A Map for the Missing: A Novel

by Belinda Huijuan Tang

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2022 First Novel Prize!

“Belinda Huijuan Tang’s debut novel is a beautifully drawn, sensitively rendered portrait of a man desperately searching for his father—and for reconnection to the past and people he once knew and loved. Both rich in historical detail and timeless in scope, A Map for the Missing explores the costs of choosing your own path, whether what’s left behind can ever be retrieved, and whether it is possible to forgive the wounds we inevitably inflict on each other.” —Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

“An engrossing saga of a young mathematician caught between two countries, two cultures, two eras, and two loves. Set against the violent turmoil of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this powerful debut explores the wrenching impact of political ideologies on individual lives in a way that is resonant and timely.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness and A Tale for the Time Being

An epic, mesmerizing debut novel set against a rapidly changing post–Cultural Revolution China, A Map for the Missing reckons with the costs of pursuing one’s dreams and the lives we leave behind

Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home.
 
When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. So he seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help: Tian Hanwen, the only other person who shared Yitian’s desire to pursue a life of knowledge. As a teenager, Hanwen was “sent down” from Shanghai to Yitian’s village as part of the country’s rustication campaign. Young and in love, they dreamed of attending university in the city together. But when their plans resulted in a terrible tragedy, their paths diverged, and while Yitian ended up a professor in America, Hanwen was left behind, resigned to life as a midlevel bureaucrat’s wealthy housewife.
 
Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on the search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past—who Yitian’s father really was, and what might have been. Spanning the late 1970s to 1990s and moving effortlessly between rural provinces and big cities, A Map for the Missing is a deeply felt examination of family and forgiveness, and the meaning of home.

Release date: August 9, 2022

Publisher: Penguin Press

Print pages: 400

Sample

One

JANUARY 1993

你爸不见了

Translated directly, the words mean your father can’t be seen.

His mother’s voice shouts again—

你爸不见了—

your Ba’s gone missing.

He is in his office in the math department of the university, the echo of the phone’s ring jarring against the silence of the hall tense with the purposeful air of research. This has never happened before; because of the expense of international calls, he has always been the one to make the calls that would travel the Pacific.

你在吗? she asks.

The shock of hearing her voice and of what she says has rendered him speechless. At last, he forces a sound out of his mouth.

“Yes, Ma. I’m here.”

The cratered receiver pressed to his ear, he does a calculation. It is late afternoon in Palo Alto, which means that in China it is hardly even morning. In order to call him, she would have had to rise in the stillness of night and walk the fifteen li to town, leaving the frozen dirt roads of their village, going farther and farther until she reached the township’s main avenue, which, even at that hour, would still be dark and quiet, the determination of women preparing their storefronts visible only through shadow. At the forlorn train station, she would have asked one of the half-asleep passengers which direction to board, and then when she reached the city, she’d have to question a stony-faced city dweller to read the signs illegible to her. Not until she reached the telecommunications building almost three hours later would she have been able to finally make the call.

At this realization, his stomach tumbles, down and down. He grasps for the cushioned arm of his desk chair, for its comfort, for its familiarity.

Her words are so frantic that he must take a moment to hold the receiver away from his ear, put it aloft in the empty air. She’d never been shaken of the belief that her voice had to be made very loud in order to travel across a phone line, much less the distance of the Pacific Ocean. The more she yells, the more he begins to fear the entire math department will hear her through his office walls. He stuffs the receiver into the thick sleeve of his sweater to muffle the sound.

Finally, he calms her enough to hear her explain. His father left home two mornings ago, she says, shuffling out of the courtyard with a plastic bag knotted in a bow over his wrist, as if planning on a day trip. He hasn’t returned. She assumed he’d merely gone to a nearby village, perhaps to see a relative or an old army friend, but to believe this, she admits, she had to put aside her doubts about why he’d do such a thing. His father hadn’t taken a trip out of their village in years.

He inhales deeply. He promises his mother he will come home.

---

—

He was startled for the second time by the pattering of knuckles against his office door, then the voice calling out, in that tentative tenor he heard so often in America, thick with its awareness of the possibility for intrusion—“Hey?”

Yitian looked up from his hands, twisted until the skin had risen to a red-and-white mottle, and was surprised to find that the light in his office was already softening with the sunset. He hadn’t realized it was so late.

Steven Hsiung stood at the doorway, apprehensive, leather messenger bag dangling from his shoulder. On the corner of Yitian’s desk, the phone was still dangling off its cord.

