After my father’s death, I didn’t write for two years. Even reading fiction no longer interested me. But when a friend mentioned W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess, a romance novel published in 1928, I was curious. The novel had been disparaged and overlooked by critics; maybe that’s why I was attracted to it. Did Du Bois, the renowned social scientist and activist—whose seminal book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, remains one of the most influential works of African American literature—really write a romance? I had never been a reader of the genre, but death had recalibrated so much of my relationship to the world that it was hard for me to be definitive about anything, even my own tastes.
In every poem, there is a ghost. The page’s emptiness between words. White space where what’s said falls short of what, at the most essential level, needed be said.
For every image, a negative. A lit room gone dark. Against it, the outline of a face, its vague features.
In the moments before entering every supercell thunderstorm, there’s a moment of pause that washes over me. It usually comes as daylight vanishes, a few seconds after I turn on my headlights; just before the first raindrops, and just after the wind has gone still. I silence the radio, tighten my seatbelt, and lower my armrest. Here we go again, I think. There’s no turning back now.
Then it hits, in this case like a car wash. The strongest storms often have the sharpest precipitation gradients. There’s no gradual arrival of the heavy rain. You’re either in or out. And I was in it.
Seeking greatness as individuals makes us restless, discontented, and ruthless to our children, while social and economic rewards for the great immiserate the many. Greatness’s trickle-down effects never arrive. Alpert’s observations may seem a little too familiar. Few of us can be unaware of the late turn to a bespoke minimalism in private life, whether our resources stretch to purchasing meditation apps or to hiring one of Marie Kondo’s KonMari Master Consultants to declutter our houses. And as for trickle-down economics, hasn’t the bloom been off that rose for a good while? “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space because while he was up there we were signing people up,” said Christian Smalls, organizer of the first Amazon union in the United States, the ALU. Seldom has anyone so efficiently skewered the notion that the greatness of a few visionary innovators benefits us all.
Shifting back and forth between the late 1970s and early 1990s, “A Map for the Missing” is a vivid portrait of this period of rapid change in Chinese society, showing both the benefits of opening to the world as well as more personal losses that cannot be recouped.