A Map for the Missing(89)

“I suppose this is what your new wife, who is from a large city, must want,” she wrote back to him. “Likely, she thinks that all our old traditions are beneath her. You are an adult, so I cannot tell you what to do. All I can do is warn you against marrying someone outside your own social class. Your wife will never understand you, and she will look down upon you for the rest of your life.” He imagined his mother, furiously dictating the contents of the letter to a village child who could help turn her anger into written text.

He wanted to explain to her that Mali was not that kind of person, that her family, like the small party they would have on their wedding day, was extremely modest. But he knew his mother wouldn’t be able to understand how city people could also be poor. At middle age, she couldn’t rewrite her understanding of the world’s contours and how money and poverty mapped onto city and country. She’d think he’d had the wool pulled over his eyes by the city’s bright lights.

Still, she said she would attend. It was her only son’s marriage, after all. Yitian sent her some money, just enough to cover the multiple train rides and transfers all the way from Anhui to Beijing. These days, he was carefully apportioning the money his American university had loaned him before his departure. He’d promised he would pay them back as soon as he could, but in reality he had no idea of when that future would be, or if he would ever reach it all.

On the day of his mother’s scheduled arrival, he went to wait for her at the Yongdingmen Station. He stood amidst the crowds on the platform, jostling to get a good look at the lines of people exiting each train. He didn’t know which one she’d be arriving on, so he had to pay very close attention.

It had been seven years since he’d last seen her. Afraid of his father, he’d never returned to the village. The only communication he had with his mother were the letters he sent to her before important holidays, each with a small amount of money enclosed, which he tutored students in math to save. He asked her to keep some for herself to use, and then to lay out the rest at Yishou’s grave on his behalf. His mother only occasionally wrote back, but he was sure she read every single letter. Once, after he’d written to say that the buns they served in the canteens lumped up in his throat and slid down like gravel into his stomach, she’d mailed him a burlap bag filled with crusty rice, his favorite snack. When the rice arrived, he’d held a large clump in his mouth, letting his spit soften the hard edges until they were pure mush. He’d swallowed the rice, nearly weeping.

As he waited for his mother to arrive, he saw, over and over, women that he thought must be her. They had the same broad shoulders, firm calves, no-nonsense hairstyles. The terminal grew dark. When he finally found her, her eyes were the only part of her that hadn’t changed. Even then, the flurry of wrinkles etched around them seemed to bring the whites out in brighter relief than before. She was looking anxiously around the terminal, frightened by the expansive space and the crowds of people who rolled around them in waves.

He ran to her, calling out, “Ma, Ma,” echoing the sounds of so many other boys in the terminal.

When they finally stood in front of each other, he was speechless. She held his face between her hands and rubbed his cheeks over and over with her thumbs. He looked at her, trying to find his reflection in her eyes. He realized he must have changed even more than she had.

He was afraid of how she might react when she met Mali, whose hands had the softness of someone who’d never had to do hard labor. His mother might say something too direct, not even conscious of how rude she sounded. After arriving in Beijing, however, she became quiet and demure, as if the city had pulled a thin layer of gauze over her and dulled her body into stillness. Whenever she spoke she covered her mouth, hiding her dark teeth and afraid that her country accent wouldn’t be understood.

“She is extremely beautiful” was all his mother said about Mali. He was sure she didn’t mean this; it was never Mali’s beauty that he’d found remarkable.



* * *



—

For the wedding, Mali lined her mouth with red rouge and warmed her eyelashes curly. He watched her getting ready that morning, holding twin matches, just blown out, to her eyes, opening them wide so that she wouldn’t blink. They got dressed together. He wore a white button-down shirt and gray slacks that didn’t quite fit his skinny frame, and she, a dress made of creamy silk taffeta with puffy half sleeves and a ruffled bib, borrowed a week ago from her older sister. The dress ended at midcalf, a fashionable cut from which the milky skin of her legs emerged.

Yitian resolved to be like her on this day, clinking her glasses with the guests heartily. She used her own chopsticks to force food onto their plates and made loud jokes about which of their friends would be the next in line to be married.

The gathering was small. They’d invited just two round tables of ten people each. Yitian and Mali sat at one together with her family and Yitian’s mother. Seated around the other table were all their friends. Everyone was there except for Jianguo. Yitian was not surprised when Jianguo refused the wedding invitation, mumbling something about a prior engagement. He finally understood. He was a country boy, who, by being invited to America, had exceeded the cup allowed to him, the types of things that better-off people could condescend to admire.

As the lunch wore on and on and guest after guest approached them with toasts, what he wanted most was to slip outside. Now that he was surrounded by the raucous noises of so many people, he could only think of those who hadn’t come. The tally of the missing weighed much heavier than those present. Jianguo, Yishou. His father and his grandfather. Hanwen. That morning, he’d briefly wondered how she’d act on such a day. She was not capable of Mali’s blissful unawareness. Hanwen, getting ready in the morning, would have acknowledged the same weighted heaviness he’d felt all day, the intuition that one part of their lives had irrevocably finished to allow this new one to begin. As he looked back upon the past few years, he could see this fundamental principle guiding events through one another. Each opening had necessitated a closure enabling it, the hinge upon which the door had swung.