A Map for the Missing by Belinda Huijuan Tang (Penguin Press)

In this new century fiction has changed. Autofiction blends truth with stories, teasing readers with what’s been made up and what is fact. Unreliable narrators are normal and plots often need an electronic microscope to plumb their enigmatic depths. Chapters not infrequently are no longer than a single paragraph and sometimes are never there at all. A book waiting on my shelf right now is a novel told in a monologue of thoughts silently voiced in the matter of  an hour or two.

These are all interesting journeys into new forms of story-telling but once in a while all I want to read is a straightforward, chewy, smart novel, one written in a 20th century mode, with a beginning that links coherently to its end and with characters whom I care about. 

These aren’t easy to come by in the realm of what’s now called literary fiction so when I picked up Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing, I had no idea that my wish was was going to be granted.

The book begins with a language that I can’t read, translated into the words “Your father’s gone missing.” A swift phone call from his mother sends Tang Yitian from his life at a California university back to the rural Chinese village that he left fifteen years ago. He returns with the last words his father ever said to him echoing in his mind: “You owe us a son.”

It’s Yitian’s brain that took him from the family farm to Beijing’s top university, that sent him to America and made a home for him as a professor in Palo Alto. It also led to the death of his older brother and made his father cast him out forever. He returns to China eight years after his departure, promising his mother that he will find her husband. 

Rapidly he realizes his promise is an empty one. He’s never learned how to negotiate the intricacies of a Chinese bureaucracy, even on its lowest levels. He knows only one person who might help him, a girl from his past whose letters he has ignored, whom he hasn’t seen since they both were struggling with China’s recently revived national examination, the gaokao.

Once a “sent-down girl,” one of the urban teenagers whom Mao’s regime whisked off to the countryside as laborers, Hanwen is now the wife of a city official, living in an affluent gated community of a provincial city,. A woman who has bumped up against corruption, she has just begun to question the limits of her life when Yitian appears with his plea for help.

Skillfully taking her story through China’s transformation from the 1970s into the 1990s, Tang has based her novel upon the life of her own father, who left his ancestral village to live in the US and who spent a summer when he was seventeen searching for the man who had guided him through childhood. Her research has been both personal and scholarly, returning to her father’s village home as a stranger who’s welcomed by relatives she had never met, as well as unnearthing primary sources written in Chinese to discover how it was to live through the dizzying periods ot the Cultural Revolution, Reform, and Reopening. 

In her search for her own family’s history. Tang endows her characters with vivid and poignant life.  “Home,” she says in an interview, “is a place in your memory, more than a physical location.” Exploring what happens when memories are lost, she confronts the idea that places are defined as much by what is missing as by what now exists. The result is a deeply satisfying story of  journeys back and journeys forward, an odyssey everyone can recognize and understand.~Janet Brown