Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. Belinda Huai Jin Tong's debut novel,

A Map for the Missing, follows a character whose story closely follows Tung's own father.

It bounces back and forth between the 90s and the U.S. and the cultural revolution in China in the 70s.

And Tung went hard researching all the historical details to really nail

all the facts and figures to have it really be authentic. But again, a lot of the story is based

on her father's. And in this interview with NPR's R. Shapiro, she pointed that a lot of her

research questions could have been pretty easily answered by just asking her dad.

But for some reason, she couldn't.

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The novel A Map for the Missing opens in the United States in the 1990s.

A young academic named Tang Yitian gets a phone call from his mother back in a small Chinese village.

She shouts, Your father's gone missing.

That first line of the book is written in Chinese characters.

I imagine for Tang Yitian this moment when he hears the news that his father goes missing must be incredibly disorienting and almost feel like a terror in reality.

And I wanted to recreate that feeling for readers when they encountered the book's first pages.

This is Belinda Huajunang's debut novel. The story

jumps back and forth in time from the 1990s to the 70s at the end of China's cultural revolution.

It was a time of upheaval, especially in rural areas like the village where her main character

and her own father grew up. And there are other parallels between fiction

...