“I was about to leave, but I just wanted to pop in and ask if everything is all right? I heard your voice earlier, and I wanted to come check.”

“Oh, nothing’s wrong.” It was obvious by their twin accents—Steven’s only becoming audible at the ends of difficult words, Yitian’s ever present—that the two of them could have conversed more comfortably in Chinese, but Yitian had followed the lead Steven set when they first met. Steven was an earlier arrival to their department, having come to America from Taiwan about a decade before Yitian. Speaking to their American colleagues, Steven made appropriate jokes at the appropriate times. When he pronounced Yitian’s name, the syllables were filtered through Steven’s attempt to make them American, and the result was strange, like dough kneaded flat and then remade in an unfamiliar shape. Yitian didn’t even know Steven’s Chinese name.

When Yitian saw Steven’s eyes linger questioningly on the phone receiver, he scrambled to put it back on the cradle.

“My mother called—” It seemed impossible to avoid speaking about the call now, but he wanted to describe it in the simplest, vaguest terms he could find. “I may need to go back home and help with my father.”

Steven looked at him with the same weariness he’d worn the first time they’d met, and then, to Yitian’s surprise, strode to the door, nudged it shut with his foot, and set his bag down. The department’s practice was to keep their offices open—to foster collegiality, the chair had said gently, when he asked Yitian if he would mind not closing his—so that Yitian often had the sensation of being observed.

Steven sighed and leaned against the desk. “It always happens like this at their age—the call, and then you find out there’s some sudden illness. . . .” His Chinese was less refined than Yitian expected.

“It will be fine. The chair is quite flexible with things like this, and he’ll help find someone to cover your class for a few weeks, if you need to go. You don’t know this yet, but we’re actually quite lucky, in this department.”

Steven began to tell him of his own mother, who’d suddenly been diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years previously and whom he now had to regularly travel back to Taiwan to care for. Yitian listened dully as he spoke about the hospitalizations, the home aid they’d hired, the emergency trips he had to take back to Taipei, the feeling of heaviness that weighed constantly upon him. This was the most Steven had ever spoken to him, aside from once when he and his wife invited Yitian and Mali over for dinner, an awkward affair where Yitian realized that he had little in common with Steven’s elegant family from Taipei who could trace their ancestry all the way back to royalty in the Ming dynasty. Yitian had stayed quiet, only saying that he was from a village in Anhui, then allowing Mali to describe her childhood in a hutong home in Beijing, which he supposed they’d better understand. They’d all spoken English, and Steven’s wife had ordered takeout that she had no qualms serving to them directly from their little paper boxes. He understood that he and Mali weren’t considered important guests. At the door and saying their goodbyes, there had been insistences that they had to do it again, but no one ever followed up.

Neither then nor now had Yitian been able to tell Steven that he hadn’t been back to China since leaving eight years previously, or that he hadn’t returned to his own village in fifteen. He feared the questions that would come after the telling—Steven would surely have expressed confusion about why he hadn’t been home in so long. He would have assumed that Yitian was a son, part of a family back in that place, home, with a set of duties toward his parents. This understanding of obligation as the core of one’s being was their shared culture. How could Yitian explain that he’d failed in his fundamental duties to his father for fifteen years, and hadn’t even spoken to him in all that time? Steven wouldn’t understand.

“It’ll be all right,” Steven said, finishing his story. Yitian realized he’d hardly listened to a word.

“Thank you,” Yitian said.

“Don’t worry, okay?” Steven smiled. His eyes crinkled behind his polished glasses, ones that Yitian had seen actors wear in movies from the sixties. Yitian could see that his older colleague felt proud of the advice he’d given, the support he’d shown to a fellow countryman. The easiest thing to do was nod; how could he express that he himself didn’t even know what kind of help he needed?

---

—

After Steven left, Yitian stuffed all his papers into his backpack and headed to his car. Normally he took the scenic 280 home, but today, he eschewed the long way and jostled alongside the traffic on the industrial 101 so that he could get home quickly and ask Mali about what to do next.

He was disappointed when he unlocked the door and found a message she’d left on the answering machine, saying that her boss had asked her to stay late. Mali did data entry for a real estate agent whom she referred to as Mrs. Suzanna, who lately had been training her to take on her own sales. Mrs. Suzanna had been the only one willing to employ her years ago when she had no work visa, and Mali could never refuse her requests.

