A Map for the Missing(87)
“I don’t mean to be rude, professor, but then why do you suggest that I leave?”
Professor Wu paused, then said, “Let me speak candidly. Of course, this stays between us. The situation here—it’s not entirely open. It won’t be for many years, decades perhaps. There’s a limit to what you can reach here, right now. Better you go abroad, get credentials. Maybe you’ll come back, and by that time, things will be different.”
“But what will I do, after this degree? Here, or there?”
“Why, you’ll be a professor, of course. It’s what all of us here have done. We receive graduate degrees and then teach mathematics.”
Yitian’s chest filled with pride at this possibility. Ever since coming to university, he’d wondered at how incredible the lives of the professors seemed. He couldn’t imagine any version of a life more perfect than a job in which he spent days reading books and living on a quiet university campus. “Do you really think I’d be able to do something like that? Be a professor?”
“Boy”—he’d never addressed Yitian so familiarly—“I’ve been teaching here for many years, and I know when I meet someone like you, who is so suited to academia in both skill and temperament. I can’t imagine you doing anything else, and quite frankly, I don’t think you’d be very good at it if you tried.
“I went to America last year with a visiting delegation,” he continued. “Life there is different. You wouldn’t believe it. You will enjoy it, I’m sure.”
Yitian wished he could do this himself. Go abroad for just a few weeks as a tourist to try things out, wear that new country like a cheap shirt only meant to last a season. What Professor Wu was suggesting was entirely different—to commit to years, possibly a whole new life, in the country.
“Smile a little, boy. You should celebrate. Let loose, for once.”
It didn’t seem to matter what he thought. After he left the office, Yitian had the distinct sense he’d been bound to a future he hadn’t decided for himself. Professor Wu had presented the nomination as an opportunity he could choose whether or not to take, but the more he spoke, the clearer it was that Yitian’s future had already been determined. Yitian looked at his watch—he’d had the sensation of sitting in the office for hours, but in fact his fate had been announced to him in only thirty-five minutes.
* * *
—
So it will begin next year?” Mali asked that evening when Yitian told her and Jianguo of the meeting. She sat in a chair in the corner of the single room he shared with Jianguo. His roommate was lying on his back, lazily flipping through a book in bed. Since moving into the university’s instructor dormitories two years ago, they’d grown accustomed to the freer space, and Yitian could not believe he’d once lived together with so many for so long.
“I suppose. If I get it, I mean.”
“How many people did they choose?” Jianguo asked.
Yitian tried to remember if Professor Wu had mentioned such a detail. “I don’t think he told me that.”
Jianguo sighed and mumbled something.
“What did you say?”
“I said, I don’t even know if I would want to go, anyway. Americans think they’re better than everyone else. Who knows if it’s even any good over there?”
Jianguo ignored them for the rest of the evening. He went through his book rapidly, flipping each page with such force that Yitian feared he would rip one of the thin pages in half. Yitian hurried with Mali out of the apartment to walk her home, not wanting to spend any more time in the tense room.
He and Mali had developed this routine over the year and a half that they’d now been dating. Three nights a week, she would come to their dorm room after dinner at the canteens and sit for a while. Afterward, he walked her across the lake to the dormitories where the university staff lived in triple bunks, eight to a room.
“I hope Jianguo will get over it,” Yitian said.
“Doubtful,” Mali said. “You can bet he and his family have been talking about going abroad for years. And now you get the chance? You, a country boy?”
“It’s strange because, to be honest, I’ve spent a lot of time feeling jealous of him.” His best friend’s life in university had seemed much easier than his. Jianguo’s father was so good at mathematics that Jianguo had been able to ask him for help, and his mother mailed him extravagant desserts every month whenever she feared Jianguo was becoming homesick.
“But I’ve done better than him on tests before,” Yitian said. “He’s always recovered eventually.” Each time Yitian did better on a test, it was balanced out by Jianguo scoring higher on the next. He felt thrilled, though he was too embarrassed to say it aloud. He, a boy from a small town, who’d struggled all alone and had no wind at his back, had done the thing that Jianguo couldn’t.
“It’s all well and good when you do better than him on one test, but what do you think you all were working toward all this time? Going abroad, going to America—that was what all the tests and good grades were for. And now you’ve managed it, but he hasn’t.”
If Mali said this, it was probably true. She had an uncanny gift for understanding the moods of others. The strange thing was that Yitian never even noticed her watching other people. She said this ability of hers was a gift that came from growing up in Beijing, two kilometers from Zhongnanhai, during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, when it was not uncommon for people who appeared to be friendly neighbors turning and reporting on others. She’d had to keep alert, monitor people’s faces for any sign of guile, in order to protect herself and her family.