Beijing Coma Read Free Page B

the country. The radio stations aren’t broadcasting it any more, so don’t you start humming it like a fool.’
    ‘You’re behind the times, Mum. Li Gu’s ballad is old hat. You can buy The Best 200 Foreign Love Songs in the shops now.’
    ‘Stop making things up! Why am I the only one in this family to have a political consciousness? From now on the four of us must study the newspaper every night and bring our thoughts in line with the Party. Dai Changjie, tomorrow you must adjust our radio so that it receives only Chinese stations. Don’t let that son of ours drag our family back down again. And from now on, Dai Wei, you’re only allowed to play your harmonica inside this room.’
    ‘When my compensation money comes through we can buy a television, then we won’t have to listen to the radio again.’ My father took another gulp of rice wine. Beads of sweat dripped down his face.
    ‘Last year, the three popular things to own were a watch, a bicycle and a sewing machine, but we only managed to buy a watch. This year, there are three new things everyone wants to own. I can’t keep up! We might not be able to afford a shelf unit, but I’m determined that we get a sofa . . . You shouldn’t be drinking so much wine, Dai Changjie – you’ve got a weak stomach.’ My mother pulled the bottle of rice wine over to her side of the table.
    ‘I’m so happy it’s all over. I can hold my head up now.’ My father gazed at my mother with a look of contentment in his eyes.
    My mother walked out and put another charcoal briquette on our stove in the communal corridor. A thick cloud of charcoal smoke wafted back into the room.

I picked up the thermos flask and poured some hot water into a pot of jasmine tea, inhaling the tobacco smoke that my father was exhaling. I was thirteen, and had already smoked a few cigarettes on the sly by then.
    My father took a sip of the tea and said, ‘Mmm, that tastes good!’ He had a cigarette in his left hand and a pair of chopsticks in his right.
    ‘I posted several packets of that tea to the Shandong camp.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have bothered. I had to give them all to our education officers. Drinking tea as good as this while undergoing ideological remoulding would have been considered an act of defiance.’
    ‘Didn’t you give violin lessons to one of their children?’ my mother asked.
    ‘That was down in Guangxi Province on the farm supervised by Overseas Chinese. Director Liu was a nice man. He moved back to China from Malaysia after Liberation. It was brave of him to ask a rightist like me to teach his daughter. He even invited me to stay for supper a couple of times. His daughter, Liu Ping, was very talented. With good coaching, she could have become a professional violinist. Once my rehabilitation has been sorted out, I’d like to go back down to Guangxi and pay them a visit.’
    My father kept a photograph he’d taken of them pressed inside the pages of his copy of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong . Liu Ping was in a white skirt, and was standing between Director Liu and my father holding her violin in her arms. She looked about twelve or thirteen.
    My mother shot me a glance and said, ‘You mustn’t repeat anything you hear in this room to your classmates.’
    ‘I know, Mum. Dad, can you speak English?’
    ‘ Of course! ’ my father replied proudly in English. ‘I’ll give you lessons. I guarantee that you’ll come top of the class in all your English tests.’
    ‘Dad, Chairman Mao said that we must be “united, serious, intense and lively”,’ my brother exclaimed as he chewed on his last peanut.
    ‘You shouldn’t go around spouting Mao Zedong’s words like that. Just content yourself with memorising them.’ An anxious look flitted across my father’s face.
    ‘Anyway, you got the quote wrong,’ I said to my brother. ‘What Chairman Mao said was that we should “unite together, study seriously and intensely, then go home with a lively