Belinda Huijuan Tang's debut novel A Map for the Missing is a moving story about family, forgiveness, identity, loss, and the weight of cultural expectations versus personal ambition.
When we first meet Tang Yitian in 1993, he is a mathematics professor at an American university in California, where he has lived with his wife Mali for nearly a decade. One day, he receives a phone call from his mother, who still lives in their ancestral family village in China, informing him that his father has mysteriously disappeared. Yitian is estranged from his father and as a result, he has not set foot in the village in 15 years — yet Yitian agrees to return to his child home home to help look for him. When he arrives in China however, he feels like a fish out of water and has no choice but to seek out the help of his childhood friend (and his first love), Tian Hanwen, who is now a housewife to a mid-level bureaucrat. Together, they begin the search for Yitian's father, but along the way, they end up discovering truths about themselves and their families that change long-held perspectives about their lives. Through a narrative that switches back and forth between the 1970s and 1990s, we eventually learn the characters' backstories and the link between their pasts that impact their lives in present day.
It's been awhile since I've come across a book that resonated with me on so many levels. Throughout the story, both Yitian and Hanwen struggle between pursuing their dreams and forging their own path in life versus following cultural expectations of filial piety that require them to fulfill their obligations to their families. This is a struggle that I'm intimately familiar with, which is why reading this book was quite an emotional experience for me. Reading about Yitian's feelings of inadequacy in not being able to reconcile his ambitions and the trajectory of his life with his responsibilities toward his parents (regardless of how they treated him), I found myself nodding along in understanding and sympathy. I was also able to relate to his experience returning to his hometown after so many years away, and the unexpected culture shock that made it difficult for him to navigate a world that used to be familiar to him. This was actually one area that I felt the author did an especially great job with: conveying the unending struggle that immigrants like us have with reconciling the meaning of "home" and feeling like a "perpetual foreigner" in both worlds.
There's actually quite a bit to unpack with this novel — the themes of loss and forgiveness, reconciling past and present lives with future, social mores versus personal values, the price of ambition and trying to forge a better life for oneself versus the obligations of family and cultural inheritance — it's impossible to cover all aspects in such a short review. With that said, I appreciate Tang's realistic yet deeply nuanced portrayal that quite honestly continues to give me much food for thought even now, several days after having finished the book.
This was an absolutely worthwhile read — one I definitely recommend. Of course, given the cultural elements, the experience reading this will probably be different for each person, but with the variety of themes it covers, I don't think it will be difficult to find something relatable in the story.
Received ARC from Penguin Press via NetGalley.
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