Page 25

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

I began teaching Monica how to Reforge today.

It was easier for me to learn than it has been for her.

Back then, I would have

done anything to be your equal.

I was surrounded by pencils.

Monica, meanwhile, has barely used one outside of math class,

and not even a good one at that.

But she seems motivated to learn.

The first step is the easiest, if mentally the most challenging.

The sinking of the heart into the wrist.

She has always been

strong mentally though.

How else could she have studied so well after her parents left?

To push a pencil heart into a wrist—well,

you know the feeling.

She winced when her skin broke, her eyes widening as her body absorbed my words.

When she looked back

up at me, we were both smiling.

The difficult part is the second phase.

Like I said before, I do not want her to resort to the knife.

So I asked her if she had ever pleasured herself, to which she faltered and stumbled and turned an incredible shade of red.

I believe she must get this from Torou or from her mother’s side.

She pretended she did not know what I was talking about, but I came prepared with both the English and the Chinese and a description that could not be mistaken.

Still, she stammered and looked away, as if she wanted to sink through the floor.

Eventually, she told me she had never done so.

I was surprised, considering all the time she spends alone in her room.

I guess

she really is just using her computer.

I almost hope she was lying to me.

The next logical question was whether anybody had

pleasured her before, to which she became even more red, something I did not think possible.

She eked out a no.

That I was less surprised by, seeing how she has been pining after your girl and done absolutely nothing

about it.

I think of Louise as your girl now.

Not only because she was the one who reconnected us.

Having met her in person,

I see ghosts of you in her.

Oh, she is much happier, more joyful than you ever were, and I would not have seen the similarity

had she not stood up to me the other day.

She offended me, as you once offended my father.

She wants my story for reasons I cannot comprehend.

Merely because there

is a lack of stories from people who fled Shanghai, she thinks I should share mine with her?

And then what?

What difference

would it make, and what would she gain?

Maybe she plans to include it in some book no one will ever read that will sit on

a dusty library shelf.

Or worse, she wants to publish it on the internet, one of millions, billions of pages.

The people of

their generation—they have so many resources that they think they need to use them all.

Perhaps some stories are not worth

saving.

If she had told me it would help her personally in some way, I might have relented.

I do like her, and it is easy to see Monica

does as well, and I always try to do whatever I can to help Monica.

But my story is not one I willingly share with just anyone.

Monica has already figured out much of it on her own.

Though I desperately wish she hadn’t, and I don’t completely understand how she did, something about technology.

I’ve done a lot of things I regret—bullying you, Reforging that boy’s poems, being too hard on Edward, the list goes on and on—but I’d rank my time in California at the top of that list.

I wish I could have told her about it myself.

And so I suppose it is time to write about the most difficult years of my life, which also happened to be the loneliest.

I

sent you a note before I left Taiwan.

Every time I moved in the United States, I sent you another with my updated address.

At least one of them must have reached you, since you did eventually write to me.

But that would not be for many years.

They put me on a plane to California.

When I looked at the map, I was stunned and disappointed to see how far it was from

Boston.

I would be looking at multiday bus itineraries I could not afford if I wanted to see the only other person I knew

in the country.

In the summer of 1953, I landed in America.

A colleague of Mr.

Gao’s collected me from the airport.

We drove straight through

San Francisco.

He did not stop.

The city might have been easier for me.

The buildings we passed did not look so different

from parts of the International Settlement, and there was a bustling Chinatown.

But Mr.

Gao was not interested in the city.

He was interested in the universities around it, where the students gathered.

He placed me in the most foreign situation possible—a

suburban neighborhood.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an American suburb.

I only have two words to describe them—wide and isolating.

I could not

get over the wideness of the roads, how much space between the boxy vehicles, such a far cry from Shanghai’s cramped streets

filled with rickshaws and workers.

Mr.

Gao’s men had bought a small house, and this, too, sat on a wide street.

They could

have fit another two houses between mine and the neighbor’s.

Can you imagine a place like this existing back then?

Eventually, the area would be known for its protests, its fight for free speech.

But when I was there, it was quiet and, like the rest of the nation, paranoid.

The university had recently required a loyalty oath from its staff members that they were not members of the Communist party.

Anti-Communist sentiment was rampant.

This worked well for us.

We knew students from Taiwan were gathering to scrutinize martial law and viewed the Korean War with a skeptical eye too.

It was this group that Mr.

Gao wanted to control, before there was a chance of them drawing national attention to their cause.

Looking back, it was not only the students he wanted to control.

It was me as well.

I could die here, I realized, and no one

would know, not until Mr.

Gao thought to check on me.

It was impossible for me to make my own connections.

In San Francisco

I might have blended in or found my way in Chinatown, even if I did not speak Cantonese.

Not here, though.

