Beijing coma ebook

Have a card? Add it now to start borrowing from the collection. The library card you previously added can't be used to complete this action. Please add your card again, or add a different card. If you receive an error message, please contact your library for help. Error loading page. Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.

Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help. National Library Board Singapore. Search Search Search Browse menu. As he lies in bed immobile for years, he lives in his memories of the past. He also silently observes everything around his big iron bed, trapped within his body. His mother, apartment, friends, and body break down around him Ma Jian's epic masterpiece about the Tiananmen Square Protests will be present in your mind long after you put the book down-- if you can do so.

His mother, apartment, friends, and body break down around him while his mind remains unable to move or change. This is a metaphor for the natural incessant beauty of China that Dai Wei loves, which is unchanging amidst the country's political turmoil.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese culture. Ma Jian's exquisite style takes you to the rain forests of Yunnan, the sweaty southern provinces, busy Beijing, and explains the beauty of Hong Kongese women.

You become embroiled in his circle of friends, and although there are MANY characters you feel as though they are your friends as well. There are a few too many characters for my liking. I believe that Jian tries to explain how vast the protests are, but by the end, you are a bit confused about all the minor characters. All in all, I am a little too young to remember these protests first hand, and I am so glad that I learned about this era through this book.

The writing is beautiful and moving, while still being historically accurate. China in my mind will forever be shaped by Ma Jian, and of course, Dai Wei. View 1 comment. A book told from the stundent's point of view of the tianenmen square massacre. It's told retrospectively from a comatose students point of view and slips between his life and mind in the coma and his fatelful tale of those last few weeks before the massacre took place.

It gets a little boring in the middle i should say but is stunning in the last pages. Ma Jian has a interesting way of describing things in a very minimilistic way but in a way that enables you to picture the whole scene. Wor A book told from the stundent's point of view of the tianenmen square massacre. Worth a read. May 28, Yigal Zur rated it liked it. Ma is a great writer, good critic of the wrongs in china but i found this novel to cumbersome.

An absolutely towering masterpiece -- painful, haunting, compelling, and profound. Original and never once dull over the course of pages. I wish I could write some words that would do a work like this justice, that would make more people read it and experience it, but I finished the book about 10 minutes ago and my mind is still reeling.

Don't allow the length and the grim subject matter to frighten you away. This is simply one of the best novels I've ever read. Jul 23, Claire rated it did not like it. A staggering book about the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing in The author begins - through the story of our hero - with the way these students grew up who gave birth to their desire to claim something different from what was given to their parents, continuing with the situation in the universities and ending in the uprising and its bloody repression, creates a complete chronicle of this process, describing in detail each stage, putting us in the heart of events, transporting us next t A staggering book about the Tiananmen Square uprising in Beijing in The author begins - through the story of our hero - with the way these students grew up who gave birth to their desire to claim something different from what was given to their parents, continuing with the situation in the universities and ending in the uprising and its bloody repression, creates a complete chronicle of this process, describing in detail each stage, putting us in the heart of events, transporting us next to the students who struggled and envisioned a different future for their country, while dreaming of their own personal happiness.

What makes this book special, though, is that it doesn't just have that. Along with the narration of the events of the uprising shows us the life of our hero after it, being in a coma after his serious head injury from a gunshot, he tries to reconstruct the past, while his mother is desperately trying to improve his condition.

This sad second narrative forms the basis on which the first is built and until the end the one follows the other and slowly the intensity that leads to the very strong finale is build, where the violence of repression is paralleled by the equally violent genesis of the new China of the next century. In this way, the author manages to do two things at once, giving us, on the one hand, the history of the uprising with sensitivity and political insight and, on the other, a very strong allegorical commentary on modern China of enormous economic growth and non-existent progress in human rights issues.

A really wonderful and very useful book. From the first page on, life literally flashes by the protagonist. The story proper begins as the narrator switches to Dai Wei, now in a coma. We journey with Wei, from his birth, childhood and adulthood, to finality. We see him falling for his childhood love Lulu, who later betrays him; a Hongkongese A- From the first page on, life literally flashes by the protagonist. We see him falling for his childhood love Lulu, who later betrays him; a Hongkongese A-Mei, who breaks his heart, is killed in Tiananmen Square and might have come back as a sparrow in his last days; and then Tian Yi, who escaped death and to the US.

We follow him to Beijing University where he studies biology, and which is where he gets involved in student protests for government reforms.

We experience his sensations while he lies in a coma, being cleaned and fed through a tube by a despairing mother, who even if she exhorts him to die soon still attempts to find him healers.

This is like a foretelling of his fate, of being shot in the head. When he was a teenager, the police, interrogating him about a banned book he copied out and gave to Lulu, threatened him with boiling water from a flask.

