A Map for the Missing(67)

The tractor ambled up the road to them, sending dust up into the air as it approached. He wanted to take notes and remember everything in the village, to sit in the front row of the classroom again and furiously scribble all the details that were only now becoming visible to him as they were about to be lost. The smell of coal smoke coming up the chimney in the mornings, darker gray against the gray sky, his mother biting her cheeks when she worried, how the air hung tentatively before the day began.

Then the tractor was in front of them, its groaning engine loud and omnipresent, and the driver was instructing Yitian to squeeze himself and his bag against the sacks of grain in the back.

The driver shifted into gear. Yitian swiveled his body backward, bracing himself against the railing to say goodbye. He waved furiously. It had all happened so fast.

“Go home, Ma! Don’t worry about me. I’ll be safe. You don’t need to send me off any longer!”

He clenched his jaw, grateful for the dust that was coming up from behind the rolling truck that would obscure his mother’s vision of him.

He didn’t know when he would see her again. Other than her, there was nothing left for him here. He wondered what he would be like the next time he saw this place. Was it possible to live a life, moving from place to place, yourself unfiltered? And yet, as Yitian thought of himself, he was sure that nothing could possibly change. He would remain exactly the same as he’d always been.

“Go home!” he called out again. He could not turn his head away. Suddenly his mother picked up her feet and began running toward him, her jacket flying open with the wind. Dust flew into her mouth and eyes, and she rubbed at her face to wipe it away.

She spoke, her words an echo of his own, fading . . . calling out . . .

“Go! Don’t worry about us! 去吧, 去吧 Go, go . . . go . . .”





Part 4


   迷途指南


   A Map for the Missing





Twenty-six


1993


He couldn’t explain his sudden need to call his mother, except to locate it in the same place as the need to have Hanwen near him. He felt like a child, grabbing anything he could hold. His body was still shaking from the hospital visit when they’d arrived back at his hotel, and it was she who’d spoken with the lobby clerk as he looked blankly forward from the edge of the lobby sofa, whose cushions were ragged with use. Dimly he heard her asking for them to bring a cup of hot water for him. When he saw his fingers reach out to accept it, his hands seemed to belong to someone else’s body.

“I want to call my mother,” he’d said, at the shock of the sensation.

The secretary at the village office answered and said he would send someone to get her from her home.

“What should I tell her?” the secretary asked.

“Tell her that we went to the hospital this morning,” Yitian said. The words for the rest of the day escaped him. He gave the number for the hotel and retreated to the seating area.

Hanwen sat on the couch opposite as he waited. They didn’t speak. At times when he looked up at her, the fine outline of her face hovered as if belonging to a dream world.

The realization that had seized him in the moment he backed away from the hospital bed was how little he knew about his father. He was grasping about for an object in the dark.

He thought about the last lesson he’d taught his topology class. It felt impossible now that only a week ago he’d stood in front of rows of students in a modern classroom and it had seemed imperative to him, despite their indifference, that he explain the subject clearly.

“Imagine a sphere and a cube,” he’d said. “You’d think they were very different shapes, but not in topology. We don’t think about shapes by how they look to the human eye, but rather in terms of unchanging properties, called their invariant properties. Let’s take, for example, the number of holes. This property is called the genus of a shape.”

He chalked a coffee cup and a donut on the board.

“Why might these things be the same?” he asked.

A student joked both were things policemen got at donut shops. He didn’t understand, but others had laughed, so he joined in. He’d learned over the years in America that this simple act of mimicry could deceive others, and over time he could predict, like a sixth sense, when the laughter would begin, if it would require his brief chuckle or full-throated chortle—all from the way a person looked as they were telling a joke.

“That’s a good guess,” he continued, after the laughter had died down. “In mathematical terms, they both have the same invariant property of genus one. They each have only one hole. For a donut, it’s the center. For a coffee cup, it’s the handle. So we could topologically transform the donut into the coffee cup, like this.” He drew more shapes:



He expected the class to be amazed, but when he looked up, they only seemed to be as bored as they always were, not at all like he’d been when he heard about the idea of the genus. He could always tell when the end of their class was approaching by the early sounds of students closing notebooks and zipping up their backpacks. When he thought back to his years in university, he saw he’d maintained a certain innocence about life and learning these students hadn’t. They were jaded about intellectual matters and couldn’t summon up any awe about these ideas. It was amazing, he’d thought back then, that an unchanging property of an object wasn’t only what was there, but also what wasn’t. It meant that if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.