Description
A man awakens from a coma to find that ten years have vanished since he was shot during the Tiananmen Square crackdown—only to discover a country that has been carefully taught to forget. Through his fractured, lingering consciousness, the novel reconstructs the aftermath of June 4, 1989 with unsettling immediacy, exposing how power rewrites memory, identity, and truth. Blending political urgency with intimate psychological detail, it explores themes of censorship, historical erasure, moral responsibility, and the stubborn human need to remember. Written in Ma Jian’s incisive, confrontational style, this landmark work challenges official narratives and turns one private body into a haunting battleground over what a society is allowed to know.
Available Editions
paperback
Knopf Canada
Published Jan 1, 2009
592 pages
ISBN: 9780307397218
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Details
First Published
1998
Language
eng
Translation
From: zho
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for Beijing Coma by Ma Jian.