A Map for the Missing(18)
She picked up the sickle again, this time opening her palm against the handle. The sight of the rough calluses where her hands had once been smooth returned her resolve. She inhaled deeply. She could do this. A moment of pain, that was all she needed to exchange for the hope of her future.
She bit down on her lip.
“Hanwen! Hanwen! Are you there?”
A girl called out from below, and then came the crunching sounds of someone pushing their way through the grass up the hill.
“Hello?”
The voice shocked her, causing all the tension to escape her hand. The sickle dropped silently and powerless into the cushioning grass.
Hongxing was coming toward her. “I came to help you! I didn’t want you to have to cut the grass alone!”
Hanwen pushed back the sting she felt gathering behind her eyes. If she hadn’t hesitated, the wound would already have been made. Hongxing hadn’t even brought her own sickle. She picked up Hanwen’s and began to slash dramatically at the grass, grabbing and pulling at the tussocks as if she were a model laborer whom the Party urged others to mimic. Hongxing was the most notoriously fussy out of all the sent-down girls, known for making any excuse to avoid work. She came from a once-famous family of opera singers who’d been denounced in the earliest days of the Cultural Revolution. Hanwen had never seen her labor so enthusiastically. How had she known what Hanwen was planning? Or had she simply followed some weak instinct that sprouted from the shaky way Hanwen left the dorm? Desperation could leave a person transformed.
* * *
—
That night when Hanwen washed herself, there was a sliver of blood, dried to the color of rust, on the finger she’d used to touch the blade. She dragged her washcloth across it, and the blood dissolved to reveal an almost transparent cut. She pressed into the flap of skin as hard as she could. She wanted to force herself inside that sharp sting.
She could try again. She could endure more pain than that.
The next day, she rose earlier than the others and examined the tools. When she picked up the sickle, a splinter from the handle cut into her skin.
She dropped it as if burned.
She knew, then, she wouldn’t be able to summon the resolve a second time. She’d ridden to the edge of her daring, a point on the horizon to which she wouldn’t be able to return. How had she allowed such a brief moment of surprise to disrupt her plan? She’d been so sure that her determination was the one thing she had, what would distinguish her from those smarter and better connected. Now it, too, had fled her.
The next afternoon, Hongxing stayed behind in the fields to finish her work as the rest of the team was packing up their tools, ready to head back for the evening. Hanwen was cleaning the dirt off the ridges of her shoes when Niannian rushed into the dormitory.
“Something’s happened to Hongxing,” she shouted. “I think her hand slipped on her sickle. She’s bleeding everywhere!”
“What?” Hanwen said blankly. She couldn’t believe Hongxing had acted so quickly.
Brigade Leader Xu was there an hour later, wrapping up Hongxing in a piece of wrinkled tarp and cocooning her in burlap bags on the truck bed that would take her to the commune hospital. The evening was windy, and the blue tarp flew up and inflated like a billowy skirt around her legs, one of the fancy kind they hadn’t seen since being sent down to the village.
Hongxing would be returned to Shanghai now. Anger flashed through Hanwen as she watched the truck drive off. She imagined Hongxing as a young girl, how her face would have looked when her parents were denounced in front of the neighborhood. At the thought of the embarrassment and shame distorting Hongxing’s delicate features, the satisfaction of justice ran through Hanwen.
In the next moment, she was ashamed. How could she blame Hongxing? The central government’s policies were always changing without warning. The gaokao could be gone again the very next year and this might be the only chance they would ever have. The announcement of the gaokao was the first time since arriving in the village that Hanwen felt the return of possibility, and she could understand the lengths a person would go to in order to preserve that sense.
In the end, she had to admit that she admired Hongxing for her bravery.
* * *
—
Hanwen had rushed to tell her mother as soon as she heard the gaokao announcement, skipping even dinner that night and spilling ink down her arm in her haste to get the words down for her world-weary mother, who returned home from work every evening with nothing to animate her life besides these letters.
The opportunity we’ve been waiting for has finally come! her mother replied. Hanwen asked her if she’d heard any other information, but her mother wasn’t the kind to participate in the gossip of the longtangs—she heard enough, she said, while cleaning the bathrooms. Hanwen had grown up hearing the tongue of gossip exploring the alleyways, always disguised as care, vigilance, solicitude—any feeling other than the simpler truth, the euphoric rush of knowing something secret and participating in the judgment of another. Had she been in Shanghai, she would have asked down her lane whether anyone had heard a rumor about the exam date or what questions might be on the test, and someone would surely have had some information to share, passed second-or thirdhand from a relative or a friend of a friend who worked on the provincial educational committee, the kind of connections that illuminated the web of the city.