He flipped open their address book, searching for someone else to whom he could speak. He couldn’t call his mother; she wouldn’t know to be waiting for the phone at the village office. Calling their friends, Junming and Meifang, would require that storytelling and recalling. No, the only person who wouldn’t ask for explanations was Mali. He sat at the dining table, directly facing their front door, and stared at the decorative plastic ivy she’d strung over the entrance. To give the home warmth, she’d said. She always thought of things like that when he couldn’t. When they’d moved into the home, looking at the neutral stucco walls, beige and sand and camel shades whose names he couldn’t keep apart, he’d been pummeled suddenly by overwhelming loneliness, so strong it paralyzed him. He hadn’t known whether she sensed his feeling or had the same one herself, but either way, she’d been the one to say, let’s put in some pictures of our families, let’s buy some leafy plants to decorate. And it had worked; the house began to feel like a home. Her suggestions always worked. He knew he wouldn’t be able to make sense of what his mother had told him until he could speak about it with her.

She found him staring blankly at the doorway and immediately she came to him, dropping the thick stack of paperwork she’d lugged home with her. Only after she’d pulled out the chair across from him, leaned her elbows upon the table, and took his hands into hers did he begin to parse his mother’s story.

“So what will you do?” she asked.

“I said I would go back,” he said.

When he’d told his mother this, it was without conscious choice. Instinct drove him to urgency. She’d been yelling; he was a son and his father was missing.

“Will you?” He looked in her eyes and saw that she hadn’t been expecting his answer.

“You don’t want me to go?”

“It’s not that. I just think it’s not so strange, right? To leave and go on a trip. Old people forget to tell others these things, sometimes. He can’t have gone so far.”

He looked across the table at her face, searching for some hope that he could latch on to and steal for himself. She seemed so certain as she reassured him—but she was always so certain, he realized.

“It would be a big trip for you.” She bit her lip. “And I wonder if by the time you get there, he’ll already be back.”

“Maybe.” Mali’s practicality and optimism didn’t have their usual effect tonight. Over the years he’d told her so little about his father, keeping the terms vague enough that she knew about the estrangement but not its reason. She thought this was a simple matter of an old man traveling in his later years to see friends. But his father hadn’t left the village in years, never breaking the outline of that circumscribed space where things were familiar to him, which protected him from the dangers he’d seen of the world outside.

“I didn’t mean I don’t want you to go,” she said, and he could see that she felt she’d misstepped. She’d gone to see her family in Beijing twice since they’d come to America, each time with excitement and a suitcase packed full of gifts. “If you think it would help—of course you should go.”

While she warmed up leftovers in the microwave, she called the airline to purchase the tickets.

“One way. What’s the earliest available?” She knit her eyebrows together. “Are you sure there isn’t anything sooner? It’s a family emergency.” A pause. “Okay. Book that.” He wouldn’t have been able to summon such precise English at a time like this. One hand checking the food’s temperature, another twisting her finger around the cord of the receiver cradled against her ear. How was she so practiced, so calm? He was overtaken by sudden gratitude.

She hung up the phone and balanced dishes in both hands as she brought them to the table. “Tomorrow afternoon at four, there’s a flight leaving from SFO. Connecting through Seoul. I booked it for you. You’ll be home the next day. All good?”

He nodded. Home. Her words, not his.

---

—

Perhaps if Yitian and his father spoke, he would have been able to piece together a story for where his father might have gone, but he didn’t know what shape his father’s life might have taken in the fifteen years since they’d last seen each other.

In bed beside Mali that evening, he couldn’t make himself sleep. They’d purchased an ultraplush mattress for his benefit, as he often had trouble at night, but Mali swore she could fall asleep anywhere.

Tonight the softness discomfited him. In the darkness he lay awake and tried to imagine what his father’s body and face would look like after all the time that had passed. He looked into the shadows of their bedroom and tried to fill in his father’s features, piece by piece. He began with the eyes. He could not imagine them ever giving up their opacity. The eyelids that drooped over them acted like a blanket for the pupils, dark as wet soil after a rainstorm. Even in Yitian’s childhood, those eyes seemed to belong to a man much older. On rare occasions when his father laughed, the heavy lids made it impossible to tell if the smile reached upward.

Then the mouth, which he remembered mostly by the recoil he’d felt whenever his father opened it and the harsh words strung themselves out. Inside was the damp smell of rot, something Yitian was only able to name after leaving the village. His father never once in his entire life had brushed his teeth.

Yitian rose from bed. He craved a piece of paper upon which he could follow thoughts to their conclusions. He felt unsettled by Mali’s quiet breathing and suddenly missed the noisy nights of his earlier life, when his sleep was punctuated by the rumbling sounds of others.

