Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

coming down the hill in the dusk, I put my arms around her and kissed her. She’d just paused to take a swig from her water bottle and I’d moved closer and asked for a sip.
    At the bottom of the hill, we hugged each other again, but didn’t kiss. She looked at me, with a slightly nervous smile, and said, ‘Who are you?’ Then she stopped speaking in her broken Mandarin and muttered a few sentences in Cantonese.
    ‘I didn’t understand a word of that,’ I said.
    ‘You weren’t supposed to,’ she answered slowly.
    Then I said, ‘I like you,’ after which she bowed her head and stared at her feet.
    I put my arm around her shoulder and she leaned into my embrace. We began walking again very slowly. A large lake stretched before us. The reflected peak of the hill behind us plunged straight down into the deep green water. I wanted to sink my hands and tongue into every cavity of her body. The only girl I’d touched since Lulu was a girl at a friend’s birthday party. I’d danced cheek to cheek with her, and run my hand down her back when the lights went out.
    There weren’t many other tourists around, so I bent down and kissed A-Mei again. She stopped walking. Her body seemed to grow heavier.
    ‘That’s very daring of you!’ she said with a smile, gently pushing me away. In the dim light, I watched her fiddle with a lock of her hair. Her delicate hands were paler than her face. She looked up at me and didn’t move. I felt a sudden surge of love for this girl in the white skirt, who was so different from me. We were standing very close, staring into each other’s eyes. I put my arms around her and licked her hair, fingers, nose, ears, hair grip, eyebrows. I didn’t care what I kissed, as long as it was part of her.
    From that moment onwards, she became the centre of my life.
    The love you felt for her is trapped in a remote bundle of motor neurons, too distant for you to reach. All you can do is lie here and wait, as your body slowly calcifies.
    We stayed in the spare room of her aunt’s flat that night. After I turned out the lights, I sat on the edge of A-Mei’s bed and put my hand between her legs. I sat there stroking her all night, until just before sunrise I saw the tiredness in her eyes, and returned to my bed to sleep.
    In the morning I left A-Mei with her aunt and caught a long-distance bus that delivered me to Wuxuan at three in the afternoon. It was a bustling, crowded market town. The dusty road outside the bus station smelt of diesel engines and dung. Small street stalls were selling clothes, hats and fake leather shoes that had been bought in the markets of Guangzhou. The dirty, crumbling walls behind them were pasted with peeling posters of foreign women in bikinis and tigers leaping across rocky mountains. Hung from a cable suspended between a door frame and a telegraph pole, like a piece of skewered meat, was a poster of a blonde woman leaning on a limousine. I asked for directions, and soon found my way to the headquarters of the Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee, where I met up with Dr Song, an old university friend of A-Mei’s aunt. Dr Song had been a surgeon at Wuxuan County Hospital, but during the national campaign to rectify past wrongs launched by the liberal-leaning leader Hu Yaobang, he was transferred to the Revolutionary Committee to research the history of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi Province.
    He checked my student card, read the introduction letter from A-Mei’s aunt, and said, ‘Why waste your summer holidays coming here? You could be visiting the tourist sites of Guilin. And why on earth would you want to visit a reform-through-labour camp?’
    I told him that my father had come to Wuxuan in 1963 and had spent two years working in the Guangxi Overseas Chinese Farm nearby. I wanted to visit it, but didn’t know exactly where it was.
    Dr Song looked surprised. ‘What was your father’s name?’ he asked, checking my student card again.
    ‘Dai Changjie. He played for