Page 19

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

You would have hated Taiwan.

I hated it before we even boarded the plane, hated it as we sat tightly against one another,

wearing our winter jackets to save space in our suitcases, hated it when we landed, walked out, and there was only the humidity,

as we removed layer after layer, sweating right through them.

Have you visited Taiwan?

It is much nicer than it was back then.

Monica says it is her favorite place in the world.

We used

to return every few years to see Torou’s family before the journey was too long for me.

We sent Monica to study Chinese while

we played mahjong.

She always came back with a snack for herself—a bag of fried popcorn chicken, skewers poking out, or a

glistening cup of bubble tea, condensation forming as soon as it met the Taiwan humidity.

But instead of fast and clean trains or air-conditioned convenience stores on every block, Taiwan back then was a backwater

island, just as your mother had said.

A military jeep picked us up.

My father chatted with the driver, each exchanging names of other military men they knew, which ones had come to Taiwan, which to Hong Kong, which were still trying to stick it out on the mainland.

The driver even knew Mr.

Gao, called him a hotshot, though he was pleased to hear Mr.

Gao had made it out, even if he had been sent to the south instead of the north, where we were headed.

Before reaching the city, we drove through sprawling encampments, barracks built for people like us, so many fleeing China

during that time.

The barracks were small and densely populated, a single dangling lightbulb for illumination.

I dreaded finding

out which one we would live in.

But the driver took us straight past them and into the city.

“Not for you,” he said, his jolly tone grating against my sour mood.

“No, for your service, you’ll have a proper house.”

He looked not at my father, but into the rearview mirror, at my mother.

I shrank farther into my seat.

So they knew our secret

here, too.

Though the house was nice, far nicer than the encampments we had passed, my father cursed as soon as we stepped inside.

All

of the doors were sliding, the flooring tatami, and the table and seating low to the ground.

It disgusted him, to have spent

so many years fighting the Japanese, only to live in a house of their style now.

If Mother was upset, she did not show it.

You won’t find it surprising that she immediately got to work.

She and I walked

around the neighborhood, scouting the market, the school, the public clinic, the parks, while my father stayed behind and

brooded.

We came back with bedrolls and a small bag of white rice.

“Ah,” Mother sighed when she set the rice down.

“I miss Ah-shin already.”

I never realized that Mother did not know how to cook until those first few days in Taiwan.

Our rice was hard, and our vegetables burned, though the raw ingredients were better than anything we had in Shanghai.

I wondered what Ah-shin was scraping together for you and your mother, and wished I was at the table with all of you, even if our meal was only millet.

“We will be here a few months. That’s all,” my father insisted.

He sat awkwardly on the tatami, as if his body could not properly

relax on something made by the Japanese.

For those first few months, Mother and I did nothing.

She, in particular, was bad at doing nothing.

We did not have the materials

to make pencils.

Mother cleaned the house, again and again, while I wrote you letters.

The letters were checked and censored.

Of course, we knew how to work around that.

I did not want to waste money buying paper, so I used our old trick, writing on

the sheet of my bedroll, using only a hand width of space, layering the characters over one another.

I complained about the

weather and the mosquitoes and how I missed Ah-shin’s cooking.

I also mentioned the tension that even I, who barely left the

house, sensed between the locals and the new arrivals.

We were far from the only ones streaming into Taiwan during this time,

far from the only ones from Shanghai.

The locals called us waishengren, people from outside the province.

They had recently

been freed from Japanese rule, and now the Nationalists intended to rule over them.

I didn’t know then that only a year earlier, around the time when you were struggling over whether to follow your boy to Hong

Kong, the Nationalists in Taiwan had killed thousands of local demonstrators protesting what they saw as an incompetent, corrupt

new regime.

It kicked off martial law in Taiwan.

There were whispers of the incident, though never loudly, and certainly not

in the circles my father ran in.

His circles talked only of returning to the mainland, of freeing China from what they saw

as an incompetent, corrupt new Communist dictatorship.

Mother packed my pencil with a few packets of rice and shipped it back to Shanghai.

We never knew if you received it.

“Just a few more months,” my father said as he left for work, a new position given to him by the Nationalist government.

It was again within the intelligence division.

They were scrambling to find a weak point in the Communist regime as well as a way to keep the locals under control.

“It might be good for you to meet some people. Make friends. You should really be looking for a husband.”

“Why would I look for a husband here if we are leaving in a few months?” I glared at him the way you used to.

He gave me only

a passing glance before leaving us alone in the house again.

