A Map For The Missing by Belinda Huijuan Tang

 

Publisher: Penguin Press

Publication date: August 9th 2022

Pages: 400

This is a review of a review copy from  the publisher.

1993; Tang Yitian was born in China, but for the past years he has been living in the United States with his wife Mali, and where he works as a math professor at a university.

One day he receives a stressfull call from his mother, who still lives in the rural village in the Anhui province of, China, that his elderly father has gone missing. Yitian travels to China in a search for his missing father. When he arrives there in the rural village he grew up in, he tries to figure out with his mother what could have happened and where he can search for him. He seeks help from an old friend; Tian Hanwen, who he knew in his young adult years as they where planning to study together in the city and escape the rural village. But life turned out differently for both of them, and Yitian finds out it is difficult to search for his missing father when he walks into walls of bureacracy.

But together they walk the path his father walked in his past and present, which in the story leaps in time from the late 1970s Cultural Revolution to the 1990's and during different times in China's moving history and set in rural villages and bustling cities as Shanghai.

The story is beautifully written, and from the first page on, altough it starts in the USA, you are to embark on a (time)travel to China as a reader. The chapters alternates between the present and past time, which at some points, I found a little confusing, altough luckily not too much. During the chapters that are set in the past, which take up most of the book, the love story of Yitian and Hanwen plays a big part, and the missing of Yitian's father becomes more of a side story that you remember all of a sudden in the last parts of the book. I must say though that i found the ending a bit loose and odd, this could have been a better wrap up and it left me with a big question mark.

Overall I found it a beautiful and good story, but with some loose points here and there.