A map for the missing, p.11
A Map for the Missing, page 11
Only when she hurried into the car minutes later did Hanwen realize her mother had never mentioned the hug, and this was how she knew with certainty that the gesture had not been insignificant.
* * *
—
In the car driving out of the city, she told the driver not to rush. She wanted to delay the arrival at the dinner for as long as she could.
About a month ago, while Yuanyuan had been at school and her mother was out on her morning walk around the complex, there’d been a knock on the front door, which almost never happened. She was just looking up when Ayi was already running to answer.
Two strangers stepped into her house, one of them so short he could meet her gaze exactly. He was dressed in a crisp, Western-style taupe suit, the other man much taller and wearing a plain white undershirt with holes in the sleeves that pulled up around his large and ropy arms. If she hadn’t been so surprised, the sight of these two men together would’ve struck her as comical.
They walked into the home without being invited, gazes directed firmly at some point above her. The man in the suit picked a spot on the couch with the air of someone who owned the place. The taller man stood stoically in the corner, wedged between two cabinets, watching.
“Are you here to see my husband, Wang Guifan?” she said. This seemed the most likely explanation. “He’s never home during the day. Perhaps you should try his office instead.”
“No, actually. We chose this time when your husband wouldn’t be home. We wanted to speak to you specifically.”
The suited man took his time before saying, “My surname is Qian. We’re colleagues of your husband’s.”
They looked around the room, appearing disinterested in her, eyes pausing at various points: the bookshelf, the china cabinet, the picture of her father displayed on the wall above an offering of fruit. Perhaps they’d come to scope out her furniture before robbing her. Ever since working at the restaurant, she’d felt a pang of fear whenever she was alone with men she didn’t know, and these were the kinds of men—powerful, who didn’t ask permission—who put her on edge.
Mr. Qian commented briefly on the weather, colder than usual at this time of year, before saying, “We’ve been working on a project with your husband. A new shopping complex, the International Prosperity Center. Has he told you about it?”
She shook her head.
“Does your husband often tell you about his work?” He raised his eyebrows in suggestion. She sensed he wanted her to pick up some meaning behind his words, but she couldn’t guess what. Again she said no.
“Well, we can understand that, can’t we?” He turned toward his companion. “Yes, Mr. Pan agrees with me. Your husband knows the job of a good housewife isn’t to know too much about her husband’s work. You stay home, take care of things here. You don’t need to get involved with things that don’t concern you.” She didn’t sense a need for response. His speech was quiet and efficient, unlike all the men in power for whom she’d always felt disdain, ones she’d met at dinners and receptions and who never let the slightest drop of self-awareness or sense of discretion tinge their boasts.
He rose slowly from the couch and took a porcelain vase from the bookshelf. His long fingers stretched around the neck looked as if he could contract his hands at any moment.
“You’ve arranged your home beautifully. You two have a son, right?”
He returned the vase to the shelf. Her chest, which she hadn’t noticed was tightened, unspooled. She gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Yes, your husband has spoken about him, too. I’d love to meet him sometime. Is he home?”
“No. He’s at school.”
“I’m sure you two will raise a fine child. Your husband is so different from other city officials. Just last week, I met someone who was at—where was it, the Ministry of Water and Electricity?—bragging about all the children he had with mistresses in the countryside. It’s no wonder the ordinary people see things like that and get angry with their government.” He shook his head, as if expecting her to bemoan the state of the country with him.
She sensed this might be an opening. “Mr. Qian, I’m sorry to be so abrupt. I’m afraid I have another appointment now.”
“Of course, of course!” He jumped up. “I’m sorry to keep going on. You must be very busy. We’ll get going now.”
She exhaled with relief. The visit had been strange, yes, but she couldn’t discern any particular threat. She’d ask Guifan about the men that evening.
“Oh, I seem to have forgotten something,” Mr. Qian said, just as they were about to depart. She’d gone outside, still in her slippers, to see them off.
He reached into his pocket and produced a tiny velvet box. He flipped open the top to reveal a pair of carved rose studs, each the size of a pinky nail, pressed into a soft pillow.
“Made of ivory,” he said. He held the jewelry box out, letting it linger in midair.
“I can’t take that. You’re much too polite.”
“No, I insist.” He hadn’t retracted his hand.
She closed her hand on the box and right then he leaned in and said, “I wanted to say this earlier, but I wasn’t sure if I should even mention it.” She could smell stale cigarettes on his breath. Her heart was racing. “Your husband is in a position to help us with the International Prosperity Center. You know, we have great plans for this city. Look at how beautiful it’s getting. You wouldn’t want your husband to get in the way of that, right?” Coming even closer, he added, “You have a beautiful home and family. Tell your husband not to do anything that would jeopardize what you’ve obtained.”