During the period of the one-child policy, birth control officers carried out forced abortions at family planning clinics, throwing foetuses into buckets, strangling new babies. One kind of horror which traumatizes Wei was experienced by his father in internment camp: cannibalism. A doctor he talks to in Wuxuan, researching such atrocities, also adds that local citizens proved their loyalty to the Party by executing friends and neighbours.

Wei himself experiences cannibalization of a sort when his mother had to sell off one of his kidneys to fund his medical upkeep. Wei gives us a blow by blow account of how the doctors remove his kidney - without anaesthetics. The reader can expect similar minute details throughout the entire novel, especially in the Tiananmen Square pages. Wei likens the scenes in the Square to some movie set. However the dialogue is not so much akin to a film as sometimes it can be a little stilted and formal.

But, surprisingly, this works here, because the reader could be watching a Chinese opera, particularly one set on an immense stage with stage directions and asides aplenty, with a preponderance of characters.

She is slowly driven to insanity as she is persecuted for being a member of the Falun Gong; her electricity, water and phone cut off. Her neighborhood is being razed to the ground for a new shopping complex, whose chairman is none other than Lulu.

Nearing the end, Wei is now finally starting to see light behind his eye lids, when before, his entire Weltanschauung while in a coma has been through his ears and nose.

If you believe in karma, when one does not have anywhere left to go, there is no cycles left to endure, one has reached the apex just like Wei finally seeing himself in a public square with just one building standing, atop in an iron bed — Nirvana. Jan 12, Joey rated it it was amazing. It is so hard to properly review a book like this that is brilliant, descriptive and eye opening and at the same time chronicles atrocities too shocking to fully comprehend.

This is the story of the massacre of student protesters at Tiananmen Square. It is also the story of their fathers and grandfathers and the torture and injustice they suffered during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

The narrator lies in a coma after taking a bullet to the head while fleeing from the crackdown on student act It is so hard to properly review a book like this that is brilliant, descriptive and eye opening and at the same time chronicles atrocities too shocking to fully comprehend. The narrator lies in a coma after taking a bullet to the head while fleeing from the crackdown on student activism in Beijing.

As he lies unable to move or communicate the past leading up to getting shot is enmeshed with the world moving on without him, a world he can smell, hear and see in his mind, but cannot respond to. He travels back to his earliest memory of being forced to watch an elderly woman next door being tortured to death because the police believe she is a capitalist sympathizer. He remembers his violinist father coming home from a prison camp after being a musician is outlawed.

Shortly after he returns home he dies, leaving his son his journal chronicling being reduced to cannibalism and digging through the feces of other inmates trying to find undigested food to keep from starving to death. As a teenager he watches his mother turn away a cousin who is pregnant for the second time. In trying to flee to the country to have her illegal baby, she is taken down at the train station by soldiers who cut the fetus from her belly as she lays bleeding on the train platform where no one dares stop them.

These are just a few of the memories that weave themselves in and out of the story side by side with narration of the comatose student's favorite book of Chinese myths. Even though this is labeled "fiction" there is no doubt in my mind these things happened. Maybe not to a boy who lay in a coma but surely to either the author or someone he knew well.

I was never taught of the Cultural Revolution in school. All we were told was that Mao was a Communist and Communism was bad. I was eighteen when the first protests took place and twenty when the massacre occurred. I had no idea what happened to the students that survived, their families or even how many were killed.

If you are interested in activism, social justice, history or are just a Sinophile like myself, this book is required reading. It is not easy to read, it is beautiful and horrifying and unbearably sad and depressing, but it is worth the emotional ravaging you will take to learn the truth.

Jun 25, Meredith rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction , cultural-revolution , reviewed , asian-literature , china , tiananmen-square , favorites , library. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

There are three major periods of Beijing upheaval in this amazing novel, and Dai Wei survives them all: first Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, then the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and finally the beautification of Beijing for its Olympic bid, which brings his mother's housing complex to rubble around him. Through all of this turmoil, Dai Wei is ever the observer, watching as the Cultural Revolution wreaks havoc on his parents' marriage, as his friends orchestrate the protests at Tiananmen There are three major periods of Beijing upheaval in this amazing novel, and Dai Wei survives them all: first Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, then the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, and finally the beautification of Beijing for its Olympic bid, which brings his mother's housing complex to rubble around him.

Through all of this turmoil, Dai Wei is ever the observer, watching as the Cultural Revolution wreaks havoc on his parents' marriage, as his friends orchestrate the protests at Tiananmen Square, and as his mother struggles in vain to remain in her home. He is, in this regard, an omniscient third-person narrator, allowing us a snapshot of many characters' lives as he witnesses the conversations, deaths, romantic encounters, and psychological struggles that defined these periods in recent Chinese history.

