A Map for the Missing(94)
“So your father went and learned himself, did almost all the farming for his family, when he was just a young teenager. He left for the army but couldn’t ascend far because of your grandfather’s background. And your grandfather didn’t help things by how he treated your father. Even after all your father did for your family, your grandfather was always calling him stupid, because he wasn’t good at school.” Second Uncle glanced quickly at Yitian. “He couldn’t help it, we all knew. Some people just don’t have a mind for practical things.”
“So my father hated him because of all that work he had to do.”
“Well, not at first. But as time went on, he became resentful. Your grandfather used to really hurt your father, saying he didn’t know how your father could be his son because he was so stupid, stuff like that. Your father even cried to me about it once,” Second Uncle laughed. “Before he became the tough guy. ‘The characters just swim in front of me, I can’t help it!’ Of course, later he made me swear never to tell anyone about that single instance when he cried. Even made me draw blood to promise. He was so embarrassed! And I never did tell anyone, but I’m not sure if it matters now.
“I’m always talking too much when I’m around you. Never mind. I’ll leave you be,” Second Uncle said, rising. “Who knows what year it will be when we see each other again? Have a safe journey, all right?”
Yitian nodded and stood, too shocked to give Second Uncle a proper greeting. He wanted to go to his father, to ask him if it was all true. He would only ever be able to hear about his father through the stories of others, he now realized.
“Wait,” he said suddenly to Second Uncle. He’d forgotten something.
Second Uncle turned back, surprised.
What was left to say?
“Thank you.”
* * *
—
Yitian walked mechanically back to the village. His memory overtook his steps, so that he was startled by how quickly he was faced with the door to their home.
His mother came out of the courtyard immediately at the sound of his approach.
“I was just thinking about going out to look for you. I didn’t know what you wanted to eat for lunch.”
“Oh, anything,” he mumbled.
He sat at the center table while she prepared food in the kitchen. If he was honest with himself, he’d noticed before that there was something in how his grandfather accepted his father’s rudeness, never protesting as Yitian did, as if it were deserved. Yitian hadn’t ever wanted to follow the thought fully through. He’d admired his grandfather too much. His grandfather had always been patient with him, never sharp or dismissive. Even if he took a long time to grasp an idea on occasion, his grandfather would never have called him stupid. But between Yishou and his grandfather there was always a shallow silence, as if Yishou was hardly a being worth attention or care. Perhaps this was the form that his grandfather’s earlier dismissal of his own son had taken by the time he had grandchildren, scorn slackening into its more benign form of indifference. Was it possible that, without this earliest wound, his father would have been someone else entirely?
Something else struck him about Second Uncle’s description of his father. The characters just swim in front of me, he’d repeated. Yitian had once heard his older brother saying this exact phrase. How do you do this? The characters just swim in front of my eyes, Yishou had said, picking up Yitian’s papers and marveling at the sentences.
At the time, Yitian hadn’t thought much of it. But now, hearing that his father had once said something similar, he was reminded of another memory.
In his first year teaching in America, one of his students had approached him with an official university document. Yitian, occupied enough at that point with other worries about teaching American students for the first time, placed the paper somewhere on his office desk, where it quickly disappeared under the piles of grading to be done. Not until after the midterm did he think about that document again, when the student came to his office hours to protest the poor grade she received, saying that he hadn’t given her the appropriate testing accommodations.
That evening, when he returned home, he’d complained about the student to Mali.
“She doesn’t grasp the material, and so she comes whining to me? It’s so American, to have a made-up reason like this for not understanding something so basic.”
“Let me see the note,” Mali said. She read the words slowly aloud. “Well, it looks very official, from the university. It says you’re supposed to give her extra time on tests and ignore minor mistakes in how numbers are written.”
“Of course I read it. But it’s a mathematics course. The numbers being written the right way is the whole point.” Her response annoyed him. By this time, Mali’s English ability was already outpacing his, despite the fact that she’d known little of the language when they both left China. He knew he was only imagining that she was questioning his ability to understand the words, and yet he felt embarrassed by her. “Anyway, you can’t really believe what she’s saying on there, can you?”
“It says she has a diagnosed medical condition. Dyslexia,” she’d read slowly.
That first time, she’d pronounced the word DIES-lex-ia, but the next night when he returned home, she read the y with a lighter sound, as it had been described in the book she’d found at the library about the condition. “And the doctors say it’s a real disorder. They say as many as fifteen percent of the population has it,” she said, handing him the sheaves of paper she’d photocopied.