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Conclusion: The Square Comes Full Circle Among Tiananmen’s many revelations is that historical imagination may not always be literal. It may accrete through accidental suggestions and rumors, even inventions and errors, as much as facts. As George Black and Robin Munro justly put it, the term “Tiananmen Square Massacre” has firmly entered into the “political vocabulary of the late twentieth century ,” even though, technically speaking, no massacre happened inside the Square. At best the phrase is a “shorthand,” but they will insist it is also a misnomer (234). Munro in particular has pleaded with passionate sincerity that “journalism may be only the rough draft of history, but if left uncorrected it can forever distort the future course of events” (811). Given how Tiananmen’s narratives have been told and its meanings produced, what seems to be at work with its historical imagination is undoubtedly something more literary than barely factual. The “Tiananmen Square Massacre” is at once a synecdoche, a myth, an allegory. The incident ’s potential meanings, from the first, have been fluid, pliable, and even now, more than twenty years later, they continue to be amenable to literary shaping. It is hard to dispute Munro’s claim that the geography of the killing matters, that the demographic of the dead matters. But what then? What does and will Tiananmen mean for a time that exceeds, and a world that survives, the massacre? Contrary to what observers projected at the time, the “truth” of Tiananmen will not wait to be redeemed on some future horizon when knowledge meets history, when some fateful historian-­ seer comes into full possession of all knowable data. Rather, the time of historical imagination is ever present and open. It has been so in the Tiananmen literature, with all its ellipses, catachreses, even distortions. 238 / conclusion This is the “future course” that our present moment occupies. Craig Calhoun articulates a similar insight for the mainland itself: “For most of the people of China, and for the future of democratic struggles in China, firsthand observations will be far less crucial than representations of the movement in photographs, narratives, news reporting, gossip, histories, sociological analyses, trials, speeches, and poetry” (203–­ 4). Fiction constitutes only one slice of this future, but it derives unique power from its capacity to move between the concrete and the conceptual, to bring into dialectical concert history’s actuality and the present’s exigencies. Ren Bumei, the former student activist and Liubukou survivor, once commented: “It would be fair to say that all of my writings have been influenced by this tragedy—­ to a greater or lesser extent, there is nothing that does not originate from that seething spring and that blood-­ soaked dawn” (65). This testimony to Tiananmen’s omnipotent and enduring effect on an individual psyche can be taken as a distillation of Ma Jian’s national allegory as much as Ha Jin’s diasporic melancholia. In terms Ma will echo a few years later, Ren noted that “June 4th has not really led Chinese to a spiritual awakening. . . . For this reason I worry that the aftermath of the June 4th tragedy is an even greater tragedy: the bloodbath has not actually imparted to the Chinese spirit any sense of guilt or humiliation or personal growth, resulting in only more needless sacrifice of life. This easy retreat, this ready indulgence in mutual flattery over a little ‘progress,’ can only make one sigh in the depths of despair.” Finally, deploring the “barrack-­room boasting” and “mutual recrimination” that vex Tiananmen discourse on the Internet by parties both within and outside of the PRC, Ren concluded: “15 years without self-­ reflection, 15 years of callous indifference , 15 years of speechless rage or rageless speech—­ all of this shows that June 4 was not really a turning point for Chinese. . . . In a human tragedy of such massive scale, China did not produce a single book, film, mass commemorative movement or humanist champion worthy of the event” (68). We can only speculate on what Ren might think of Beijing Coma, but here at last is a work that earnestly, fervently, epically attempts to be “worthy of the event,” blow by blow. In sync with Ren’s exhortations, Ma’s novel calls for the Chinese people, whether within the PRC or in the diaspora , to move beyond “barrack-­ room boasting” and “mutual recrimination ,” beyond superficial self-­ congratulations about China’s progress and self-­ exonerating criticisms of student leaders. His text resonates with Ren’s declaration...

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