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Beijing Coma: A Novel
Ma Jian
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2008
On Sale: May 27, 2008
592 pages
ISBN: 0374110174
EAN: 9780374110178
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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