In his study, he clicked on the desk lamp and then extracted a single sheet of white paper from the drawer. The bulb’s light cast oblong shadows on the smooth eggshell surface, upon which he began doing what he knew best—sketching out a model:

Let f(x) be the time in China (in hours), x hours after midnight where

{x : x ε , 0 ≤ x < 24}

then f(x) is a function defined by:

f : x ↦ (x + 16)

y → y(g)

and g(y) is my father’s activity at y hours in Tang Family Village, defined partially by the following diagram:

y		y(g)
5.5	→	waking in muted dawn light then steam rising from face with hot towel
11	→	returning home to lunch after morning in the fields
20	→	lighting tung oil lamps and soaking day’s dirt off feet

then g(f(x)) gives my father’s activity at California time x, with the codomain of

g(y)={set of activities my father does in Tang Family Village}

The smooth flow of his pencil stopped. He couldn’t push past the mapping of the functions, which were confined to the particular space enclosed by the village’s borders—two square kilometers lined on one side by the embankment and fields on the other. He couldn’t make the range of the equation stretch to the artery of road that reached out of the village’s northwest corner, the one that could lead a person away from the place they’d always known as home. Anyway, who knew whether these functions were still true? He hadn’t allowed himself to picture his home in years. Whenever he was tempted, he told himself he needed to focus on this new life in America and all that needed to be learned here. Sad memories could only be intrusions. Still, he’d imagined his homecoming as more triumphant, his father at the scene, ready to see all Yitian had made for himself in America and how he’d finally erased the mistakes of the past.

Yitian turned off the lamp and returned to their bed just as the first lights of dawn were beginning to spread in the sky outside.

---

—

By the time Mali helped him pack the next morning, something within him had fled. He sat directly on the floor next to his suitcase while she thumbed through the items inside. When she released shirts from their hangers and asked him what he wanted to bring, he found he couldn’t even guess what kinds of clothes he’d need.

“How cold does it get around this time of year, over there? Will this be enough?” she asked.

“More than enough, I think.” He folded a last pair of trousers and added them in, mostly to have a feeling of contribution. The suitcase was still only half filled, full of loose room between the items inside.

“I’m going to get some stuff from my office,” he said, rising.

He dislodged the stickiest, bottom drawer of his desk and extracted the only item there, a brown airmail envelope covered with stamps measuring the distance it had traveled. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep at night, he would come to this desk, open the letter, and read it again. He would summon the past and wonder what would have happened in another version of it, if he hadn’t said goodbye to Hanwen, the first woman he’d loved. He wouldn’t have had that word then, love; that came later, when he’d come to America and picked up the language that insisted on putting names to every feeling.

Now, he flattened the letter inside the first textbook he saw. An old love pressed inside Introduction to Topology. It was the only thing animating the textbook. None of his students this semester had showed much interest in his class, and writing out his lecture notes was a chore bringing little reward.

“It’s amazing that you can still think of work at a time like this,” Mali said, when he returned to the bedroom and packed the book, lifting the other layers of soft fabric and pressing it down between them, so he knew it would be kept safe.

Two

TANG FAMILY VILLAGE, ANHUI PROVINCE

He could sense he was home before he opened his eyes. He no longer needed sight; he could tell time as he once used to, by feel and by sound—if the darkness was weakly transparent with the coming of dawn, or carts were already beginning their low roll on the road outside, if wives were calling to wake their husbands and children, then it was already past six and soon his mother would be upon him to collect manure for the fertilizer pit. Otherwise, he could stay in bed with his grandfather for a few moments longer.

He opened his eyes to the sight of the village’s welcoming pine through the taxi’s glass. Its branches bowed down in their familiar arc of greeting and were bare as they’d been on the day of his last departure. He could have pretended that only a day had passed.

He rolled down the window to see more clearly.

“What are you doing?” the taxi driver exclaimed. “It’s freezing!”

Yitian ignored him. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant and shocked him into the alertness he would need when he saw his mother again. He hadn’t slept at all on the plane ride out from San Francisco, nor on the turbulent connection through South Korea and in the rocking train compartment he shared with eight others that took him from Shanghai to Anhui. At last, after crawling into the cab for the last leg of the journey—he’d justified the expense by telling himself it would have taken hours to decipher the bus system—he’d been seized by a fatigue so great that he could not even open his mouth to answer the driver’s questions about why he was going so far out in the countryside. He’d fallen asleep to the sight of the construction and upcoming buildings of Hefei City and awoken to the familiar landscape of his childhood.

