A Map for the Missing(21)

Her mother had been twisting her hands all morning. She checked Hanwen’s bag for a fifth and final time.

“Be careful. Don’t say anything political to anyone. Just keep quiet, and do your work. People will respect you,” she said.

Hanwen nodded.

“Be safe, and be good.”

She grasped Hanwen’s arms by the shoulders.

Hanwen suddenly felt choked by all the wishes she had for her mother. “I don’t want to leave you alone,” she said.

“Nonsense! What’s alone? You think I could ever be alone, in that alley with all the gossiping women and noisy men? I can only wish!”

Hanwen turned quickly to board the bus. She felt embarrassed to cry in front of her mother, whose voice was so stable and determined.

Not until she looked out of the window to see her mother waving furiously from the sidewalk did the dam break. All her loneliness to come seemed written into the speed of that wave.

Her seatmate leaned in front of her, trying to see her own parents in the crowd through the window, but Hanwen used her forearm to push her back. She could see her mother was trying to say something, but the loudspeakers’ blasting music made it impossible to hear.


To the countryside,

To the borderlands,

To the places that our motherland needs us most.



The music shouted at the children, while Hanwen tried to focus on her mother’s cracked lips telling her this one last thing.

She could not decipher it before the bus pulled away. Her seatmate was yelling at her, rubbing her elbow and saying she was hurt. Hanwen turned her head away and ignored her to look back at the rows of students. Hongxing was in the seat behind her, weeping the loudest of them all. Their parents had made sure that each of their children looked their best for the occasion: girls’ hair brushed into neat braids, not a single strand loose; the boys had received prickly haircuts close to the scalp. Even now Hanwen didn’t dare to take off the red scarf that scratched at her neck. But she saw so many of them were crying wildly, the tear tracks like chipped varnish on the faces of pristine dolls.

The bus dropped them off at the train station. As she watched the landscape of the countryside from the muddy compartment windows, its emptiness frightened her. When night began to overtake daytime, the green fields were rendered into shadows upon which she could barely find a single glimmer of light. Occasionally, she saw a flash of bright parting the darkness, what she supposed was a farmer carrying a lamp hurrying from place to place. Even they did not want to be out there for long.

She hardly slept on the train ride away from Shanghai, and when she looked in the mirror, the reflection she saw was ashen. On the platform, she made her way through the sounds of people shouting in a country dialect she’d never heard before. She found Hongxing amidst the crowd, and though they’d never been friends in Shanghai, they gripped each other’s hands as they were directed onto the bed of a truck that would take them to their final destination.

The truck they rode had last been used to transport livestock. The driver hadn’t taken down the rope that had previously kept pigs corralled inside, strung across the width of the truck bed. For two hours, each time the truck drove across a rock on the road, manure lurched a centimeter closer to them from the puddles where it had collected. None of the six students gathered there spoke, but they huddled closer and closer together, so that by the end of the journey they hardly took up any space at all. It was clear now that life in the villages was nothing like that of the posters calling for the Educated Youth to Go Down to the Countryside. She would not meet a brawny farmer, nor the village girl standing beside him in the fields of golden grain that whispered as high as their waists.

An older girl greeted them at the dormitory when they arrived. As soon as they were alone, she threw her arms around Hanwen’s neck.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! It’s been so lonely here by myself.” She looked like one of the village women, with her heavy padded jacket and ruddy face, but when she spoke, it was with the crisp, defined accent of a Shanghainese, cutting off words in a high, sharp pitch at their endings.

Her name was Pan Niannian. She was also from Shanghai, but had been a member of the production team for four years. She was part of the earliest group of students who’d been sent down to the village. All the others had been able to leave in the intervening years, through relatives or connections.

As she slowly unpacked her items, Hanwen examined Niannian’s face. Her hair was coarse and cropped short around her chin, skin tanned darker than any of theirs. When she lifted her hands to help the girls place their items on the shelves lining the small room, Hanwen saw dirt crescent moons stuffed under her fingernails. What would Niannian’s mother have said had she seen? Hanwen wondered whether if she spent enough time here, she, too, would become an unrecognizable version of herself.

She did not ever want to change in such a way.

They retired early that evening, their first in the village. The next morning, Hanwen experienced the first day of her new life. They were awoken at four thirty for breakfast, so that they could take advantage of every second of sunlight.





Part 2


   上山下乡


   Up to the Mountains, Down to the Countryside





Eight


1993


The place smelled of pungent manure and resembled a prison, with its squat buildings wrapped in raw, unpainted cement and the low tunnel with the guard’s office they’d had to pass to enter.