A Map for the Missing(48)

“You can’t stand here in front of my shop. Come on, go!”

Every shop they passed was the same. Some proprietors they asked laughed at them for even believing staying overnight was a possibility. All their things wet, they were just beginning to discuss sleeping on the floor of the bus terminal when an old lady approached them.

“Are you boys looking for somewhere to stay? I have a room in my house.”

They studied the old woman, who looked up to them from barely chest level. Her back was stooped in a knot, shaped almost like the handle of a cane. Eyeing her, with baskets of dried fava beans hooked into the crooks of her arms, it was hard to imagine her posing any danger.

“I’ve been watching you two boys walk all up and down the street looking for a place. I’ve decided to take you in. One kuai a night, for the both of you. Reasonable rate, yes? This old lady is not trying to take advantage of you.”

Later, when they’d brought their things up to her home and were drinking hot water around the table in her sitting room, they found out why she’d approached them. Their gaits reminded her of her own son’s, she said. The mood between them was jovial after they discovered she was also originally from the cluster of villages populated by people surnamed Tang.

“You two are brothers, aren’t you?” she asked.

“How did you know? People say we don’t look alike.”

“Ha, because they aren’t as experienced as me. Look, even though you’re broader than him and have a more handsome face”—she pointed at Yishou, causing Yitian to wince—“you two have the exact same posture. And your noses, see how they both widen at the tip?

“My son would have been the same age as you two when he died. He was in the army.” She took out a photograph that had been flattened under a clay pickling jar and handed it to them. Yitian peered at the photo of the officer in a pressed green suit—though the photograph was in black-and-white, he registered its color, along with the gold buttons, and the star on the center of the cap that would certainly have been red—the same that his father wore in the picture from when he enlisted.

“He hated it so much,” the woman continued. “Being out there, with all those men and away from their families. My son wanted to be a scholar, but the timing was never right for his life. The wars . . . and all this chaos . . .” she waved her arms in the air vaguely, afraid to say more.

“One day I received a letter. I had to ask someone to come read it for me, but even before that, I knew it had some kind of bad news. I could just feel it. They said my son was missing in action in Korea. After a while, when they couldn’t find the body, they said he was dead.

“But I never believed them. There was no body. Can you believe that? They didn’t even give his mother his body back. Who knows what happened? I imagined for years he might have snuck out to Taiwan and started a new life there, reading all the time, just as he’d wanted. I thought maybe he’d look how you did, walking along the streets.”

They were all silent now. The water, untouched, had gone cold.

“This old lady is so annoying, isn’t she?” She sprang up and began collecting the cups. “Bothering you young people with all these stories of my son, while you have your own things to worry about.”

They protested when she offered to make them dinner, but she insisted.

“Nonsense! I’m just boiling some noodles!”

As Yitian watched the old woman work at the stove, he was overcome with loneliness. He thought of her son, trudging in that crisp suit of the picture, made wrinkled after all the days he spent in its unwashed folds. The image of her son gradually morphed, becoming Yitian’s father, walking along with his battalion, lonely in the evenings as he lay on his bedroll. Yitian had never thought about whether his father marched with vigor alongside the other soldiers, or if instead he, too, harbored some secret hope. He wondered how he would have lived himself if he’d been conscripted into the army, had he been born in a time when his choices were even fewer. He was quiet as they ate dinner, saddened at the thought of all the individual dots, obscured by uniforms, forced into places that they hadn’t decided for themselves.



* * *



—

After dinner, the old woman went to bed, and Yitian pulled out his notes to study. He’d debated whether to try to get some early rest the last night before the exam, but in the end he couldn’t help himself.

“Will you test me?” he asked Yishou. He wished Hanwen was there instead. She was also testing in the city, but she’d left separately and was staying with the other sent-down youth. They’d made plans to meet up after the exam finished.

Yishou took the paper reluctantly and pointed to a line of characters in Yitian’s scribbled cursive. “How do you read things like this all day? I can barely make out the words.”

“It’s just because you don’t study them. If you did, you’d be able to read them without any problem.”

“No, that can’t be it. I used to try, but the characters would just flip and swim at my eyes.” Yishou was so unabashed about how little he knew. Yitian guessed that, even now, his brother probably only recognized as many characters as a primary school student. He read slowly, “What era of Chairman Mao’s thinking does the fifth volume of Selected Works of Mao Zedong come from? And what is the foundational philosophy of the fifth volume?”