A Map for the Missing(9)

Three


OCTOBER 1977


Yitian sat on an old wooden stool in their storage shed and watched his grandfather die. He’d come to this place for months, sitting amongst the rusted tools and dried grain of the harvest, reading books as he listened to his yeye’s shallow breath. They had still been able to converse in the early days of the illness, but as the months grew on, Yitian could no longer deny death’s creeping maw. Many years later, in a forgotten corner of a university library, he would stumble upon an entry for liver cancer on the thin paper of a medical dictionary and find his grandfather’s final days described succinctly in bullet points, but at that moment, what had happened was still a mystery. They’d called the barefoot doctor so many times that the house had smelled like bitter medicinal herb for months, but still his grandfather’s eyes had yellowed like used sunlight and his skin drained gray.

Yitian reached every few minutes to rub his grandfather’s cold feet underneath the padded cotton blankets. He had accidentally brushed those feet every night while sleeping on the narrow wooden pallet he and his grandfather had shared for seventeen years. His brother, Yishou, slept on a mat at the floor of their mother’s bed to protect her if an intruder ever came. At night, their four atonal breaths beat different tempos, like four different songs played at the same time. Then his grandfather had become ill and they moved him to the shed, so there were only three voices left. Yitian hadn’t heard one of his grandfather’s stories in months. When he lay in bed alone at night, he felt as if his body were missing its most important skin.



* * *



—

Yitian heard the first story on a summer evening when he was six, the same year his mother cut off his childhood braid. He’d been thrashing against his grandfather’s body for hours in the humid night air. It was already long past midnight when he felt his grandfather’s wrinkled palms clasping his legs together to stop his fidgeting.

“Have I ever told you the story of the first Yellow Emperor?” his grandfather asked.

Yitian tapped his foot against the bamboo mat.

“It’s the most important story of our people, the one you must learn!” His grandfather began to recite. “On the top of Longevity Hill, at the highest spot lightning always finds, the Yellow Emperor was born. He was the son of a farmer, from an ordinary family. In the land, there were six extraordinary beasts, plaguing their tribe . . .”

After thirty minutes, his grandfather said, “I am too old and tire easily. I must continue the story tomorrow.”

Yitian hadn’t noticed how much time had passed. He’d been too absorbed to move, afraid that if he so much as rustled he’d be unable to hear his grandfather’s story. He’d forgotten the itchy mosquito bites, his hair sticking to his hot forehead, the warm air that felt like it would never cool. He was still wide awake and wanted to hear more. He could picture so clearly the Yellow Emperor as he devised a plan, the first in all the land, to defeat the beasts. He wanted desperately to know what happened next and whether the emperor succeeded.

“Please,” he begged.

“If you go to sleep, tomorrow evening I will tell you another part of the story.”

The next evening, Yitian remembered the promise. His grandfather continued, telling him of how the Yellow Emperor taught the people to build shelters and tame cattle, bringing new prosperity to the tribe.

“What happened next? Was there any more trouble?”

“I will tell you tomorrow,” his grandfather said. He yawned loudly and turned to his side.

Eight days after he began, his grandfather finished the story of the Yellow Emperor. Then he began the tale of the emperor’s successor, the Great Yu. A month later, they entered the Han Dynasty. This way, in three hundred and sixty-five evenings, they moved through four thousand and seventy years of history.

They kept going until his grandfather finished the five thousand years contained in the Twenty-Four Histories, volumes that he’d memorized as a matter of safety. It was gambling to rely on words stored on paper, his grandfather said. Books could be destroyed: a small army—sometimes Japanese, more often Chinese, your own people finding it easiest to stage a betrayal—could tear through a village, conscript the men to march farther with them, leaving the fields intact but piling all the books to be burned. Even those illiterate men knew how powerful words could be. For hundreds of years, histories and stories had burned, new ones then created and written down only to be burned again. His mind was the only place where words could truly be kept safe. He wanted to pass them down to Yitian so that they could continue to exist in the mind of another. Like water poured between cups, so the tales would remain safe for the next generation.

When he finished the country’s history, his grandfather began to tell Yitian of their own. Eight hundred years ago, his distant ancestors had first come to this land by way of dry Henan. They traveled until they reached the Changjiang Delta, where they saw the soil become dark and wet. This was back when people made their own roads by walking and there were still such things as new places. They walked until they saw holly ferns giving way to leopard flowers. Coming down a hill into the valley below, they raised dust, and when the fine mist settled they put their things down and stayed. It was springtime then, and so they saw fortune in the dove trees blossoming white and the real doves flying above and the quiet tributary water trembling in the wind that had eroded for itself a road that ran through the green land. For the next twenty-three generations, the descendants of their people planted and lived by this land, sometimes as rich as the day they arrived, more often dry for long stretches, sometimes years. Still, it was their land. Had they continued walking for a few more months, they would have made it to the fertile coast, where much later the most prosperous cities in the country would announce themselves. Luck, instead, had led them here.