A Map for the Missing
Belinda Huijuan Tang
For my waipo
Who, on his own, Has ever really known who gave him life? . . .
Since you ask me, yes, they say I am his son.
—Homer, The Odyssey
They don’t want to create a place for themselves in history: they want to create themselves.
—Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
Part 1
老家
Ancestral Home
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.