A Map for the Missing(62)

“He needs to know the debt his life is based on. He owes us a son.”

“You cannot say that to your own son,” his mother said.

His father ignored her and turned toward the fire with the pile of papers.

Yitian didn’t have a plan as he lunged toward his father. There was already a finality to everything else he’d lost, but these were the few objects of meaning that he could still preserve. He reached around his father and clenched his hands around the pile, sheets ripping in his hands as he grasped.

His kick landed on his father’s limp leg. His father spun around, his face pruned, first in surprise, then anger. His mother screamed. He brought his closed fist backward and then onto Yitian’s face. This time, Yitian fell over, bracing himself against the dirt floor. He tried to scramble up just as he saw his father throw the first thick section of paper into the fire.

Yitian knew, then, that it was too late. He ran forward, but the papers, so thin to begin with, were already being eaten by the flames. Like a flower tightening in darkness, they closed up, then disappeared entirely. His father continued, throwing the notes into the fire in fat sections, until none remained in his arms.

Yitian was shocked at how quickly the papers burned and left nothing to remember them by, as if taunting him for how long he had taken to write each sheet. The flame’s tongue darted quickly out over the pieces of paper and drew them into the hot center, curling each one black over the edges and making all the contents insignificant in an instant. He could see now how his father would assign cheapness to these words because of how easily they could be destroyed. They held nothing of that weighty and grounded world that his father valued, the one that Yishou had lived by.

Yitian was vaguely aware of shadows leaving the courtyard, of his father’s shape, shuffling back inside. He lay on the floor and let the night air whip him. The wind was howling now, rising up and blowing the bare winter branches as if making up for the earlier stillness of the day. When he and Yishou had been young, they’d made up tales about the nights when the wind was like this, saying ghosts were particularly angry and wanted to make their presence known. Only the dead who had unfinished business on earth stayed to haunt the night, they said. If that was true, Yishou would be screaming in the wind for a very long time.





Twenty-three


FEBRUARY 1978


Hanwen squatted by the embankment and sank her undershirt into the river, allowing the icy surface to clutch at her hands and numb them. They’d just passed the fifth term of winter, and the next few weeks would be the coldest of the year.

She hadn’t washed her clothes in four days, not since the announcement of the gaokao results. She hadn’t seen Yitian in all that time, either. By now, the news had spread through the whole village—and even the surrounding ones—that he was going to that famous university in Beijing. Though they didn’t know each student’s particular scores, the meaning was obvious. He would have had to be within the top fifty scorers in the entire province to go to a school like that. Villagers and sent-down youth who didn’t even know him were talking about him—they’d announced his name on the radio and printed it in the newspaper, along with the reports that only five percent of students had passed nationally.

When they began to hear rumors that students were receiving admissions letters, both Hanwen and Wu Mei had been too afraid to go to the commune, where the notices were sent. They’d begged Pan Niannian to go for them.

“It’s so cold,” Niannian said. “I don’t want to bike all the way to the commune. Besides, I didn’t even take that silly exam.”

Niannian didn’t agree until Hanwen offered to take one of her kitchen shifts. She borrowed a bicycle from a villager—the sent-down youth were not permitted to have their own—and set off on the fifteen li journey to the commune. Hanwen lent Niannian her warmest gloves, and she and Wu Mei huddled under the eaves of the dormitory as they watched her bike away. Her feet moved furiously against the pedals, trying to fight off the cold.

Hanwen and Wu Mei attempted to occupy themselves with all kinds of activities while they waited. They played tic-tac-toe, marbles, digging out things they hadn’t touched since they were schoolchildren. As soon as they saw Niannian’s shape on the bicycle coming back up the road, they sprinted outside.

She was moving more slowly this time. Hanwen had her first premonition, then, that there was bad news. She turned away from the road, afraid even to watch Niannian approach. She wanted to run back into the dormitory and shove her head under the covers, to feign deafness at the news.

But before Hanwen could do anything to stop her, Wu Mei was already shouting out to Niannian, “So? What’s the news?”

Niannian spoke to the ground as she said, There weren’t any letters for you. Hanwen felt too stunned to speak, but Wu Mei was already bombarding Niannian with questions.

“How can that be? Did you double-check? Maybe you just missed our names.”

“I did double-check,” Niannian said. “I asked three people at the commune office. That’s why it took me so long.”

Hanwen felt powerless, as if she were younger again, leaving her mother crying on the street as she rode the bus that took her away from Shanghai to this village. In her years here, she’d gone from a girl who tripped over the hoes and rakes to one who could do nearly as much work as any of the village women. She had her own life in the village, she’d thought, one for which she could feel a small tinge of pride. It didn’t seem to matter anymore.