Those days blurred together, the only marker of time my father leaving and returning.

Mother poured her energy into learning

how to cook.

I assisted halfheartedly.

I could not help it.

I would wake up wondering what you and your mother were doing

in Shanghai, if you were safe.

I spent every day in that little Japanese house, knowing each one would be the same, gray and

dull, without my home, without you.

I could not muster the energy to meet new people, convinced the locals hated us, and the

others from China only saw us as competitors.

“Good news,” my father said one day, returning from work.

“We are going back?” I asked, sitting up from where I had been lying down on the tatami.

Mother straightened too, walking

over from the kitchen.

“No.” I deflated and almost did not hear what he said next.

“The boss wants to open a pencil company here.”

“In Taiwan?” Mother asked, eyes wide.

“Yes. Mr. Gao has been lobbying for it, even from the south. The government will pay for all expenses. They’ve found a few

buildings they want me to choose from, but I said I needed to consult you two first.” He stood behind me, placing his hands

on my shoulders, and kissed my head.

“Wouldn’t you like that?” he asked.

“To go back to making pencils?”

I wanted to yell at him.

I wanted to tell him that he was missing the point, that it was not the pencils we missed.

This island

would never have the life of Shanghai.

It would never have you, and no number of pencils would change that.

But I was not

a child anymore.

I was twenty years old, and I knew he was trying his best, that he needed me to try as well, and the only

thing I was good at was making pencils.

“That sounds great,” I managed.

We began work on the Phoenix Pencil Company Taiwan branch.

I helped Mother decorate the new store while the government bought

equipment.

The building had been left by the Japanese Mitsubishi company when they departed after the war.

We tried to make

it as similar to the Shanghai store as possible—the back contained all the equipment, the front a small counter, behind which

would be a wall of pencil hearts.

There was an extra nook to this place that we did not know what to do with, so Mother arranged

a table and bench there and called it a study area.

I poured everything I had into reviving the pencil company.

It started slow, but with each passing day, the building looked

more and more like our home, and some of my energy returned.

I chatted with neighbors, telling them what kind of store would

be there soon, handing out sample pencils.

I met others like us, straight from Shanghai, many who were familiar with our store.

I took down their addresses, promised I would let them know when we opened.

By the time the store opened, we had been in Taiwan for a year.

We still had not heard from you.

The radio broadcasted news

of persecutions and starvation on the mainland.

They buried the news of the Communists taking Nanjing without a fight, followed

swiftly by Shanghai.

The day we opened the store was the first time I really suspected I would never return.

“Let’s get to work,” Mother said, and she hunched over her workstation, looking like she was home.

The reinvigoration lasted only a few weeks, during which we manufactured pencils, and I worked the storefront, trying to channel

my father’s way with people and your mother’s easy charm.

I had been good at it in Shanghai.

In Taiwan my language faltered,

everybody with such different dialects and attitudes toward people like us.

My father invited his colleagues.

They inspected

our pencils, chatted with Mother, eyed me.

I should have known where all this was headed from the moment my father said they

were funding the company.

“When will the Reforging start?” they asked.

A few days later, we were back to Reforging, cutting ourselves open, bleeding out onto a page.

In a way it was a return to

our previous life and should have been a comfort.

But our previous life was all about war and survival, and this time, too,

was all war and survival, only without you.

It worked like this—we would sell our pencils, sometimes even give them away for free.

We had what we called a recycling program.

If someone brought their used pencils back to us, we would sell them new ones, heavily discounted.

My father came up with

the idea of crafting some with broken hearts inside.

It would start off working fine, then suddenly there would be a gap in

the heart, and the customer would return, complaining about their purchase.

We’d take it back, replace it for free, and even

throw in another one.

All the used pencils were Reforged.

No matter the content, the Reforged text was passed on to my father’s colleagues.

Most

of it was not incriminating, at least I did not think so.

I did not know what became of the ones that criticized the government.

I could only hope we were doing the right thing, that my father was right, and we needed a strong government to bring about

stability, to muster a force large enough to take China back from the Communists and to take us home to Shanghai.

The days blurred even more than before.

We were so tired, working the pencil company in the morning and Reforging at night.

Mother often spent all day Reforging, as if she preferred the memories of strangers over her own.

Despite the Taiwan heat,

she was cold most of the time.

She insisted it had nothing to do with the volume of Reforging she was doing, even as she rubbed

her scars.

“Let me take on more of them,” I said.

“I’m not a child anymore.”

“No.” She wrapped a blanket around herself.

“You know I hate working the storefront. Please just handle that.”

