A Map for the Missing(76)

Auntie Bao’s laugh was almost indistinguishable from a cough. “Leave! Where would I go? When I first got this job, people were lucky to have any work at all. I don’t have any other skills.”

As if she’d seen the look on Hanwen’s face, she added immediately, “It won’t be like that for you, you hear? You’re young, not like me. You still have time. Even if the gaokao didn’t work out, so what? There are other things. People are opening up their own shops now, or you could go to trade school. Going to college isn’t the only option. Don’t get stuck here.”

Hanwen couldn’t imagine herself doing any of those things. Jobs like that were for people like the other girls who worked at the hotel, who were strong and sure of themselves in the world. She wasn’t like them. The only thing she’d once had were her books and her smarts.

Huihong glanced into the room and huffed loudly at them. The other waitress had taken an almost immediate dislike to Hanwen when she’d begun working at the hotel.

“Yes? Do you have something to say to us?” Auntie Bao shouted at Huihong’s back. “We’ve already set everything up for dinner.” Auntie Bao was the only one who could get away with talking this way. Because of her seniority, no one dared to defy her when she smoked in the kitchen or left tasks to the younger women. Hanwen liked Auntie Bao for the older woman’s no-nonsense attitude, but many of the other girls refused even to speak with her.

“The disrespect! That’s what I mean,” Auntie Bao said. “I’m just whiling my time away here, where they’ve left me like trash. You don’t want to have to spend the rest of your life with people like them.” She stamped out her cigarette and they rose to do one last check before the guests arrived. Hanwen looked down at her feet. In her rush, she hadn’t put the mirror down carefully. Hairline fractures sprouted, branch-like, out of the base, splaying her reflection into pieces.



* * *



—

If she was being truthful with herself, she wasn’t surprised that she’d failed the test for the third year in a row.

For the first year after her return to Shanghai, she stayed at home and didn’t work. After she recovered, she began studying for the gaokao in earnest. She had the free time she’d always dreamed of in the village, but studying was much more difficult now. Ever since she’d fainted, she had found it almost impossible to concentrate on words on paper for more than an hour at a time. When she tried to focus, a light feeling overtook her, just like the one she’d felt in the moments before she’d collapsed in the fields. She fought to keep the black only at the edges of her vision. Reading words was like looking at a point in the distance that would not stop shimmering from the heat rising all around it.

She withheld all this from her mother. When her score was lower the second year than the first, she told her mother the test had become harder, which wasn’t untrue.

Earlier in 1980, they finally heard that the central government had sent out the directive that the sent-down youth policy, in place for almost two decades, would be terminated. By that time, the rules were only loosely enforced, in any case. She was never ordered to return to the village after she’d recovered.

At least when she’d been in the village, she received her work points, some of which she could redeem as money by the end of the year and send home. And her mother hadn’t had to worry about buying food for her then. Hanwen had reached the age when she should have begun taking care of her mother, but she was still allowing her mother to sacrifice for her. The first thing Hanwen had noticed upon returning to Shanghai was how much older her mother appeared, her posture beginning to droop in the permanent half-frozen position of someone sweeping.

So after she failed the second year, she’d gone to her neighborhood subcommittee to see what jobs were recruiting. She’d been assigned a job as a restaurant worker in the Xinhua Hotel, a famous old building on the Bund. “You might as well be a cleaning woman like me,” her mother protested, but Hanwen knew she wouldn’t be able to do any better. She had no technical skills. She promised her mother she’d continue to study for the gaokao while she worked. They rode the same bus route to their respective jobs, her mother boarding at dawn, Hanwen squeezing in three hours later.

She was diligent. At the Xinhua Hotel, she retreated to the employee break room to read whenever she had a free moment. She felt strange, studying in the bare room, all alone. Whenever she remembered the first year of studying, reading by lamplight with the girls in her dormitory or with Yitian in the barn, she thought they hadn’t known how fortunate they’d been. The exam had felt like a welcome surprise that year, a gift dropped in their laps at a time when there were no such things as gifts and had not been for a very long time.

Yitian had sent her letters occasionally. Life in Beijing is both the same as and different from how we imagined it, he wrote in one of his last ones to her. History is all around me, but I feel far from it. The bus ride from the university to the Forbidden City is long, but I took it last weekend. I wonder what you would have thought of it, as I wonder often what you would think of this university campus.

What was she to say to that? It was selfish of him, she thought, to imagine her in places she could never go. She missed his voice at the same time that she felt angry at him for telling her of a life she’d never get to access. Sometimes she went so far as to fill a pen with ink and sit at the kitchen table, but when she stared at the blank piece of paper, she found it impossible even to write a simple greeting, and instead the pen lingered heavily in her hand, empty of words.