Bookstorm

Exiled Chinese author Ma Jian--author of one of my favorite books of 2008, the angry and exotic Beijing Coma--revisits Tiananmen Square, twenty years after the Chinese government suppressed a massive student protest.

Two thousand years ago, contemplating the relentless flow of time, Confucius gazed down at a river and sighed, "What passes is just like this, never ceasing day or night ..." In China, time can feel both frozen and unstoppable at the same time. The Tiananmen massacre that 20 years ago ravaged Beijing, killed thousands of unarmed citizens, and altered the lives of millions, seems now to be locked in the 20th century, forgotten or ignored, as China continues to hurtle blindly towards its future.

The amnesia to which China has succumbed is not the result of natural memory-loss but of state-enforced erasure. China's Communist regime tolerates no mention of the massacre. But Tiananmen Square, and other sites connected with the events of 1989, still remain charged with memory. When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.

Starting June twenty-first, I won't have an excuse to continue putting off David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: "A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat."

Interesting. When I was reading Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf two years ago, I recall having a nightmare in which I was an SS officer working at a concentration camp. I was carrying a submachine gun and patrolling a barbed-wire-lined perimeter. And like all of my dreams, it was fragmented, and I suddenly found myself surrounded by dozens of starving Jews, all of them with a tattered Star of David on their prisoner uniforms, all of them telling me I shouldn't be reading that book.

I heeded their advice and promptly set Mein Kampf aside for five or six months. Take it from me: it's a frightening book that'll completely fuck you up.

Now, imagine immersing yourself in a eight-thousand-page history of Nazi Germany: you might learn a thing or six.

Constantly reading about horrors makes every part of your life a little horrible. For the first six months of my year of Hitler, I didn't relate the symptoms I was having--the grisly nightmares, the lousy moods, the sudden, random bouts of despair--to the fact that I had immersed myself voluntarily in one of the darkest periods in recorded human history.

It's a little reassuring to know that I wasn't the only one having nightmares.