The sky outside was oppressively gray with winter. As the car ambled down the unpaved main road, he squinted down the narrow alleyways, trying to make out the houses he’d once known. The exteriors were of the same material, made of bricks and the mud adhering them, but under the snow blanketing roofs and the hanging icicles, the outlines of homes were much taller than they’d once been. And yet the place looked smaller than he remembered. As they passed one home on a corner, he was so surprised at the scene he glimpsed behind the half-ajar courtyard doors that he thought he was dreaming. There, in the house: a square television perched on top of a shabby dresser.

“Where do I go, boss?” the driver asked.

They’d reached the end of the road, but still Yitian had not seen the roof with cracked tiles that always told him where to turn.

“I must have missed it,” he said. “Can you turn back?”

At each alley opening, he saw only layers and layers of neat eaves, all unbroken, all well kept. All the while, the meter’s glaring red digits trickled up.

“Just let me out here. I’ll walk,” he said.

His shoes slipped against the snow as he trudged through each of the alleys. He began to wish that he had allowed Mali to pack him more clothes when she’d asked. The wind insinuated itself between the layers of fabric covering him and rendered the protection useless. He hadn’t experienced cold like this in years, out there in California where there was never any real winter. Even here, a winter storm this fierce was rare and seemed to write a foreboding into his father’s disappearance. He hoped that, wherever his father had gone, he was wearing his thickest clothing and had found a way to be indoors.

At last he saw it. He’d missed the turn before because there wasn’t any broken roof to be found. The single-story brick and mud home of his childhood had been heightened, covered with concrete, and whitewashed. He’d walked by this house two or three times, but only now could he recognize the older structure hiding beneath. It stood apart, the kind of home villagers could walk by and point at, whispering under their breath, “Now, thosepeople—they’re rich.”

The thought made him proud. It was the money he’d sent back twice a year that had built it. Even when he and Mali had first moved to America and partitioned out each week’s spending down to the smallest change, he’d mailed a check to his mother. Sometimes the amount had seemed hardly worth the postage required; other times, Mali showed him how little they had for themselves and pleaded with him to keep a little more. She held out her palms, upside down, open-faced, to say, nothing. He hadn’t known how to respond. He couldn’t make sense of care as a thing that had to be compared and doled out in portions between those he loved.

He hesitated, shivering at the door with his hand on the knocker. He leaned his head close to the new wood, half expecting to hear his father’s booming voice emanating from within, once again drunk too early in the day. He would step out the door, shaking off the dregs of alcohol, and tell Yitian this thing about a disappearance had all been a joke, made up because he’d finally forgiven him and wanted to lure him home. Then his mother would emerge, too, brushing her hands on her apron and apologizing for her part in the deception. They would embrace and agree that the trick had been worth the cost.

No sound came from behind the wood. He pushed upon the iron ring at last. The door yawned open.

“Is anybody home?” he called into the empty courtyard. He was surprised to hear his voice coming out in their old dialect, through no effort of his own.

---

—

His mother’s body had rounded out, thickening in the middle and through the chest, bones parting and relaxing to make space for new flesh. Her head bobbed near his shoulders as she patted his arms by way of greeting, as if only the evidence of her hands upon his body could make his physical presence certain. She was shorter than he remembered, though this new image was much closer to how he always thought she should look, the firmness of her body matching the strength of her movements and speech.

“What happened to you!” was the first thing she said. “I thought you were coming days ago!”

“The flight here is long, Ma.”

“Did you eat? I killed a chicken last night because I thought you would be back already. I’ll warm the food up. How much did you pay for the taxi?” She rushed about the house, boiling water, taking his bag from the floor into the bedroom, each time she walked away from him returning in mere seconds with another question.

Where to begin? There was his father’s disappearance, but there was also this—his mother, her solidity in front of him, for the first time in years.

He walked around the house as she boiled water for tea. The familiar air came back to him, the scent of garlic and dust and work. The rooms were as neat as she’d always kept them. The walls were still lined with shelves of clay pickling jars, hanging knives and cutting boards, old calendars that stretched as far back as the eighties. A fraying poster in the center of the room showed mountain scenery, magically blurred, from a place they’d never go. He was struck, now, by the house’s frank utility, so different from his American home that valued privacy and separation. He’d been so confused the first time he’d heard that American phrase, living room, because all the real parts of living, of a life—the cooking, eating, sleeping—seemed to be pushed elsewhere behind yet another wall or door. The real living room, though they would never have called it that, was this room, in this old home.

He sat down with his mother to drink the tea. At this table in the center of the room, ...