A Map for the Missing(2)

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?”