A Map for the Missing

March 1, 2022

After 10 years in the United States, Tang Yitian is called home to China when his father vanishes, but his efforts to learn what happened are waylaid by bureaucracy and his mother's evasions. So he teams up with childhood friend Tian Hanwen, a well-to-do housewife whose academic dreams were wrecked by tragedy, and together they uncover who Yitian's father really was in a narrative that ultimately ranges from the late 1970s to 1990s. From Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate Tang.

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May 23, 2022
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. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group.

June 15, 2022
This ambitious debut novel finds a math professor returning from the United States to his native China on a pilgrimage of multigenerational discovery. Themes of family and forgiveness against the sweep of political foment inform this epic, which opens in the U.S. but spends the rest of its pages in China, hopping between the mid-1970s and 1993. The earlier period represents the formative years of Tang Yitian, a bookish boy from a rural farm family who frequently finds himself at odds with his brusque father. The later marks Yitian's belated return to his homeland following a frantic call from his mother informing him that his father has disappeared after having walked away from home without explanation more than a decade earlier. In between, there is much for Yitian to discover, and the reader as well, as the novel seems to underscore the adage that to understand all is to forgive all. What requires understanding is the death of Yitian's older brother, as well as their grandfather, over the course of a year; the tension between that grandfather and Yitian's father; and the transition for Yitian from toiling in the fields to studying at an urban university, falling in love in the process. All this occurs within the turmoil in China during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Having left all this behind when he immigrated to America for graduate studies, married to a woman who provides some stability, Yitian must balance the identity he has forged and life he has found with the one he left behind. Through returning to China and searching for his father, he discovers so much more. There's a lot to absorb, but the narrative momentum keeps the reader engaged.

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Starred review from June 1, 2022
Moving to the United States, to forge a career in mathematics, Yitian might have hoped for a clean break from his past in small-town China. But he left behind a long list of unfinished business, from a trail of lingering guilt to a deeply damaged relationship with his father, and a love that floundered in the face of Yitian's frustrating inertia. When Yitian's mother reports that his father has gone missing, he returns to a country he is no longer comfortable navigating to help find his father and, perhaps, closure. In this spectacular debut, Tang places an everyman at the center of her narrative and traces his unease with himself and the larger world through expanding circles that define his life. We learn about Yitian's family, his struggles to attend university, and his love, Hanwen, a woman who is now part of China's upwardly mobile economic class. A lover of topology, Yitian believes in defining a shape by understanding what's absent. But real life is much more complicated; with so much left unsaid, one can never piece together a map for the missing. A breathtaking portrait of the regret that can forever shape a life when someone helplessly sticks to the path of least resistance.

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