NOTHING SEEMED SERIOUSLY wrong at first. A few days of struggling through lectures and campus life. A seasonal depression as the earth moved further from the sun and the hours of darkness lengthened. Then one morning Wang couldn’t get out of bed. Under the blankets, he lacked the strength to move. He shut his eyes but could not sleep, because his thoughts wouldn’t grant him a moment’s rest. They mocked his defects and weaknesses. They scorned his punctual and eager attendance at lectures, pen grasped in hand to note down everything the lecturer said. They ridiculed Wang’s ambition to be a history professor — he who was so pathetic he couldn’t even get out of bed.
Under the blankets Wang stagnated. His physiology slowed down to the point of stasis. Waste filtered through his kidneys, seeping from bladder to sheets. His heart pumped so weakly, blood silted up his veins.
Vanishing under the duvet to recover from a hangover, a cold or a broken heart was a norm of dormitory life. Three days went by before Wang’s roommates recognized something was wrong. They crowded around Wang’s bottom bunk, shivering as the windows were flung wide to clear the air. Wang could hear them debating what to do, their voices filtering down to his new subterranean level of reality, where the meaninglessness of everything was bleakly exposed. They shook Wang’s shoulder, then withdrew from his limp unresponsiveness. There was laughter as they threw a glass of water over him. Then confusion as Wang did not so much as flinch or blink.
‘What’s wrong with him? It’s like he’s died.’
Wang’s father came to collect him the following day. A commanding figure in his expensive suit, Wang Hu went to the student accommodation office first and handed over an envelope stuffed with cash for the ‘inconvenience’ caused. He was charming and apologetic; slick and experienced at bringing disagreeable situations under his control. Wang Hu then went to his son’s dormitory with two security guards from the Ministry of Agriculture, who heaved Wang out of bed. The guards stripped Wang under his father’s watchful eye and dumped the soiled clothes and bedsheets into a bin bag. Then Wang Hu told them to stand him under a shower.
‘Be as rough as you need to be. Make sure the water is cold.’
The shower got Wang functioning again, putting one foot in front of the other and moving in the direction that he was told.
During the medical check-up Wang did not answer a single question. Clinical depression, diagnosed the doctor. A high suicide risk. Owing to his deteriorated mental state, 21-year-old Wang sat out in the waiting room as, in hushed conspiratorial tones, his father and doctor determined his fate.
‘What’s your madness?’ The elderly man peered at Wang through the opalescence of his eyes.
‘Don’t know,’ Wang said. ‘Dr Fu has it in his notes.’
A frozen wind gusted through the wrought-iron bars of the window, and Wang smelt the sourness of the old man’s estrangement from water and soap. The old man squinted his cataract-clouded eyes at Wang. ‘Neurasthenia,’ he decided. Then he shuffled away, remarking loudly to the empty hall, ‘His mother was here once. She pretended to be a cat and peed on the floor. What a hiding the nurses gave her.’
Wang was leaving his room for the first time that day, holding his breath as he passed the urinals on the way to the common room. He stared through the doorways into the other dorms. Six iron bedsteads and one wardrobe per room. The walls empty, no photographs or calendars to count the days. Not even a potted plant on the sills. The patients huddled under blankets, or stared about with the idleness of nothing to do.
The illness of some of the men in the common room was evident in their smiles. Others were deceptively sane-looking as they watched the TV news bulletin, wearing long johns and mildewy jumpers coming apart at the seams. It was 1997. The year Deng Xiaoping died and Hong Kong returned to the motherland. Wang was certain that neither historical event had even for a moment shaken the patients out of their lassitude.
Eleven o’clock was personal-grooming hour. A nurse clipped an old man’s nails, nagging him to keep his splayed and liver-spotted fingers still. Another nurse was cutting a patient’s hair over sheets of the People’s Daily spread under his chair. Wang saw some electric clippers on the table and asked her to shave his head. The nurse refused. Skinheads were against regulations. Why not go for a short back and sides? Wang scratched his head.
‘My scalp is itchy. I’ve got lice.’
He sat before the nurse and bowed his head. The buzzing clippers vibrated against his skull, tremors descending vertebra by vertebra down his spine. Wang felt like a sheep being shorn. Fleeced. Afterwards he rubbed his hand over the stubble, waving away the nurse’s offer of a mirror. The palm of his hand had told him all he needed to know.
The clinic was a low building with wrought-iron bars over the windows. Kindness, Friendship, Tolerance, said the breeze-fluttered banner stretching across the entrance. Sometimes Wang stared out from between the bars at the suburbs of Beijing. Fields of poorly irrigated crops, fertilized by sewage. The dust-blown sign of the near-empty-shelved corner shop creaking in the wind. A bus stop where a bus from the city stopped twice a day. ‘A temporary stay,’ Wang was told. ‘A month or two at the most.’
The world shrank to the hospital grounds. Restricted, regimented, confined. Bells rang at six. Yawning, the patients trudged to the canteen at quarter past. Breakfast was rice porridge. Tea. On Sundays a hard-boiled egg. The day nurses yet to arrive, the Level One patients struggled to put spoons in their mouths, dribbling the porridge back out. At seven they washed and brushed their teeth in the bathroom of Ward B, spitting in the scum-filthy sinks. There were no mirrors, and as he dragged the toothbrush about Wang stared at the cracks in the wall.
Eight o’clock, outdoor exercises in the yard. Thirty patients in padded winter jackets followed the tracksuited Dr Fu as music played on a cassette-player. Hands to toes. Hands on head. Jumping jacks. They queued for medication at eight thirty. Otherwise speech-stunted patients were fluent in the language of pharmaceuticals, the polysyllabic names of psychotropic drugs — chlorpromazine, perphanezine, trifluoperazine, clozapine and diazepam — rolling with ease from tongues. Eight fifty-five, Wang swallowed his anti-depressants. Nine o’clock was cleaning time. Wang swept and mopped on automaton, changed the bedsheets soiled by incontinents in the night. Ten o’clock, a mid-morning nap until lunch. After lunch, a nap until dinner. Another dose of medication. Television. A cigarette smoked in the yard. Bells ringing at eight thirty. Lights out. Bed.
Within weeks Wang felt as though he had been a patient for years. There was no rehabilitation or occupational therapy, but the lack of meaningful activity did not bother him. All he wanted was to sleep around the clock. And at the clinic, he got away with this, almost.
Bells rang at eight thirty. Lights out. Sleep quotas met during the day, the patients were untired at the scheduled hour for sleep. Each night Wang lay awake in his cot, his blanket pulled over him, listening to the voices of his roommates in the dark.
‘Look closely at the pills they give you,’ whispered Gao Ling in bed two. ‘Are they different in size, colour or shape? Spit them out if they are. The doctors are testing out new drugs for pharmaceutical companies. They are experimenting to find out which ones make our brains haemorrhage. Don’t be a lab rat. Spit them out.’
‘Down with Gao Ling!’ chanted Wei Hong in bed four, ‘running dog of the Guomingdang!’
Wei ‘Serve the Red’ Hong had been sacked from his job as an elementary-school teacher after making his class of seven-year-olds write ‘Thought Reports’ to expose their anti-Maoist thoughts then leading a struggle rally against a little girl, encouraging the rest of the class to slap her and smear her with black ink.