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From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

Right now, my words course through your veins.

I spent a long time this morning looking at your picture.

It’s been more than seventy years since the last time we saw each

other, sixty years since we knew each other’s stories.

Monica, my granddaughter, found you.

To be honest, I did not expect

her to succeed.

Hoped maybe she wouldn’t, even.

But she’s an awfully determined girl with a knack for bending computers to

her will—and while it might be our shared history, I know you and I told ourselves different versions of the same truth, and

now that I have a thread back to you, I can no longer delay explaining myself.

I want to ask for your forgiveness, and I need you to understand how I perceived the world we grew up in, our world of wars

and betrayals and pencils.

In the picture Monica sent, you were small as always, even if your back has not hunched as mine has.

Legs dangling off a bench, modern-day Shanghai sprawled out behind you, shining buildings along the waterfront.

Not far from where we grew up, no?

Remarkable, how you remained in place, while I bounced around the world.

I would have thought it impossible that day you and your mother arrived, that I would be the one to leave home while you stayed behind in the city you claimed to hate.

The only memories I have from before you are in swabs of gray.

There was the time my father left for war, everything in harsh

dark lines, the outline of his shoulders as he tried to embrace Mother and she turned away, back to her machines.

There was

the smoky haze of my grandmother’s room, where I attempted to find comfort and found only the sweet smell of her drugged exhalations—and

then there was the pencil company, churning away under the guidance of Mother’s ever-steady hand.

Her once white smock covered

in dark fingerprints, her fingernails always black.

Then you and your mother arrived, in a flash of green, the first color I remember seeing and thinking beautiful.

I thought

you were the most glamorous people I had ever seen.

We lived in the International Settlement in Shanghai, which, in 1937,

was still the home of foreigners and expats and some of the wealthiest people in China.

Glamour was not new to me, yet it

was striking to see it up close on a woman who so resembled Mother.

Your mother was younger than mine, always the elegant

one.

She wore a high-collared emerald qipao with gold threads woven throughout that formed floral patterns around the shoulders,

bordering the slit at the bottom that hinted at her long legs.

You wore a smaller version made from the same fabric.

I stared

at your dress longingly, at your hair that was styled after your mother’s, thick and upright and voluminous, while mine grew

long and limp.

The two of you looked like you had walked out of a mahjong game with elite friends.

Not like you had fled a

war zone into Shanghai’s winter.

You glared at me.

I imagined you were disappointed with our living arrangements, having heard about the magnificence of the city, only to find yourself living behind a pencil factory.

I wanted to disappear into Mother’s smock.

She pushed me forward and made me introduce myself.

You did not meet my eyes when you said your name.

We all sat around the kitchen table that night.

You held your chopsticks elegantly, picking the grains of rice into your mouth.

“I want that one,” you said when I reached for a tofu puff glistening in a mixture of soy sauce and sugar.

Ah-shin, our helper,

had only prepared three, not expecting more than my grandmother, mother, and me.

I never had to share before.

It was the first

time you looked into my eyes.

I brought the tofu puff into my bowl.

Neither of us broke eye contact as I sank my teeth into it, letting the soy sauce dribble

down my chin.

You slammed your chopsticks down on the table.

“I want to go home,” you told your mother.

There was no mistaking the tears in your eyes.

“That’s not an option,” your mother said.

“Give the other half to Meng,” Mother ordered, pointing with her chopsticks at the half I had left in my bowl.

I regretted

not eating the whole thing at once.

You did not thank me before shoveling down the rest of your food.

It was like this for what seemed like years at our young age.

Each of us prowling around the other, deeply jealous.

I wanted

your elegance, apparent even at the age of ten, and you wanted my stability, how I had never had to move in my entire life.

I knew Shanghai and could without hesitation call it home.

We were so absorbed in the war we were waging against each other

that we were completely oblivious to the one right outside, dropping bombs around our city.

In Monica’s American history textbooks, the war does not begin until 1941, with Pearl Harbor.

But for us it began a decade earlier when Japan invaded Manchuria.

By the time you came to Shanghai, Japan had been ruthlessly cutting through China for six years.

Luckily, we were insulated from much of the violence, thanks to the International Settlement.

Whether the Japanese did not want to anger the English, the French, the Americans who lived there with us, or were simply biding their time for another invasion, we had no idea.

But for a few years at least, we lived a relatively normal life.

Your mother insisted we go out and enjoy the safety of the Settlement, that she had heard so much about Shanghai and we had

to show her around.

My own mother rarely took me anywhere since Japan had taken over the surrounding districts.

But that first

week, we visited the largest department store in the city.

Inside, the salespeople flocked to your mother, holding pearls to her ears, lengths of silk to her torso, begging her to buy

a custom-made qipao.

She laughed and, because she could not speak Shanghainese, declined with brisk waves of her hand.

She

admired the French cloche hats, the Scotch whiskies, the German cameras, the American lipstick.

You hated how busy it was,

everybody buying and selling with a frenetic air, fueled by the war right across the river, by the knowledge that the Settlement

could fall any day.

But as much as you disliked the store, outside was even worse.

Nanking Road was the busiest shopping street in the Settlement.

Rickshaws mixed with motorcycles mixed with coolies hoisting bamboo poles over their shoulders, buckets of anything from live

chickens to vegetables swaying on either end—and everybody had to make way for trucks and automobiles carrying the wealthy

foreigners in their silk suits to their mansions along the river.

You clung to your mother as I made a show of pretending

I was accustomed to this bustling life.

Peddlers shoved pastries and tea beneath our noses.

