A Map for the Missing(28)

“Actually”—he swallowed—“it’s my first time back in Anhui.”

“The very first? In how long?”

The number fifteen arrived heavy in his mouth. He had kept the count, but only now, seeing her face and the youth of her features, did the years not seem to add up.

“American life must be keeping you busy, then,” she said. “So, you’ve been in graduate school.”

When he mentioned that he’d studied math, she interrupted. “Wasn’t that your least favorite subject? Or am I remembering wrong?”

“They forced me to take math classes in college,” he explained, as if to a stranger. How could she forget helping him to learn those formulas on that hilltop when they’d first met? “And it wasn’t so bad as I thought it would be. Actually, I turned out to be quite good at it, I suppose.”

“I’m not surprised. Things have always come easily to you. I always knew you’d make something of yourself.”

She didn’t smile as she complimented him, and her words had the recited quality of a rote politeness.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

“No.”

“That’s good. Better to keep your own time, at least for now. And what does your wife do?”

He realized with shame that he hadn’t wanted to talk about Mali.

“Real estate.”

“Oh, that sounds like a good job. If it’s anything like here, real estate is a lucrative industry. All of the rich people here got their money from developments.” She said rich people as if she was not one of them. He was sure that the image in her mind was of someone touring luxury high-rises or sprawling villas, so different from the small condos that Mali and Mrs. Suzanna sold to young families.

“Do you work?” he asked.

“No. I don’t need to.” The declaration came from her easily.

He glanced down at the dark wood of the table, swirling his tea. He couldn’t believe that they’d arrived at a silence so quickly. For years, he’d imagined the moment of seeing her again, but had never considered the possibility that they’d have so little to say.

She called the ayi in to bring more water. The teapot was still almost entirely full, their tiny, delicate cups capable of holding little volume at all.

“She seems very young,” he said, not for any particular reason other than that being the first thought to cross his mind.

“She’s twenty. Older than we were when we were working in the fields.”

“Would you wish that on someone else, though?” he asked. “I thought we had left that period of history behind.”

She glanced upward at the ceiling before speaking so softly he wasn’t sure if he imagined the hesitancy in her voice.

“I think they were my happiest years.”

“Mine, too,” he said. At last, she’d acknowledged the time they spent together hadn’t already been replaced in her mind by all the glamorous memories that must have come in her life after.

He wasn’t sure if he meant the words, but it was too late—she was already smiling, her first real smile of the afternoon. “Really? Remember how you used to complain about how sore you were from the work?”

“I only said that to make you feel better.”

“Me?” She raised her arms above her head and mimed someone hitting their own foot with a hoe, then gasping in surprise.

The closed line of her lipstick broke into laughter, then he was joining her, and suddenly the tension between them had evaporated. Their laughs were loud and consuming, shaking through his limbs and relaxing them, so that when the ayi returned with a filled thermos, she looked alarmed at how quickly the mood had shifted.

Hanwen waited for her to leave, but even the silence felt different now—loose and full of possibility. “You’re right, though,” she said. “It was very tiring. Thank you for reminding me. Being in the city and away for so long, I seem to have only remembered the good parts.”

“It’s the same for me.” He took a sip of tea and the liquid warmed him. He felt relaxed and honest. “I remember only how beautiful the countryside was, not any of the worms in our stomachs or how plainly we used to eat. But even when I do remember those things, it doesn’t seem so bad anymore.”

“I know what you mean—it’s like a nice kind of suffering, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “And even if I only remember it one way, what does it matter? Things are changing so quickly. Hefei looks nothing like it did fifteen years ago. Even my village—the changes aren’t as big there yet, but I had this feeling when I was back there, that everything was on the cusp of being different forever. Like I might accidentally look away and then when I turn back, everything will be gone. But I couldn’t tell whether it was the same, or whether it was just me who’d changed.”

“Tell me what else you notice. I can’t tell, because it seems to happen right under my nose.”

She looked eagerly at him. Everything he could think of seemed somehow trite, an observation that could just as easily be read in an encyclopedia article about China. He paused, then tried, “When I first arrived in America, what I thought about most was how lonely the country was. People were always in their cars or in their houses, separated from everyone else. No one really walks in the streets there or knows the people who live around them. And when everyone is in their homes, there’s this deep silence all around. You can’t hear anyone else at all. It’s not like in the village. It feels like there’s not a single person in the world other than yourself.