Free Beijing Coma by Ma Jian

graduation certificate at the end of it.’
    I lay in bed, munching on the dough stick. ‘I’m nearly seventeen years old, Mum. Dad said he wanted me to read his journal once I’ve left school. Let me see it.’
    My mother’s expression hardened. ‘Dai Wei, although your father was rehabilitated, his outlook on the world remained skewed,’ she said. ‘The Party has learned its lesson from the way it treated people like him, and it won’t make those mistakes again. You must remember that when you read the journal, and not look at things too negatively. I wanted to burn it, but it was his dying wish that you should read it one day. If I do give it to you, you must promise not to show it to anyone else.’
    ‘Times have changed, Mum. There’s no stigma to being the son of a rightist or a capitalist any longer. Now that Deng Xiaoping is liberalising the economy, people like you, who come from a wealthy background, are held in higher respect.’

Unfortunately for my mother, her family had no foreign connections. She had an older brother and a younger sister. I suppose they were my uncle and aunt, but my mother hadn’t been in touch with them for decades, even though her sister lived in Beijing. The wife of my mother’s uncle travelled down from Tianjin to visit us when I was eleven or twelve. She brought out a handful of peanuts, placed them on our table and talked about her life. It was then that I learned that my mother’s uncle had been a Guomindang general before Liberation. When Communist peasants dragged him up a hill and were about to execute him, his wife went to his rescue. She shouted out to them that when the next political campaign came around, they’d have to pick a new class enemy from one of their own families. The peasants decided to let my great-uncle go, so they could use him as a target in any future campaign. During the land reform movement a few years later, he was brought out again to be an object of hatred, saving many lives in the village. After all the landowners and rich peasants of the surrounding ten villages had been executed, he was lent out to them to play the enemy in their campaigns as well.
    ‘Dai Wei, when you get to university, you must focus on your political education. You must do all you can to gain Party membership.’
    I didn’t bother to argue with her. I wasn’t particularly interested in my father’s past. The country had changed now. My father’s foreign connections may have ruined his life, but they had saved mine. Thanks to him, I was now about to go to university.
    Dai Ru said goodbye to me and went off to school. He was fifteen, and as tall as I had been when I was detained by the police.
    Your flesh and spirit are still alive, buried inside the coffin of your skin.
    Southern University was on the outskirts of Guangzhou City. The campus was ten times larger than my secondary school. Mosquitoes danced through the dense leaves and sprawling branches of hundred-year-old trees.
    Our dormitories were housed in two former hospital blocks that had belonged to the old Military Medical Academy. The two-storey, adjacent blocks were connected on the first floor by an open passageway which was probably built so that patients could be wheeled easily from one ward to the next. This passageway was the only place in the campus where you could enjoy a cool breeze. Everywhere else – in the dorms, classrooms, cafeterias and basketball courts – the air was hot and humid.
    In April, I would begin to sweat, and for the next six months would remain drenched in perspiration from head to toe. The heat steamed my energy away. I understood why southerners are so small and thin. All the students suffered from the heat, gulping at the air like goldfish, but students from the north, like me, suffered the most. During lectures, the professors had even more sweat on their foreheads than us. At mealtimes, our sweat would drip into our bowls, and we’d swallow it down together with the soup