Ma Jian, _Beijing Coma_, trans. Flora Drew

BEIJING COMA SHUTTLES between two time frames. In one, Dai Wei is a student caught up in the ferment that leads to the mass demonstration of May 1989 in Tiananmen Square. In the other, set seven to ten years later, he is in a coma in his mother's apartment, unable to move or speak but still able to hear everything said around him. We learn early on that Dai Wei took a bullet to the head in the final hours of the demonstration, when the People's Liberation Army moved in, and he has been in the coma ever since.

The Tiananmen Square passages, which usually run 8-10 pages, follow Dai Wei as he interacts with his friends and fellow demonstrators, rushes off to get some sleep, checks in on his hunger-striking girlfriend Tian Yi, gets appointed head of security, and so on. These sections, more dialogue than description, succeed in conveying the buzz, the chaos, the excitement of the early days of the demonstration, when triumph seemed imminent, and the gradual, then accelerating darkening when the troops are gathering, demonstrators are drifting away, and the shooting commences.

Ma Jian was an actual eyewitness at Tiananmen, though he was not present at the bitter end, and these scenes have a peculiarly realistic flavor, mainly because people are only occasionally talking about politics and goals. They wonder about when the food will arrive, or scrounge cigarettes, or quarrel with each other, or indulge in utterly ungrounded (it turns out) speculation that Deng Xioaping will ultimately have to give way. Couples form, couples break up. A community forms, with all the the mess and contingency of a community, even while the feeling grows of being at a turning point in history. It's almost like Woodstock--had Nixon sent in the National Guard on the final day to mow everyone down.

The passages set in Dai Wei's mother's apartment provide a glimpse of how China changed after Tiananmen through what he overhears. Hong Kong is handed over. Some of his old associates go to the USA, or get rich, or lose their minds. Falun Gong and other traditional practices gain popularity. Hong Kong developers arrive. Hutongs are cleared out to make way for the Olympics.

At novel's end, Dai Wei may be on the point of waking up. If he does, he will be a kind of Rip Van Winkle, emerging into a society that will have become alll but unrecognizably different--though not at all in the ways the demonstrators envisioned.

It's a long book--586 pages in the edition I read--and I would say it could probably lose about a quarter of its length without any grievous sacrifice. The Tiananmen Square scenes, in particular, sometimes seem to be repetitions without variation. Even so, if you are interested in an up-close, on-the-ground view (as opposed to a bird's-eye, big picture one) of one of the hinge moments of recent decades, Beijing Coma provides that.