A Map for the Missing(75)

He didn’t sneak into the history lectures that afternoon. There wasn’t any point. Neither was there any reason to go to the library and read those history books any longer, as the dean suggested.

He went back to the dormitory room he shared with seven other boys. To his relief, none of them were there. He climbed up onto his bunk and pulled the blankets up over him, though their small room was dry and stuffy. The ceiling hovered only centimeters above his nose. He reached up and drew his thumbnail against the plaster, leaving a slash, angry and sharp. He did this again and again, clawing until the surface above him was covered in hashes, as if he were a person with a goal to count toward. How stupid he had been to think he could still change his major, to believe he could reverse the path he’d already traveled. The thoughts of his failures mounted. Hanwen, his brother’s death, his grandfather; now, the loss of history. This surely was a punishment for the pain he’d caused Hanwen, Yishou, and his parents. He deserved this suffering, the balancing of the scale that would tip it away from his brother’s sacrifice.

He stayed like this in bed for days, skipping classes and meals. In between, he slept more than he ever had in his life, awaking each time with a feeling of dark walls closing in on him. In the seconds after he awoke, he smelled wild ginger in his nostrils, but had no idea from where it might have come.





Twenty-nine


1980, SHANGHAI


Hanwen checked over the place settings a final time, adjusting the bowls so they were in proper alignment. That night there was a party of municipal officials hosting a delegation from out of town, and she would work their room. She knew it would be a VIP table by the amount of food they’d preordered, which the kitchen was already busy preparing.

Normally, she could have placed the chopsticks and cups in her sleep, but today she’d made such a mess of the settings on her first try that she’d had to redo them all. She’d been nervous ever since hearing from a neighbor that the gaokao scores would be posted that day at the district education bureau office. She’d taken the gaokao for the third time more than two months ago. Her supervisor, Auntie Bao, who liked to be wherever the gossip was, had offered to go check the postings during her lunch break.

After she finished the place settings, Hanwen reviewed with the chefs the sequence in which the dishes were to be brought out. At last, she went to the break room. The space reserved for the hotel employees was amongst the shabbiest in the building, barely large enough to fit a metal-framed twin bed that Hanwen had never seen anyone use. The once-whitewashed walls were covered with gray streaks. She picked up a small hand mirror that the waitresses kept in a utility cabinet and examined her hair in the reflection. She smoothed the flyaways that had risen from her scalp in the heat of the kitchen.

From the corner of the mirror, she saw Auntie Bao entering the room.

“Was my name there?” Hanwen said.

Auntie Bao leaned against the doorway and stared hard at her. “Heaven’s lot is unfair for women,” she finally said. “Look at you, waiting every day for the news, working so hard.”

“So my name wasn’t on there?” Hanwen swallowed. She refused to cry in front of her supervisor.

Auntie Bao shook her head. She lit a cigarette and took a drag. She raised her eyebrows whenever she inhaled, giving her the look of one generally unbothered and bemused by the world. “This is just the way things are. You studied more than the others, but it doesn’t mean you’re the one to get the reward.”

Hanwen coughed at the smoke filling the small room. Auntie Bao was the first woman she knew who smoked. She herself might as well take up the habit now, too. If she was going to spend the rest of her life working in this hotel, she’d probably be promoted to a position like Auntie Bao’s one day. She pictured herself, older, giving advice to another generation of young girls who arrived at the hotel, all while she puffed on a cigarette. Auntie Bao was about the same age as Hanwen’s mother but seemed much older in appearance and demeanor. Though Hanwen’s mother had led a difficult life, Auntie Bao’s constant dissatisfaction gave off an even more pervasive air of fatigue.

“If you want to go home, I can make up some excuse for you, say you’re sick,” Auntie Bao said.

“No, I’ll stay.” It would be worse if she went home early. At least if Hanwen stayed through her shift, her mother would be asleep by the time she got home, and they wouldn’t have to speak about the news. She dreaded her mother’s reaction. For two years they’d settled into a rhythm, her mother usually in bed by the time Hanwen finished her shift. Her mother’s class status had been rehabilitated after the fall of the Gang of Four, and she’d found a job as a cleaning woman in a factory cafeteria. She rose late at night to check whether Hanwen was studying—“If you don’t pass the gaokao, we have no other hope,” she’d say—before falling asleep again. Hanwen would warm up the rice and pickled vegetables her mother left for her—just that past year, they’d purchased an icebox—and then study until dawn. She got into bed just as her mother was leaving it, fitting her body into the place where her mother had slept.

There would never be another night or morning like that again, Hanwen realized.

“How do you stand it here, Auntie?” she asked suddenly. “You hate it so much. How can you come into work day after day like this? Don’t you ever want to leave?”