A Map for the Missing
A Novel
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4.4 • 15 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2022 First Novel Prize!
“Belinda Huijuan Tang’s debut novel is a beautifully drawn, sensitively rendered portrait of a man desperately searching for his father—and for reconnection to the past and people he once knew and loved. Both rich in historical detail and timeless in scope, A Map for the Missing explores the costs of choosing your own path, whether what’s left behind can ever be retrieved, and whether it is possible to forgive the wounds we inevitably inflict on each other.” —Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere
“An engrossing saga of a young mathematician caught between two countries, two cultures, two eras, and two loves. Set against the violent turmoil of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this powerful debut explores the wrenching impact of political ideologies on individual lives in a way that is resonant and timely.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness and A Tale for the Time Being
An epic, mesmerizing debut novel set against a rapidly changing post–Cultural Revolution China, A Map for the Missing reckons with the costs of pursuing one’s dreams and the lives we leave behind
Tang Yitian has been living in America, estranged from his family, for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. When Yitian returns home and attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate the country’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider. So he seeks out a childhood friend: Tian Hanwen, who as a teenager was “sent down” from Shanghai to Yitian’s village as part of China’s rustication campaign. Young and in love, they dreamed of attending university together. But after a terrible tragedy, their paths diverged, and while Yitian ended up a professor in America, Hanwen was left behind.
Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on a search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past and what might have been. Spanning the late 1970s to 1990s and moving effortlessly between rural provinces and big cities, A Map for the Missing is a deeply felt examination of family and forgiveness, and the meaning of home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tang's gripping if predictable debut opens in 1993 as math professor Tang Yitian receives word in the U.S. from his aging mother in rural China that his father has gone missing. Yitian boards a flight, leaving his wife behind, and returns to his birthplace for the first time in nearly a decade to help in the search. After it becomes clear the police aren't interested in helping, Yitian reaches out to Tian Hanwen, an estranged friend now married to a local politician, to ask for help, and their reunion fans romantic sparks they'd both denied in their youth. Tang rewinds the nonlinear timeline back through the late 1970s and early '80s to track the duo, showing Yitian passing the gaokao college exam and Hanwen failing it. Meanwhile in 1993, sightings of Yitian's father turn out to be false and Yitian begins to lose hope. Throughout, Tang weaves her characters' stories seamlessly and incorporates commentary on class politics via Hanwen's participation in China's "sent-down youth" program as a teen and Yitian's uncomfortable early adulthood. Still, the plot sometimes feels manufactured to produce moments of triumph and disaster. While the turns are easy to anticipate, Yitian and Hanwen's complex history makes this engrossing.
