A Map for the Missing

"[Belinda Huijuan] Tang's vibrant, stirring descriptions of Communist China during the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath . . . grip, transport and beguile." --San Francisco ChronicleTang 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 fa