Then he backed away and was talking with the same airy voice again. “Don’t worry. You can ask your husband about what I mean later.” He smiled broadly at her and handed her a business card before departing.
She had to put her hand on the wall to steady herself after they left.
Ayi, who’d come to clean up the teacups, startled. “Miss, what’s wrong?”
Hanwen shook her head and almost fell forward onto the couch in her rush to sit down. The lightness was lifting her body away from herself once again. Dark spots trickled into her vision, like an ink spill blotting out her safe home.
She gulped greedily at the hot liquid Ayi brought to her, still with her eyes closed. They’re gone, they’re gone, she said to herself. There isn’t any danger. Slowly, she could feel weight returning to her head, allowing it to become a more solid thing again. She opened her eyes.
“I’m fine,” she said, and when Ayi still appeared to be worried, she repeated herself. Hanwen hadn’t experienced one of these spells in over a year, not since before this new young woman had begun working for them. The episodes had been more frequent when Hanwen was younger, but year by year, the sources of stress that would cause a spell had grown fewer. Her life was bounded and protected by the walls around the complex, the others who went out and interacted with the world for her. Now these two men had breached the barrier. But for what? Mr. Qian’s words were shrouded in code, but she was sure of two things—the men had threatened to hurt her family, and it had something to do with Guifan.
That night, she told Guifan about the visit. He’d been looking over a packet of papers at the desk by their bedside, but his eyes shot up when she mentioned the International Prosperity Center.
“They came here?”
“They came straight to the door. I don’t know how they got past the guards.”
“How did they know where we lived?”
“Maybe you should answer that.”
His eyes, behind his glasses, were large in disbelief.
Her own courage was faltering but she willed herself to press on. She didn’t want to know about the problem at the same time she saw that she had to. She inhaled and said, “I never ask you about anything you do at work, but they came to speak directly to me and threatened Yuanyuan. I won’t be angry with you, but you have to tell me.”
She could tell he was relieved when he confessed. She wondered how long he’d kept the story bottled inside.
What he told her about was a large scheme, the kind sometimes described on the news, accompanied by grainy footage of policemen pushing a crowd of handcuffed men, exactly the type of thing in which she never imagined Guifan would be involved.
Mr. Qian worked for the Li Corporation, a national real estate development company. She’d heard of the firm—they had the tallest buildings in many large cities across the country. He’d first approached the mayor, who’d taken some money from them in the past. They had even grander ambitions for a new shopping complex. The proposed site was in the economic development zone under Guifan’s authority. He would need to approve the demolition of a maze of old alleyway houses for the project to continue.
He’d balked at forcing people out of their old homes to build a new structure that there weren’t enough businesses in town to fill. He thought it would be obvious they were completing the project at the behest of the corporation’s interests and there would be backlash to follow. The mayor first tried to cajole him, telling him how much they each stood to make if Guifan did this one small favor. But then, after a few months of Guifan’s refusals, the mayor began to imply he’d find an excuse to report him to the central disciplinary committee, on grounds of corruption.
“A few months?” Hanwen interrupted. “This has been going for that long? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was—I was afraid.” Guifan hung his head. “I didn’t know how to tell you, and I didn’t want you to be worried.”
“Well, should we be worried? Could he really report you like that? You haven’t done anything wrong,” Hanwen said.
Guifan sighed before continuing. “All these gifts. It doesn’t matter that every official has things like this, or that what we’ve received is nothing compared to everyone else. If he wanted to find an excuse, it wouldn’t be difficult.”
Of course, she’d wondered about the gifts early on. Businessmen or constituents who wanted to give Guifan a token of thanks for a small ask—fast-tracking a restaurant permit or getting someone’s child into the city’s best high school. Inconsequential favors. Red-ribboned bottles of maotai, rubber-banded bundles of foreign currency, once even a calligraphy scroll from the late Qing dynasty. Hanwen didn’t like to look at the gifts, which made her feel like a foreigner in her own life. She knew none of these could have come from Guifan’s salary, which was laughably low, part of the Party’s public commitment that the leaders should live like common people. Everyone accepted that there would be perks that made up for the low pay, like the subsidized housing and their drivers. She’d asked him only once about them, early on. “It’s nothing. I won’t ever let it get out of hand,” he said. She’d decided to believe him. The country was awash with money, anyone could see that. Imported cars whizzed and stirred up dust from the construction sites springing up all around town. Investors came to erect new office buildings and apartment complexes, created shiny pamphlets to sell the city on the place it could become.
She’d been wrong to listen to Guifan, she saw. She’d underestimated the size of the troubles that could come from the gifts and put too much faith in Guifan to handle them.
“So what have you done?” she asked Guifan now.
“I’ve been hoping they’d back off. That the mayor would give up.”
“Hoping? That’s it?”