“You’re hurting yourself—”

“You should go make friends here,” she interrupted.

“Do not stay in this job long.”

“What do you mean?” All my life, the only thing I had known for certain was that I would take over the Phoenix Pencil Company.

She looked down at her bleeding hand resting on a notebook.

“Don’t rely on your Reforging skills. Or at least do not share them the way I have. Your grandmother was not wrong when she

did not want me to teach you. It is a dangerous thing. If you can, find a different way to live.”

She sliced her arm open once again.

I missed your mother the most then.

She was the only one who could convince Mother to unburden herself.

I wondered if Mother

missed her the same way I missed you—in fleeting, biting moments, always with the undercurrent of dread that none of us would

voice.

On the second anniversary of my grandmother’s death, my father started a fire outside our home, in a metal cylinder.

He methodically

folded fake money and tossed it into the fire, pausing once in a while to bow his head and mutter beneath his breath.

Mother

tried to join him, but it was not a good day for her—she had Reforged too much the night before.

She was pale and wrapped

in blankets even in the tropical heat.

She handed me a pencil and nodded to the flame.

I joined my father and tossed it in

for her.

Halfway through, it began to rain.

It happened often on the island, sudden downpours on an otherwise clear day.

My father

cursed, trying to protect the flame with his body while I ran inside for an umbrella.

By the time I returned, the fire was

gasping for breath.

I held the umbrella overhead and my father threw in bundles of dry paper money, coaxing the reluctant

fire back to life.

We winced when the wind blew the smoke right at us, stinging our eyes.

He tossed the remaining paper money

into the cylinder.

The fire was extinguished, some of the money unburnt, tears ran down my father’s face.

He quickly wiped

them away, blaming the smoke, the rain, the island.

He sat in front of the house, head in his hands, attempting to wipe the

smoke’s sting from his eyes.

I didn’t ask what he was thinking.

If he regretted coming here, if he missed home, his friends, the time when his wife was healthy and his daughter happy.

I didn’t ask if he regretted making Mother cry—she cried not from moving or from Reforging or even from his temper, but from the fact that he made her craft broken pencils when she used to take so much pride in her work.

I didn’t ask if he thought our burnt paper money could even reach his mother from here, or if she would be looking for us in Shanghai.

Instead, I closed the umbrella, retreated into the house, and worked on the next batch of pencils.

The clientele at the Taiwan branch was not as far-reaching as the one in Shanghai.

For the most part, only university students

were interested.

They were my age, and yet they seemed a world apart, improving themselves through education, often with the

goal of leaving Taiwan.

And nobody dreamed of that goal, or was closer to reaching it, than Torou.

The Anti-Communist and Resist Russia Union hosted community events, an effort by the government to garner support for the

military.

They held free movie nights, organized tree plantings and social gatherings where they would, with each bowl of

rice, hand out pamphlets showcasing all the good they were doing for the island.

It was at one of these events where I met

Torou.

I only went because my parents forced me out of the house.

I had started playing mahjong with a group of women, sometimes

for entire afternoons.

Once, they invited me to come with them to one of these gatherings.

Everybody would be my age, they

promised, although I would be the odd one out, since I was not in university.

The event was held on campus at the local university.

Thankfully it was winter, so the heat was not as oppressive.

Most of

the people there knew one another from class.

I only knew the woman who invited me, who quickly abandoned me after seeing

her classmates.

I made a show of looking at the tent of meager refreshments.

In the end, I sat on the outskirts of the crowd,

next to a boy drinking, of all things, soup.

“Soup?” he asked, raising a spoonful.

“No thank you.”

When I faced him, he recognized me.

“You’re the pencil girl” were his exact words.

“You work at the Phoenix Pencil Company.”

“I do.” I looked at him more closely, but I did not recognize him.

I was the one working the storefront in those days, and

so I knew most of the customers.

“Do you get your pencils there?” If so, I likely would have Reforged his words before.

“No. My sister does though.” He pointed at one of the women in the gathering closest to us.

“She raves about them.”

I wanted to warn him, let him know anything his sister wrote could one day be used against her, that our pencils were not

safe.

But I barely knew him, and so I said, “That’s nice.”

“I love communication,” he blurted out, which was such an odd thing to say.

He put his soup down and looked at me intently.

He was much thinner back then, but the intensity in his eyes was the same.

“That’s what I study,” he said quickly.

“Communication.”

“Oh.”

“Your pencils are a means of communication, too, aren’t they? The way all writing is.”