I could not even

go to the grocery store on my own.

It was too far.

One of Mr.

Gao’s colleagues picked me up twice a week and monitored me

as I shopped for ingredients.

Walking into my first American grocery store—the closest comparison might be the one and only time I went to Great World,

that huge amusement arcade in Shanghai.

It was before you came to live with us, before it was bombed, back when it was five

floors of acrobats, dancers, magic mirrors, fortune tellers, and gangster hangout spots, designed to dazzle and overwhelm.

The grocery store wasn’t as crowded and didn’t have any sort of entertainer, but I experienced that same overwhelming feeling,

looking up at its high ceilings and unbelievably bright lights, food as far as the eye could see.

The way they displayed their

fish, cleaned and descaled, spread across the clearest ice, then another row of refrigerated meats, wrapped in cellophane

so you might see the fat in each cut, practically run your hand across it.

And my favorite part—they would give you stamps

for your purchases, which you could collect and trade in for appliances.

I collected meticulously.

Though the house seemed huge to me, I now know it was tiny by American standards.

There was the first floor with a kitchen

and a seating area, which I arranged to be a restaurant.

Then there was the second floor, more of an attic, really, where

I slept.

The most remarkable thing was the refrigerator.

I had never seen one.

That first night, I remember opening my suitcase in the cold, bare attic with its low, slanted ceiling.

I took out my clothes and spread them across the floor.

Then I pulled out the US dollars they had given me, rolled up in my sock, and placed them next to my clothes.

The rest of the suitcase was filled with boxes of pencils.

“I’m here,” I whispered in English, lying on top of my clothes, the strange smell of the US dollar seeping through the sweater

I used as a pillow.

I had to become good at cooking, and fast.

According to Mr.

Gao’s men, food would draw in the local immigrants, and they would

share stories while eating, imagining my tiny home a haven from government surveillance.

The men would help by having their

spies recommend the restaurant.

They wanted it operating at maximum capacity before the school year began, before the university

students returned to campus and fostered any radical ideas.

If I did not prove useful, they would send me back to Taiwan.

Mother had taught me two dishes before I left.

They were pretty much the only two dishes she had picked up since moving away

from Shanghai, away from Ah-shin.

One was a simple stir-fry of anything green.

“The more oil and salt you add, the better it will taste,” she promised.

“Garlic, too.”

Once I was confident in my stir-fried greens, I progressed to beef noodle soup.

“American beef is very good,” Mother told me.

I allowed myself a week to work on both recipes, most of the time experimenting with substitutes I found in the American grocery

stores.

A noodle soup with meat and a side of vegetables.

If I had leftover flour from the noodles, I would bake an apple pie, which

I learned how to do from the bag of flour.

Those were the only things on my menu, and once I ran out of food, I closed the

store for the day.

It was lucky that I did not need to make money.

I could never have handled running an actual restaurant.

I only needed customers who would talk.

Nobody came the first week.

I was in a neighborhood surrounded by houses, far from street traffic.

If the spies were directing people to me, they were not doing a good job.

The second week, I drew up flyers, putting my drawing skills to use for the first time since we were children.

I drew the soup, the vegetables, and the pie, included imitation calligraphy characters with my address.

Then I wrote the name.

I called it Phoenix 708 after the restaurant’s street number.

Nearly all the customers who eventually came were male.

There was a time when I would have loved the idea of all those men

coming to see me, paying me money, complimenting my mediocre food, if only because it was faintly reminiscent of meals they

remembered from home.

I would have looked forward to their visits, flirted, laughed, and entertained when they brought their

friends.

But even though it was my job to loosen their mouths, I mostly kept to myself.

I tried to recall your mother’s easy

hospitality, her gentle, convincing nudges, channeled her as best as I could.

It exhausted me though.

By dinner most days,

I was meek and quiet, much more like my mother than yours.

There were still men who stuck around and talked to me.

Not because I was particularly charming or pretty.

There were so few

women from our home there, even fewer on their own, not accompanied by a husband or a brother.

It would have made sense for

me to find one with citizenship and marry him, to secure my place in the United States, then bring you and Mother over.

Except

I shrank from their touches and brushed off their attempts to spend time with me.

I was there to betray them, not to love

them.

Phoenix 708 balanced a fine line between drawing in enough customers and being an entirely illegal operation.

I did not know

how to become a certified restaurant, did not even know that was a requirement.

When one of the neighbors came by, eyes narrowing

at the small tables and men seated together eating vegetables, noodles, and pie, I assured her they were my family.

“I have a lot of cousins here.” I smiled.

I did my best to conjure some charm.

“My family is very wealthy back home. Sent all of us here. The boys to study, and me to cook for them.” And then I laughed, imitating your mother, leaning in, as if sharing a secret.

