A Map for the Missing(82)
“My name is Wang Guifan.” He paused. “I’m leaving Shanghai tomorrow morning, but I was wondering—can I send you a letter? I come to this city sometimes for meetings, so I may see you again soon. But I’d like to write to you in between that. If you don’t mind.”
His hand was shaking as he took down her address. Now that she’d spent more time speaking with him, she could tell that his nervous manner wasn’t due to the subject matter, but rather something more closely related to his disposition. Perhaps he wore glasses to protect himself from being examined too closely. She wondered how a man like this could work in the government, how he managed to make himself endure over and over dinners like the one she’d witnessed.
* * *
—
Guifan’s first letter came a week and a half later, so she supposed he must have written it as soon as he arrived back home. It was long and assured in tone, in contrast with the apprehensive way he spoke. His penmanship flowed neat and precise.
She was surprised by how she felt by the time she received his third letter. She would not have called the feeling love, not even close, but she had affection for him and his uncertain demeanor. He wrote to her in that third letter about how he seldom met new people because of how much he worked. His mother was anxious—he would be thirty-two that year—and had tried to set him up with the daughters of other women she knew. I have rejected all her requests. For some reason, I feel attached to finding a love of my own. It was a romantic notion against everything else she learned of him from the letters, which suggested a person dedicated to rationality and efficiency.
Only once did he write something that irritated her. I hope you know this isn’t because I want something from you. This was much later, in the tenth letter. Any earlier and she might have stopped corresponding with him altogether, but by then she thought well enough of him to overlook this silly statement. Of course he wanted something from her. He could be honest and sorry for what had happened while also hoping something would come from his gift. Reality apportioned itself somewhere between what he said and what he wanted. Unlike Huihong, she felt oblivious about the world of men, and yet she wondered at how transparent they could be, how little they even knew of themselves.
Her correspondence with Guifan made her think about Yitian often, more than she had in a long time. By this time, she hadn’t received a letter from him in months. She wondered what kind of person he’d become, away in college all these years. If she wrote a letter to him now, she wouldn’t even know how to speak to him—he would have learned so much by now that all their old discussions would have seemed childish to him.
Her feelings at Guifan’s letters were different, somehow less than how she’d felt when a letter from Yitian came. That had been with a sharpness beating in her chest, but she expected something mildly pleasant when she read Guifan’s letters, that was all. It was not a matter of loving one person more than the other, she told herself; only that some feelings became out of reach with age and knowing, just as some doors closed in a life.
“If you two are corresponding like this, I supposed it’s time for me to meet this man,” her mother said when Hanwen told her Guifan was coming to Shanghai. “We’ll invite him for dinner at our house.”
“Do you really think he is so important?” Hanwen asked.
It was nighttime and her mother was boiling water for them to wash their feet before bed. She didn’t look at Hanwen as the steam rose around her face and she said, “That’s up to you to decide.”
It was the first time her mother hadn’t told her not to worry about marriage. Like a photograph, Hanwen could see herself from the outside, could decipher what all the letters and the dinner at her house signaled in symbols. Feelings were worth only as much as the performances that demonstrated them, and Guifan’s behavior clearly pointed one way.
As she lay in bed awake that evening, she thought about what she wanted. She reached out to caress the skin on her mother’s fingertip. They slept close enough so that they would have each other’s warmth, but not close enough to touch. The things she held in the basket of her life, the ones she needed to ferry from here to there, were more than just her own. She’d been living in a limbo for so long, acting as if she could take the test over and over, that one day the results would save her life, that she wouldn’t have to make any other meaningful decisions. She could see more clearly now that some things were not about want, but rather about the sacrifices one had to make to survive in this place, in this time. What her mother had been trying to tell her was that her dreams could no longer hold.
Thirty-one
JANUARY 1982
By ten p.m., Yitian already regretted allowing himself to be dragged to the dance, and it was only the second waltz of the evening. He watched from a corner of the repurposed canteen, which still smelled hotly of that evening’s dinner of sautéed pork and wheat buns. The signs advertising the day’s special of tomatoes and eggs, hanging from the canteen windows, shook from the collective stamping of the students’ feet against the floor. Though it was the coldest time of the year and outside the ground was hardened in frost, there were so many gathered in the small space that his collar stuck to his neck and his palms were damp in his pockets.
On the dance floor, boys wiped sweat from their foreheads in grim concentration on the steps. His roommates had been trying to get him to attend a dance for four years, but he’d always refused. “But how will you ever meet a girlfriend?” Li Jianguo asked. Yitian laughed at how earnestly Jianguo asked the question. Other than Yitian and Mingliang, who had a wife back in Shaanxi, the boys of their dormitory, and all of the dormitories, went to the Saturday night dances held by the mathematics department with a sense of duty approaching the filial. Still, it was rare they actually danced. Their department was known to be notoriously dominated by boys. There was fierce competition to dance with the few girls, requiring a certain disregard of face that none of his roommates could quite surrender to.