“What else would you have liked me to do?”
“Your hoping didn’t work. Now they’ve come to our house.”
If the government decided to make an example of an official, the punishment could be ruthless. Stripped of Party membership and their position, certainly. A long jail term. It was uncommon, but at worst they would find out about the crime on the nightly news broadcast: executed by gunshot for corruption, the news anchor would inform them, her voice cold and neutral. The decision on punishment happened in some room where men in power met, through some calculus she would never understand.
She couldn’t believe that Guifan had subjected their lives to such an arbitrary whim and was now acting so helplessly before it. She’d sacrificed the whole other life she’d wanted for the safety of this one, so that her mother, and now her son, could have the stability she’d never had. If what she’d collected could be taken away so easily, then for what had she made those choices?
For the next few weeks, passing by any person smoking on the street, she was made dizzy by the reminder of Mr. Qian, standing so close to her that she could smell his breath. She began writing a desperate letter to Yitian. I know it’s been a long time since we last spoke, but I wonder if I could ask for your advice on something, she started. But what would he think, hearing about how far her life had strayed from the person she’d once been? She ripped the letter to shreds and tossed the remnants.
After that, there’d been weeks of a silent holding pattern. She’d thought that perhaps Guifan was right, that hope was enough to make the men disappear. But then, on the eve of Yitian’s arrival, Guifan had announced wearily to her one morning, “The CEO of the Li Corporation is coming to town next week, and he wants to invite us to dinner.”
Twelve
She could tell that Guifan was already drunk by the time a demure waitress led her to the private dining room. To anyone else, he would have looked exactly the same as always. He had the type of unremarkable features that inspired confidence in others and in Hanwen, which she thought was the reason for his quick ascent within the Party. You looked at that angular face, the suggestion of economy and concern in the wrinkles that had slowly formed on his broad forehead, and thought immediately that he was a practical person you could trust, who wouldn’t reveal your secrets. And in fact, he never did. Even when she’d first met him thirteen years ago, he gave off the considered expression of a person much older than he was. But tonight, when she entered the room, his jaw was already slightly slack, his gaze occasionally blurring out of focus before snapping into the room again, resisting the alcohol’s pull upon his attention. At moments, his eyes seemed to catch on the glittering chandelier that loomed above the room.
She wished that, for once, he didn’t have to be so stoic and composed. She could see her husband through others’ eyes, as someone trying to prove his drinking abilities to the table. If he could just pretend to be a more outlandish drunk, they’d stop forcing shots upon him. But such guile was not in his personality.
“Welcome, welcome!” Li Tuan bellowed at her from across the wide circumference of the table. “We’ve been waiting for you all night.” She recognized him from the newspapers as the president of the Li Corporation. She’d seen his face in the tabloid section, when there’d been a recent rumor that he was having an affair with a young European movie star.
A single open seat to the right of Li Tuan had clearly been left for her. Guifan was seated closer to the door, at a position of lower honor. The dining room was beautiful, she had to admit. Behind Li Tuan, a misty watercolor of mountains and lakes spanned an entire wall. The table and cabinets appeared to be of delicately carved rosewood.
Li Tuan introduced the other members of the table, skipping over Mr. Qian. She nodded at the introductions and said, “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” though she already recognized them all. For the past month, she’d read all she could find about the corporation in old newspapers, hoping that somewhere she would stumble upon some detail of the company’s imminent collapse. Instead, all the articles described its developments in cities all around China and speculated that it was certainly poised for even greater growth in the years to come, one of the country’s prime jewels.
Li Tuan addressed the table. “I’ve only been to Hefei once before, when I was a very young child. It felt like some country backwater back then. I wasn’t sure why they wanted to build in this city at first, but now that I’m here, I can understand. There’s so much open land around here. So much potential for development.”
Hanwen began, “Yes, it’s already different from when we first—”
“That’s what you need to do, if you’re smart. Identify the places that are up and coming, not play catch-up with places that are already prosperous. . . .” He began pontificating on the particularities of the Li Corporation’s strategy.
Hanwen sat back in her seat. She bristled at how he’d interrupted her without even a gaze in her direction. She should have expected it, she knew, but it had been years since she’d been given the seat next to the host, not since before she’d been pregnant with Yuanyuan. It was considered the placement of third-highest respect at the table, but the position was false. The young women picked to sit here were expected to entertain and listen to the host’s comments throughout the night. They couldn’t speak unless directly asked by the host. The person in the lowest position, opposite the host, could at least jump up to refill water. At least there was some choice in that.
“Vice Mayor Wang’s wife knows this place well, actually. She was sent down to a village near here,” Mr. Qian said.
“Oh, is that right?” Li Tuan said. Still, he did not look at her.
“Yes, that’s true. It was a small place—”