We encounter characters who are of sound body and deadened mind, and vice versa. No one, however, escapes with both body and mind intact. Of particular interest is Dai Wei's mother, who devotes her entire life to caring for his comatose body.

His mind, however, is sharp as he travels the neural pathways of his own history and somatic systems. Even with eyes closed and body immobilized, he can sense his mother's frustration and despair. After she is arrested for her participation in a peaceful Falun Gong demonstration and her would-be lover Master Yao is imprisoned, she returns as broken as Dai Wei's friends after Tiananmen. She wishes her comatose son dead so that she can have some semblance of a life, but ultimately finds herself echoing the student demonstrators she once so vehemently opposed: "Down with Fascism!

Few novels have driven home for me the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as vividly as this one, despite its focus on Tiananmen Square. Ma slips in some harrowing, eye-popping anecdotes about Red Guard brutality and inhumanity. Of course, the main event in this book is the unjustifiable brutality against peaceful student demonstrators.

Ma Jian spent more than a decade writing this story of the events of Tiananmen Square prompted by his desire to force China to remember the tragic events of its past.

He said of the novel: 'I wanted to write a book that would bear witness to recent history and help reclaim a people's right to remember. However, it is the way he frames his story that m Ma Jian spent more than a decade writing this story of the events of Tiananmen Square prompted by his desire to force China to remember the tragic events of its past. However, it is the way he frames his story that makes this novel so impressive. The hero, Dai Wei, is in a coma after being shot in the head by a soldier on June 4, The story is told as he remembers what led up to the shooting, and also what he hears being discussed around him as he lies, rotting inside his prone body.

Truly a tour de force, this book should be read by everyone before the Olympic Games begins this year. I am far from a political animal, but the events of China's recent history cannot be ignored and must be acknowledged and remembered. Dec 30, JimZ rated it liked it. I read this in August.. I made a note after finishing it and it took some time to finish it : Hard to describe. Too long but shows immaturity of the students.

I worry about the Hong Kong protestors of August Today, They have many other people from different walks of life in Hong Kong on their side.

His understanding of human nature moved me to tears. Two narratives are intertwined, both told from the perspective of the narrator and main protagonist, Dai Wei. One narrative relates minute details of the weeks of protests, of which Dai Wei was one of the organisers. Years are passing and his life is filled with memories, grumbling of his mother - his sole carer, and occasional visits of friends who moved on with life.

The novel reads like a documentary in which every event and conversation from weeks of protests is recorded. I took breaks for days and weeks and returned to the book as if to an old friend.

To this day I find it heartbreaking that a million citizens failed to bring change. Wasted lives, ideas, potential. Dai Wei, alive, trapped in a decomposing body, at some point becomes useful only when his mother sells his urine for urinotherapy followers. His body becomes a bed for a bird. I loved how sensual this novel is. Human spirit is not unbreakable but how to live with a broken one?

Aug 16, Jorge rated it it was amazing. Amazing account of China from the start of the Mao era, Mao's initiatives to detailed notes on the events of Tiananmen Square protests in and the decade after the massacre. Truly captures the challenges of achieving democratic rights under a strong central government. The book is a fictional account of Dai Wei yet it captures the sentiment and many of the events of the massacre.

The sad part for me is how many outside of China never received details of the incidents and possibly forgot Amazing account of China from the start of the Mao era, Mao's initiatives to detailed notes on the events of Tiananmen Square protests in and the decade after the massacre. The sad part for me is how many outside of China never received details of the incidents and possibly forgotten. The sadder part of the account is how many now in China may never really hear the bloody history of the Communist Party in China.

Rather the past is glossed over, erased, forgotten and replaced, distracted by Olympics. Overall, impressive literature, political fuel, and romanticism. May 07, Nancy rated it it was amazing. Excellent fictionalisation of the tiananmen square incident in A really good read and so much more grown up than red dust.

Jun 16, Ricki rated it it was amazing. I loved every minute of this book but will also admit to putting it down several times whilst I digested what I had read. All in all, it took me about 3 weeks to read it Jul 23, Edward rated it it was amazing. Totally engaging, difficult to put down. A bit lengthy-- close to pages with no chapter breaks but worth every smidgen. Just in time for the Olympics-- be informed.

A lot of weighty stuff exposed accompanied by prolific prose. Oct 29, Raully rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction. Dai Wei lies in a coma after the student protests of have been brutally shut down.

The narrative combines what he observes now with his memories of his former life, allowing us to contrast the romantic dreams of his youthful friends with the compromised actualities of modern-day China. Highly recommended. Feb 01, Matt rated it really liked it Shelves: historical-fiction , chinese , asian , s. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.

We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Beijing Coma may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.

Loved each and every part of this book.