A Map for the Missing

by Belinda Huijuan Tang

They don’t want to create a place for themselves in history: they want to create themselves. —Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

“We know the names for everything now,” he said.

Wasn’t it true, that love grew in ways beyond what he’d ever read or understood from a book? It could come from something as small as what she’d just described, or the way a person squinted thoughtfully toward the sun before she answered your questions. That was all it took, a moment enough to lodge in your mind and replay itself over and over, affecting your days forever after.

Days with Guifan began with an expectation that was met by the end. She hadn’t minded that until now. Liked it, in fact. But their type of flat life could leave a person trapped.

It was amazing, he’d thought back then, that an unchanging property of an object wasn’t only what was there, but also what wasn’t. It meant that if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.

It was one thing to know her mother’s wishes for her, another to hear about them day and night, to feel her entire life was an obligation to the sacrifices that had made it.

There had been no moment in which he discovered he loved math, not at all like the night in his youth when he became enraptured with his grandfather’s stories. The steady accumulation of knowledge simply settled to become the factual sediment of his mind.

He’d also found a certain relief in the numbers. Putting the pieces of these equations together was so different from anything he’d ever done before that it was as if he were entering into a new, fresh room of his life, one with its door closed against all the mistakes of the past.

It was the singular time of the week he could access quiet, so he looked forward to these evenings when everyone else went to the dances and he walked around the lake alone. In his dorm room, no word could be spoken without inhaling the thick air of so many young boys’ bodies cramped together; no feeling, even loneliness, could be experienced in solitude.

What she felt wasn’t desire for him, but rather a yearning for his very life.

Her son’s life would not be like that. When his fever subsided, she would read him a story, she decided, and then she’d start telling him about math and science, and later on he could tell her he didn’t care about any of it at all. He would make choices about the person he wanted to be.

And so she would keep building this life and her son’s, so that they were strong enough to withstand the people around them trying to make history.

She wondered if it would be like the place she’d always heard stories of, the lights on the Bund shimmering at night, women made up beautifully in bars with dreams animating their dance steps—that sense of living as something that deserved to be enjoyed on its own.

Unlike her, he left his face uncovered. He knew his cheeks would soon turn red, as if they’d been slapped, but now that he was about to leave, everything, even discomfort, had already transformed into the pleasant softness of a memory.

Though his mother scrubbed and scrubbed at it, the remnants of color remained, the spots as pale as sunlight now.