A Map for the Missing(20)
“I don’t know how the committee makes the decisions.”
“She’s my only daughter, the only child I have. My husband died years ago. . . . Doesn’t that count for anything?” Her mother was practically begging now.
“It would have a couple of years ago, but now they’re strict again. They need students to go down. Anyway, Auntie, your class background is poor. It won’t help if she stays. She wouldn’t be able to get assigned any worthwhile job when she graduates.”
Hanwen’s mother crossed her arms, her lips shaking with what she couldn’t say aloud.
“Listen to me.” For the first time, Teacher Ma looked frustrated. She spoke in a near whisper. “You want her to be a heiren living in the city for the rest of her time here? Think about it, Auntie, how will she live! How will you feed her? She won’t be able to get rations, have you thought of that? Do you want her to starve? And the neighborhood committee is really pushing this time, they’re saying parents of the students who defy the order could lose their jobs, too.”
“Me—”
“Ma, that’s enough. Haven’t you been listening to Teacher? I’ll go.” Teacher Ma and her mother both looked at Hanwen, surprised at the sudden interruption. Hanwen was accustomed to staying silent when adults discussed her, but her mother could not be allowed to go on. She’d been made frenzied by the news, if she wouldn’t even give in at the threat to her own job.
“See, she knows,” Teacher Ma said, gentle again. Hanwen’s words had sucked all the air out of the room and everyone looked deflated.
“Do you think she’ll ever get to come back?” her mother asked, her voice quietly resigned.
“I don’t know. . . . You can’t think that way. It’s better to just accept things. Hoping for another outcome will only make things more difficult.” Teacher Ma placed her barely used chopsticks on the plate, and then rose. “Auntie, I’m sorry. Really I am. Thank you for the meal. I can’t stay any longer. I have to go visit other parents.”
After she left, Hanwen and her mother stared blankly at the table piled with rich food. Hanwen had no appetite. She felt a new gravity to her impending departure. She’d seen the posters before, calling for the educated youth to go down to the countryside to help the peasants. The village scenery was rendered in beautiful tones of sun-drenched wheat, expansive blue skies that youth and villagers stood brazenly against. There was an air of the epic about them, a story that she thought she wouldn’t mind being a part of. But now she realized what the new assignment would mean. She would receive a new hukou booklet with her countryside residence listed, only two characters enough to imply that she might never live in Shanghai, or with her mother, again. Perhaps she would never again stop by the bookstand outside her house on the way to school, where, for a cent, she could have her pick of the picture flip-books—she’d learned every movie plot she knew that way. Or go to the plaza at the mouth of the longtangs on a hot summer night and watch the adults eat watermelon and nudge xiangqi pieces around a board while moths flitted in the light. How she’d loved that.
Her mother cleaned up the table in quiet. It would be just like this, Hanwen thought, after she left for the countryside. Her mother would eat alone every day and then clean up in silence, so different from all the nights before when she’d made sure there wasn’t a single spot of oil slickening the table before allowing Hanwen to set up her homework. “What are you looking at?” her mother said, if she ever caught Hanwen fidgeting, or even simply looking away from her textbooks. “Back to the book, unless you want to end up like me.”
She hadn’t had to explain any further for Hanwen to understand—her mother, the single daughter in a family of five sons, was the only one never to attend school, and she blamed their circumstances on her lack of education. “You can be an engineer—that’s very stable. You’ll never be without a position,” her mother had said when Hanwen told her she wanted a job that allowed her to use her hands, to take things apart and look deep into their insides to understand how they worked.
These had been the conversations that had filled their house in the years ever since her father’s death from tuberculosis that he’d contracted in a labor camp. That same year, her mother was denounced as a petty capitalist for the small tailoring shop she ran in the longtang and was reassigned to a position as a laborer on the neighborhood’s sanitation committee. Hanwen had been seven.
After Teacher Ma’s visit, they had to eat the leftovers for days. The fat of the braised pork congealed into a milky solid. When she walked down the alleyway with her mother, they passed neighbors sitting at their doors and sunning themselves in midday underneath their drying laundry. Hanwen was sure they’d all heard about the failed dinner. The thin walls between the alleyway homes were made of the flimsy material through which gossip could be threaded and sewn into a dramatic story. She looked back after they passed and saw in the beady and penetrating eyes the intimation that she and her mother would be discussed as soon as they were out of earshot. She hooked her elbow into her mother’s and stared defiantly back.
* * *
—
So Hanwen left Shanghai for Tang Family Village on an autumn day, boarding a bus leaving from her middle school. The sky that morning was impossibly blue and cloudless, as if nature was announcing its refusal to comply with their sadness.