“They’re just pencils.” I shrugged, even though they very much were not just pencils.

I took one of ours out of my bag.

I

always had at least one with me.

I twirled it expertly between my fingers, hoping to distract him.

“You must know all about how people communicate,” he said almost dreamily.

We were getting into uncomfortable territory.

“What do you study about communication?” I asked to turn the conversation away

from me.

“How to secure it,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, in wars there is always a necessity to send secure messages. That’s what I study. How you secure a message.”

The topic had somehow turned even more uncomfortable.

“So do you go to this university?” I asked, another attempt to change the subject.

“I take a lot of classes here,” he said.

“But I’m not technically a student. What do you do?”

I shrugged.

“All I do is play mahjong and make pencils.”

“I bet there’s more to you than that. Here.” He took off his watch and turned its face to me.

“Talk for five minutes. I won’t

interrupt or say a thing.”

Five minutes did not sound long, and I had nobody else to talk to, so I agreed.

I spoke in halting sentences at first.

I did

not hide the fact that my father was a proud Nationalist, though most locals did not take kindly to that.

If Torou cared,

he did not show it.

I told him we came from Shanghai.

That we ran a pencil company there.

That we were reestablishing it here.

That I left behind my aunt and cousin.

When I began to talk about you, the words came easily.

I talked about how we used to

compete to settle the accounts, how we wrote a story together, how we slept in the same room every night for ten years, whispering

deep into the night through our mosquito nets.

I told him about Shanghai and startled myself with the longing in my voice,

for the home we had left.

“You sound like you really miss your cousin,” he said.

I glanced at his watch.

I had talked for more than ten minutes, and

he had stayed silent the whole time.

“I guess I do.” I tried not to think about how I had received no news from you or your mother since we arrived.

“I’d write a story with you,” he offered.

I laughed.

“Our stories were silly,” I said, and yet I ached for those nights all the same.

“What were they about?”

“Girls with special powers who fought the Japanese.”

“I like that,” he said.

“But you’re right, I probably wouldn’t be very good at writing that. If there’s anything else you and your cousin did, I could help you with that instead.”

It was such a startlingly nice gesture that I did not know how to respond.

“Or maybe we could go see a movie or something.” I remember he stared intently at his empty soup bowl as he said it.

“How old are you?” I asked.

He looked young compared to the rest of the crowd.

“Almost eighteen,” he said.

He was three years younger than me, which at that age made me think him impossibly young.

No wonder

he was not officially a university student.

“Maybe in a few years, then,” I said lightly.

“I won’t be here in a few years,” he sighed.

“Oh? Where will you be?”

“America. I’m going to study engineering at MIT. Have you heard of it?”

“You’ve already gotten in?”

“No.” His face turned red.

“But I will.” He sighed again.

“I don’t want to live here anymore. It’s occupation after occupation

here. America though. That’s the place to be free.”

I shifted.

Any pain he was going through likely had something to do with my father, who worked for the government, with Mother,

who passed along messages for them.

And with me, for helping make their operations more efficient, more secretive.

Martial

law was in full force.

The Nationalists did not allow anyone to speak out against them, particularly the locals.

“Can I at least come by the pencil company sometime?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m Yun.”

“Torou.”

It was a Japanese name.

But I could tell from his accent that he was a local.

His family had likely given all of their children Japanese names, a practice during occupation to gain favor with the Japanese officials.

Even after occupation ended, many kids were so used to having Japanese names that they never reverted to their Chinese or Taiwanese names.

“See you soon, then,” he said, and left, soup bowl in hand.

My friend was the one who brought him up again, the next time we played mahjong.

“How did you enjoy talking to the Tsai son?” she asked.

I knew that even if she was interested in our conversation, she was

also trying to distract me from my tiles, to make me slip up in the game.

“He talks a lot.”

“You two looked good together.”

I glanced around the table, trying to figure out if the tile I wanted to throw out would be safe.

“He’s too young.”

“Lots of girls are interested in him though. He’s the most likely to get to America. Very smart. Maybe he’s tired of girls

his age and wants an older woman.”

The whole table laughed at that.

“Why don’t you ask him out, then?” I suggested.

My hand was a bad one.

I knew I would not win this round.

“He’s never talked to any of us. It was a surprise to see him talking to you.”

“Maybe he pities you,” one of the other women suggested, which really was a rather mean thing to say.

But I had been thinking

the same.

I had been standing alone.

And even though there were so many others like me, transplants from Shanghai, somehow

I was still different from all of them.

“Well, I’m not interested in him.”

I lost badly that day.