A Map for the Missing: A Novel - Softcover

Tang, Belinda Huijuan

 
9780593492963: A Map for the Missing: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059349296X ISBN 13: 9780593492963
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Belinda Huijuan Tang is a 2021 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She holds a BA from Stanford University and was a 2019 work-study fellow at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lived in China from 2016 to 2018 and, while there, received an MA from Peking University in Beijing. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

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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 earlier than 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...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059349296X
ISBN 13 
9780593492963
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Hardcover