A Map for the Missing(95)

“No one in China ever had it.” He’d tried to look up the word in his Chinese-English dictionary but hadn’t found anything.

“What if people had it but we just didn’t have the words for it? Look, there’s all these studies done by scientists. Some of them are even at Harvard.”

“All right.” He felt embarrassed by the amount of research she’d done. Next to it, his own defense sounded unscientific and stubborn. It challenged his idea of their roles—he was supposed to be the analytic one, not her. He brushed her off, but that evening after she went to bed, he’d looked at the photocopied papers, filled with testimonials from young children describing how they felt when they tried to read.

Other children say that words on papers sit still, but for me they sort of swim around the page and it’s hard for me to follow them to read, Kris, 5, said.

Second Uncle’s phrasing was strange and specific enough that the words had to be exactly the ones Yitian’s father used.

He had an idea. He called to his mother, who immediately came to him, letting the stove go out.

“What is it?” He could hear in her voice how eager she was to help.

“I was just thinking . . . Did Ba ever keep any papers or notes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything that he would have written on.”

She twisted the washcloth in her hands. “No, your father never had any reason to write things, you know that . . .”

“Not even any forms? Anything he had to fill out?”

“Oh! He had to fill out these forms awhile ago to get his pension. Let’s see.”

And then they were both hurrying to the wardrobe in her bedroom, which had, since his childhood, held all the items she was afraid might one day come of use. He supposed she’d accumulated more things in the years that he’d been gone, but still the crash of objects tumbling out of the closet startled him. The four dusty shelves were entirely piled with scraps of fabric, empty picture frames, the jagged and rusted bits of metal that had fallen out of little mechanical objects, even old toothpaste tubes. In their home in California, Mali was always cleaning and rearranging, deciding what needed to be kept and what was to be discarded. She would never allow a cabinet to become so disorganized as this. Her ideas of neatness and efficiency, of not keeping more than what was needed, didn’t make sense in a world where they were once so afraid that everything would be taken away, where even the smallest of items might one day come to show their value.

He held up a knotted green yo-yo.

“Some child left it outside when they were playing.” His mother shrugged.

He saw the corners of paper poking out from underneath the detritus, and he and his mother slowly removed the other items until they reached them. The topmost sheet was so old that it cracked in his hands. He flipped through the others. He’d never even seen his father’s handwriting and was unsure of what he was looking for. Most of the papers were in typed text—forms distributed from the government—or otherwise notices and receipts written by the smooth hand of another.

By the time he found the folded piece of notebook paper, he almost ripped the thin sheet in his haste.

The notes appeared to be an accounting of various plots of land and crops in his family’s possession and their locations. The writer had listed the number of mu dedicated to each crop, until halfway down the paper, where they’d stopped in the middle of the word peanuts. The characters floated at different heights around the page, unfettered by the lines that were meant to organize handwriting.

There were mistakes, too, within the characters. They were of the kind a young schoolchild would make, confusing the radicals within characters. Instead of 稻子 the writer had scrawled



resulting in a character that didn’t exist. Farther down, they’d mistaken 山芋 for



Yitian thought of Yishou, of his older brother’s wide shoulders hunched over a table as he did homework. But from the date scrawled in the top corner, a day six years ago, this document would have been written long after Yishou’s death.

“Did Ba write this?”

His mother took the paper and squinted. She wouldn’t be able to make any sense of the characters. He tried to remember what that girl’s, his student’s, writing had looked like, but the writing in Chinese characters was too different from her English letters to be helpful.

“Is it there? What you were looking for?” his mother asked.

He knew what she meant by the question. No, there wasn’t anything that gave him another clue as to where his father might be, yet as he looked at the childish mistakes, he felt the sense of discovery burning within him.

For the second time that day, he was overwhelmed with the urge to turn to his father and ask what had gone through his mind when he mistook these characters. Or to reverse the question onto Yishou and ask, “How do you do this?”

But he’d never bothered to understand the ways they might have been different from him. The explanation wasn’t complex—a disorder, an illness of the mind—categorized, even common. Here was this reason, so beyond their control, that had written their lives. Intelligence had been such a mysterious gift in his youth, a concept as unknowable as whether the weather would be favorable for that season’s harvest. In many ways, the life of his adulthood was so much simpler than he could have imagined, processes made legible and circumscribed by rationality and science. How would his father and Yishou have existed in this more nameable world?