A Map for the Missing(4)

               20

                →

                lighting tung oil lamps and soaking day’s dirt off feet





then g(f(x)) gives my father’s activity at California time x, with the codomain of

g(y)={set of activities my father does in Tang Family Village}

The smooth flow of his pencil stopped. He couldn’t push past the mapping of the functions, which were confined to the particular space enclosed by the village’s borders—two square kilometers lined on one side by the embankment and fields on the other. He couldn’t make the range of the equation stretch to the artery of road that reached out of the village’s northwest corner, the one that could lead a person away from the place they’d always known as home. Anyway, who knew whether these functions were still true? He hadn’t allowed himself to picture his home in years. Whenever he was tempted, he told himself he needed to focus on this new life in America and all that needed to be learned here. Sad memories could only be intrusions. Still, he’d imagined his homecoming as more triumphant, his father at the scene, ready to see all Yitian had made for himself in America and how he’d finally erased the mistakes of the past.

Yitian turned off the lamp and returned to their bed just as the first lights of dawn were beginning to spread in the sky outside.



* * *



—

By the time Mali helped him pack the next morning, something within him had fled. He sat directly on the floor next to his suitcase while she thumbed through the items inside. When she released shirts from their hangers and asked him what he wanted to bring, he found he couldn’t even guess what kinds of clothes he’d need.

“How cold does it get around this time of year, over there? Will this be enough?” she asked.

“More than enough, I think.” He folded a last pair of trousers and added them in, mostly to have a feeling of contribution. The suitcase was still only half filled, full of loose room between the items inside.

“I’m going to get some stuff from my office,” he said, rising.

He dislodged the stickiest, bottom drawer of his desk and extracted the only item there, a brown airmail envelope covered with stamps measuring the distance it had traveled. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep at night, he would come to this desk, open the letter, and read it again. He would summon the past and wonder what would have happened in another version of it, if he hadn’t said goodbye to Hanwen, the first woman he’d loved. He wouldn’t have had that word then, love; that came later, when he’d come to America and picked up the language that insisted on putting names to every feeling.

Now, he flattened the letter inside the first textbook he saw. An old love pressed inside Introduction to Topology. It was the only thing animating the textbook. None of his students this semester had showed much interest in his class, and writing out his lecture notes was a chore bringing little reward.

“It’s amazing that you can still think of work at a time like this,” Mali said, when he returned to the bedroom and packed the book, lifting the other layers of soft fabric and pressing it down between them, so he knew it would be kept safe.





Two


TANG FAMILY VILLAGE, ANHUI PROVINCE


He could sense he was home before he opened his eyes. He no longer needed sight; he could tell time as he once used to, by feel and by sound—if the darkness was weakly transparent with the coming of dawn, or carts were already beginning their low roll on the road outside, if wives were calling to wake their husbands and children, then it was already past six and soon his mother would be upon him to collect manure for the fertilizer pit. Otherwise, he could stay in bed with his grandfather for a few moments longer.

He opened his eyes to the sight of the village’s welcoming pine through the taxi’s glass. Its branches bowed down in their familiar arc of greeting and were bare as they’d been on the day of his last departure. He could have pretended that only a day had passed.

He rolled down the window to see more clearly.

“What are you doing?” the taxi driver exclaimed. “It’s freezing!”

Yitian ignored him. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant and shocked him into the alertness he would need when he saw his mother again. He hadn’t slept at all on the plane ride out from San Francisco, nor on the turbulent connection through South Korea and in the rocking train compartment he shared with eight others that took him from Shanghai to Anhui. At last, after crawling into the cab for the last leg of the journey—he’d justified the expense by telling himself it would have taken hours to decipher the bus system—he’d been seized by a fatigue so great that he could not even open his mouth to answer the driver’s questions about why he was going so far out in the countryside. He’d fallen asleep to the sight of the construction and upcoming buildings of Hefei City and awoken to the familiar landscape of his childhood.

The sky outside was oppressively gray with winter. As the car ambled down the unpaved main road, he squinted down the narrow alleyways, trying to make out the houses he’d once known. The exteriors were of the same material, made of bricks and the mud adhering them, but under the snow blanketing roofs and the hanging icicles, the outlines of homes were much taller than they’d once been. And yet the place looked smaller than he remembered. As they passed one home on a corner, he was so surprised at the scene he glimpsed behind the half-ajar courtyard doors that he thought he was dreaming. There, in the house: a square television perched on top of a shabby dresser.