“I really only know how to make a few dishes, but they’re so desperate for any kind of food from home.”

She squinted at the lot of them.

“Ah, yes,” she said slowly.

“I see the resemblance.”

“Would you like some pie?” I offered.

She took a slice and left, mollified.

I assure you my cooking was not good.

Still, more people came, desperate for a passable

meal and a place to talk.

I swapped the small tables for two larger circular ones so everyone sat together.

I told Mr.

Gao

it would encourage chatter, and he gladly paid for it, calling me very smart, just like my father.

“What did you do before you came here?” the men would ask.

“I made pencils.”

“Pencils?” The surprise was always there.

Most of them found it odd.

The ones from Shanghai, though, and even those from Taipei,

suddenly looked at me differently.

“The Phoenix Pencil Company was run by my mother,” I would say to anyone who asked if the pencils of their youth were still

available.

“Yes, I brought a few with me.” I’d pretend there were not many, that it was a great kindness for me to let them buy from

my small stash.

In reality, Mr.

Gao sent me Mother’s latest offerings every month.

They were ready to pay twice the amount we used to charge for them.

Your mother no doubt would have challenged me to see how

much I could get them to pay.

But I never charged them extra.

The real price was their words, and those I would collect later.

Mr.

Gao visited me twice while I was in California.

When he first arrived and entered my attic, he insisted at once he must

buy me a proper bed.

It was then that I realized he had not bothered booking a hotel and assumed he would sleep with me.

I suppose I cannot lie to you any longer.

I slept with him even back in Taiwan, though I told you earlier I had not.

Why hide it?

Or rather, why reveal the truth now?

I am ashamed of it, so ashamed, most of all to tell you, when you hated him.

I look back on those moments and wonder how I could have done it, when he was so much older and had been with your mother first.

I believe your girl has something to do with my sudden decision to share this truth.

My story doesn’t quite make sense otherwise—I

would have happily married any of those men if it meant I might be able to bring you and Mother to America.

But Mr.

Gao would

never have let me.

As my words skirted around his presence, I saw your girl’s face.

That wide mouth, bottom lip trembling, pleading for me to

tell her my story.

I didn’t tell her anything.

But I owe you, and I want you to understand me.

So from here on out, I promise

you the whole truth, and you can think of me however you like.

He never treated me the way he did your mother.

Your mother he loved.

I was a poor substitute, which was fine by me.

Preferable,

even.

We were both using each other.

There were times when he would reminisce about Shanghai and we would laugh, a small,

sad laugh, for the home we once shared.

Other times he was cruel, demanding to know why I did not have more pencils Reforged

for him, calling me as lazy as your mother.

“I hope the Communists show her their true nature,” he would say.

But as easily as he dismissed her, it was clear he missed her.

“I always wanted a child,” he said once.

“Did you know your aunt carried my child? No need for that alarmed look. You don’t

have another cousin running around. She aborted it before I ever knew.”

I could not imagine how your mother had managed to hide something like that from us, where she could have even gone for an

abortion in our occupied city, if my mother had known.

“I always hated her for that,” he said, his wistful tone quickly disappearing.

He introduced me to two of his other pawns on that visit, his arm around my waist.

They were closer to my age, students I recognized.

I had seen them before at Phoenix 708.

The government was paying them to be there, to spy on their classmates, and they did so, hoping it was their way into America.

I saw myself in their eyes.

We were the same.

They were responsible for befriending the men at the restaurant, for getting close enough to borrow or take their pencils

and return them to me.

I would then Reforge them and report to Mr.

Gao.

The pawns made sure to always replace the pencil so

the owners never realized they had been stolen.

That night after we lay together, Mr.

Gao showed me a pencil he had brought from Mother and insisted I Reforge it, saying

I must miss her words.

I told him I would Reforge it later.

He demanded I do it in front of him.

His arms pressed into my

rib cage, his fingers trailing over my stomach.

We were lying on the new bed he bought for me as I cut deeper into my skin

than I ever had before, black blood spilling onto white paper spread across the gray sheets.

There was hardly any news.

Perhaps she knew Mr.

Gao would insist on reading.

She spoke of how she and my father were in good

health, how she had not heard from you or your mother, and business was going well.

“A lovely note,” Mr.

Gao said, kissing the back of my neck.

“Yes,” I managed.

I buried my head in the new pillow.

It smelled vaguely foreign, like the department store, a distorted version of the one

your mother used to love.

I breathed slowly, carefully, so he would not notice my shakiness or the tears gathering on my pillow.

Tears for no longer having even the pencils to connect with Mother, tears for having lost touch with you, for the days when

we bled our stories into each other, marveled at how the pencils could conceal.

And now I was on the other side of the world,

away from all of you, and without even this small power.