself. "No one talks about the Tiananmen protests any more, or about official corruption. The Chinese are very adept at 'reducing big problems to small problems, then reducing small problems to nothing at all.'"

Ma Jian, who now lives in London with his translator and partner, Flora Drew, offers the Chinese people an avenue through which to retrieve their souls and emerge from their collective coma. He gives us two choices: remain society's slaves or lose everything and find freedom. This book, inevitably, will be banned in China, but smuggled and pirated Chinese editions will be read avidly there.

Belle Yang is the author and illustrator of "Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father's Shoulders."

Reviewed by Belle Yang, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[An] important contribution to a new kind of Chinese fiction and memoir, what might be termed a literature of unremembering. It strives to recover the unlocatable self against the backdrop of state-sponsored madness and the organized demolition of identity." Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Ma brings a fresh sense of awareness of the Tiananmen tragedy to a new generation." Library Journal

"One of the most important and courageous voices in international literature." Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature

"A complex, confrontational, demanding-and ultimately rewarding-work." Kirkus Reviews

At once a powerful allegory of a rising China, racked by contradictions, and a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests, "Beijing Coma" is a novel spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty, and a deep rage.

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He worked as a watch-mender's apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a photojournalist. At the age of thirty, he left his job and traveled for three years across China. In 1987 he completed Stick Out Your Tongue, which prompted the Chinese government to ban his future work. Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987 as a dissident, but he continued to travel to China, and he supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. After the handover of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives.