Page 27

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

Even now I have trouble thinking of my time in California.

They were some of the worst days of my life, days spent standing,

working the customers at the restaurant, Reforging all through the night, collapsing in my attic room.

I haven’t been back

since—skipped Torou’s conferences, begged Edward not to apply to any schools there, shot down Monica’s vacation suggestions

a bit too forcefully.

She says there are beautiful forests and thousand-year-old trees.

Somehow, I missed all of that.

Within a month of Mr.

Gao’s departure, the other pawns started bringing me even more pencils.

I replaced the ones they brought

with new ones straight from Mother’s factory, shaved down to the same length.

I Reforged the stolen pencils alone in my attic, the blood dripping from my wrist onto loose paper.

As I pressed the pencil

heart into my skin, I could feel their excitement and optimism.

It was as if they were all in the room with me, hovering above.

I remembered them, vaguely, young men who had visited the restaurant before, one who had even tried to court me, his eyes shining.

I pressed my bleeding wrist to my forehead.

I was betraying them, as planned, and yet it hurt more than any other time before

that.

They were writing to organize protests around the disappearing of people in Taiwan.

One was writing flyers, the other a manifesto.

It was as incriminating as it could get.

I held up their Reforged words to dry, blowing on them gently even as my breathing turned ragged.

I wiped the blood off my

forehead.

It is moments like this I cannot bring myself to share with someone like your girl.

She and others her age—they’re so hopeful

nowadays, so set on what they think is morally right.

Preserving stories, raising voices, yes, all that sounds great.

Their

words so closely echo those I Reforged and systematically betrayed, and maybe that is what makes me recoil now.

I would have

betrayed her, too, if I had met her then.

It helped that there was a rising fervor in America, so staunchly anti-Communist,

anti-China.

The news was filled with details about that couple they executed for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Catch

the Communists, save the world.

America and Taiwan were both saying the same thing.

I could have turned anybody in during

that time.

I was doing this for you and for Mother.

At least that is what I told myself, even as I began to acquire more food,

more possessions.

My fastidious stamp collecting even won me a toaster.

I delighted in these things.

I sealed their Reforged words in an envelope with all the premium postage required to send them overseas, straight into the

hands of Mr.

Gao.

I don’t know what happened to those students.

I never saw them at the restaurant again.

I never heard news of any protests.

I don’t know what became of all the others I betrayed.

I think that was part of Mr.

Gao’s plan.

To keep me unaware.

It worked.

As long as I could not see the harm I was doing, I continued without complaint.

But now I know the truth, and you do too, don’t you?

There was a famous case, that professor who taught at the prestigious American university and criticized the Nationalists, who returned to Taiwan on vacation.

They captured and interrogated him, his body later found, the authorities claiming it was an unfortunate fall.

That was long after I quit Reforging, but I am sure the same people were behind it, Mr.

Gao’s team.

Could I have sent those students to their deaths?

Taiwan eventually changed course and condemned that period of their history.

Looking back, I can’t help wondering if I made

the Nationalists’ reign worse?

It is impossible to say.

But then I see Monica lounging at our home in the United States, tapping

away at her computer, without any of our fear, and I cannot regret what I did.

I would not sacrifice her for the lives of

those men.

But then again, I was always the selfish one.

The next time Mr.

Gao visited, I planned to ask what it would take to bring Mother here.

I was prepared to cite my productivity,

the number of incriminating reports I had uncovered, insist I needed her by my side so I might have a steady stream of pencils.

We could establish a new company.

Pencils were widely used, even in America.

I now followed the news carefully like my grandmother had back in Shanghai.

I knew of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek’s prolonged stay

on the East Coast, how she was trying to win US senators over to Taiwan’s cause.

The sentiment of the American people could

sway the outcome back home.

I remembered so clearly the day we had learned the war was over.

How we stared into each other’s

eyes and even my grandmother praised the Americans, who rolled into our city days later with their huge tanks and white teeth.

America would save us again, I was sure of it.

Mr.

Gao arrived with a large suitcase.

In my attic room, he unloaded box after box of pencils, fresh from Mother’s workshop.

A good sign, I thought—he must want to expand our operation.

Then he sat on my bed and told me Mother was dead.

“We wanted to bring you back to Taiwan to take over,” he said, staring at his hands.

I stared at them, too, the slender, calloused fingers.

My wrist pulsed.

I could not speak.

“But your father pulled every string he had to convince them you should remain.” He sighed.

“I would have liked to have you

back on the island.”

The news my father had done something like that for me somehow registered before Mother’s death.

Maybe it was more believable

or easier to process, though I had recognized my mother’s weakness, seen her shaking hands.

I glanced over at the boxes of pencils.

He noticed.

“Those are all the reserves your mother made. They are useless to us back home without someone to Reforge them, so I brought

them here.”

That was when I began to cry.

He had called her pencils, her life’s work, useless.

When he, more than anyone, should have

known how special they were.

They possessed an unexpected power, one Mother had kept from me until she believed it could help.

I first knew our pencils as just that—implements that were a delight to use, with which I could draw and write and even bully

you.

Mother had sought to better them not for Reforging, but for writing.

The people who had bought them, whose eyes widened

even in this foreign land when I mentioned I still had some in my possession, who ordered them in bulk when we were children

running around Shanghai, had loved them for their comfort and craftsmanship.

They were the finest pencils, and that should

have been enough.

He patted me on the shoulder, rubbed my back, then left me alone.

I wanted him to leave me alone forever, desperately, but

even so, this country was so far away from where Mother would be buried, where my father still worked, and even farther from

the place I called home, and I was devastatingly lonely.

I fell onto my bed, buried my head in the pillow.

It no longer smelled

like that clean department store.

It smelled like me, and I did not like it.

I wrote you a letter that same day sharing the news.

I don’t know if you ever received it.

I thought of you more than usual that night, wondered if you sensed Mother’s absence in the world.

You would have understood what it meant to lose her.

You would have understood what it was like to be in a home that was not yours.

That was when I Reforged your pencil.

The one with the end of our story, the one you had given me in Shanghai, and that I

had carried with me always, knowing I would need your voice someday.

I hadn’t thought of our story in years.

I remembered the broad strokes of it, the antics of our characters, but Reforging

even just the ending, I was stunned by its darkness, how much the war had warped us.

I was only a few years removed from the

reality of war, and I could hardly reconcile the violence as something we once thought so commonplace.

More than the bloodshed, which was overdramatic and unrealistic, I was stunned by the joy.

In that moment, alone in the attic,

reeling from Mother’s death, I felt you with me as your pencil melted into my wrist, as your words came to life once again.

The joy we shared in those evenings as we wrote, giving ourselves the power to face the world.

There was joy in stories, too, I reminded myself, as you had always reminded me.

There was pleasure, as Mother said.

I drew a phoenix that night.

It looked like the one that used to adorn our front door, an abstract set of lines coming together

in flames and wings.

Mr.

Gao complimented it.

He even tacked it to the wall of the dining area downstairs.

He said it looked

regal.

I said it looked lonely.

He asked if I wanted him to stay longer.

I declined.

I had been profoundly stupid, I realized.

You had warned me.

Your situation in Shanghai was the same as mine.

You had recognized

the danger of the pencils, and I had somehow interpreted your message as meaning I had to get to America through any means

possible.

And so I leveraged Reforging and pencils, the very things you burned away, and now I was far from home and Mother

was gone.

After Mr.

Gao left, it took me a month to sort through my finances.

I could not sell the house.

It did not belong to me.

Instead, I sold the bed, every piece of furniture, my beloved toaster.

I set out cups of pencils with a sign indicating they were free for the taking.

When one of the pawns brought me more to Reforge, I tossed them right back in with the others.

It was not enough.

Mother had made so many.

She had given her life to the pencils.

I ended up leaving with only the belongings I had arrived with, the small amount of money I had saved, and a handful of her

pencils.

The rest I stashed in a wooden box.

I bought a bus ticket that would take me out of California, as far away as I could think of while still being in America.

I checked it again, double-checked the date and time and destination.

I knew what I had to do, but my hands trembled all the same.

You had made it so obvious.

Did you hesitate when it was time?

Was it strange or inevitable that my life came to mirror yours?

I turned on the gas stove, the flame flickering reliably alive.

Then I tossed in the drawing of the phoenix.

The edges curled,

burning, before disappearing altogether.

I used the flame to light four sticks of incense—one for my grandmother, one for

Mother, and one each for you and your mother.

I thanked my grandmother for letting me learn the secret of our pencils.

I even thanked her for her reluctance, told her I

now understood, oh, how I understood.

I cried for my mother, for there could not have been a better mother for me—her steadiness,

her unfailing work ethic that kept us alive and sheltered, war after war, how much she sacrificed to attain that for us.

She

had deserved a life of pleasure, a life of happiness.

As for you and your mother, I prayed you were still alive even if I could not reach you by letter or pencil.

I hoped your mother would never learn about my affair with Mr.

Gao, and that if she did, she would know that for him, it had always been her.

Now there were only the two of you, when there were once five of us gathered around my grandmother’s roaring flame—and I was alone.

Where were you?

I had no idea.

Did you ever feel the utter loneliness I felt then, on the other side of the world, so far from everyone I loved?

Could it be that you felt that exactly as we both lit the fire on what should have been our homes?

I splashed some cooking oil around the stove and on the box of pencils.

I poured the remaining oil into the pot I once used

to make soup and added water.

I moved the pot to the flame.

It would take a while for the oil to heat, to cause the water to splatter, to ignite the oil

around the stove, the drawing, the pencils beneath.

First the ancestors and gods would receive the drawing of the phoenix.

Then Mother’s pencils would come pouring in, a gift to give voice to those we couldn’t hear anymore.

I used the time it took for the oil to heat to clear out of the house and begin my walk to the bus station.

It was night.

I crinkled the bus ticket in my pocket.

A reminder this wasn’t the end, even though it certainly felt like it.

My last remaining

connection to my family, my home, burned behind me.

Soon I was on a bus driving across the country I had hoped would save me, heading toward one of the only other cities I knew

by name.

My only requirement was that I end up far from the place where I had resurrected so many words that should have been

left alone.

I had only the smallest sliver of hope that I would find Torou there.