One even had your mother halfway

into a chair, ready to give her a haircut, before my mother told him off in Shanghainese.

That same day, we visited the Bund, the waterfront lined with foreign buildings, a mix of columns, domes, clock towers, murals.

“Why are these here?” you asked, one of the few things you said all day.

“What do you mean?” That it was unusual for there to be a motley of European architecture in our Chinese city had never even occurred to me.

We were in front of the HSBC bank, your mother admiring the columned entranceway, the huge white dome, the glimpses of the murals inside showing all the other cities where the bank operated.

“It doesn’t feel like home,” you said, and I was peeved at you for rejecting what I thought of as our nicest view.

But you did not notice my annoyance.

You were fixated on the two bronze lion statues flanking the bank’s entrance.

Their paws

had been rubbed to a shine by the many visitors wishing for luck, or to be made as rich as the bank owners.

You approached

one of the lions.

It loomed above you on its pedestal.

You reached as high as you could to tap its paw.

I was close enough

to hear you whisper a desperate wish to return home.

Your mother soon registered you for the same elementary school as me, much to my disappointment.

But when you sat in the classroom,

only a few desks away, I discovered I had a clear advantage over you: you did not speak Shanghainese, whereas I had grown

up with it.

You stumbled in your responses to our classmates, and we all giggled when you gave a wrong answer.

I doodled a picture of you.

This, I am sure, you remember.

It started accurate and then I distorted it.

Over your lips, I

drew slight protrusions of your front teeth.

I erased the line where your head started and moved it farther up, almost off

the page, elongating your forehead and shading in bushy eyebrows.

I gave you a speech bubble with nonsense characters.

The

girl who sat behind me stifled a laugh and held out her hand.

I passed my drawing to her, and before long it had circulated

the classroom behind the teacher’s back.

When it reached your desk, you did not lift the paper, only cast your eyes downward.

Then your eyes found mine, and for a

moment it seemed like the classroom disappeared, its giggling students and droning teacher along with it, and it was only

me and you and a fury that pulsed.

I thought you would run home right after school and report me to our mothers.

Instead, you waited for me by the school entrance.

I fell in step with you, maintaining a small distance, wary of your calm.

“You draw well,” you said in our mothers’ dialect.

“What kind of pencil do you use?”

“The eighty:twenty for sketches,” I answered slowly.

I had never talked to anyone other than Mother about pencil compositions

before.

But you were from the same line of pencil makers, so I did not shy away from the technical clay-to-graphite ratio.

“Can I see?”

I opened my bag, my box of pencils.

I had every type, each for a different purpose.

The shortest by far was the 80:20, which

I had used for my caricature.

I handed it to you.

You twirled it between your fingers.

I tried not to admire how you handled it, how it flitted through your fingers, frictionless.

“Do you mind if I try it out?”

“Oh. Sure.”

You pocketed my pencil.

That night in our shared room, I crawled through my mosquito net into my bed.

The last I had seen of you, you were at the

front of the complex, watching Mother guide the machines to press the wood that would encase the pencil hearts.

I was almost asleep when the door slammed open.

“Yun.”

I bolted upright.

Mother’s voice in such a tone always made me do so.

Through the mosquito net, she was dark and distorted.

You an outline behind her.

“Mother?” I asked tentatively, pulling aside the netting.

She turned on the light and held a piece of paper in front of her like a wanted poster.

I was not surprised to see my caricature of you, complete with buckteeth and large forehead and frothing gibberish.

But the shape of the drawing unsettled me.

My lines had been light, the way only an 80:20 pencil can convey, fleeting and carefree, a thoughtless doodle to stave off boredom in class.

In the drawing before me, the lines were dark and thick and dripping , as if someone had taken a calligraphy brush and outlined my caricature, then hung it up and let the ink bleed down.

Your

face became a mess, a facade where teeth dripped into chin and ears I had not distorted drooped.

“What is that?” I asked, only to wince at the click of Mother’s tongue.

“Do not act like you do not know.”

“That is not my drawing,” I said honestly.

“Not the original,” you said quietly.

“Maybe someone at school drew it,” I tried to reason.

“There are always people trying to copy my doodles.”

“How about this one?” Mother held up another piece of paper.

It unfurled into the doodle I had made the day before, of the

math teacher.

I had even gone and signed my name at the bottom.

Yet this one, too, had nearly the same dripping distortion.

“Yes, but also no—”

“You will defend Meng as if she were your sister,” Mother interrupted.

“If I learn you have made another one of these drawings,

I will disown you and send you straight to the Japanese.”

I barely knew about any threat from the Japanese at the time, the war still a rumor to my sheltered mind.

But I understood

the tremble in her voice.

She was angry beyond the point of even physical punishment, and so I knew the threat must be terrible.

“How did you—?” I braved, desperately wanting to know how they could have recreated my drawings in this manner.

Mother turned sharply away, so different from her standard gentle manner.

You remained standing in front of your bed, staring

at me.

I lay back down, pulled the blanket over me in a loud dramatic effort, and turned my back to you.

I heard you move,

then the unmistakable sound of a pencil rolling.

I peered over the side of my bed and grabbed it.

It was my own, the 80:20 I had lent you hours before.

But there was something wrong with it; the weight wasn’t right.

In the

dark, I ran my fingers over it, felt the familiar embellished phoenix logo at the top.

When I reached the tip, I realized

the point was missing.

I pressed my finger against where it should have been and found the beginning of a hole.

The heart

of the pencil was missing.

I dropped it back on the floor with a clatter.

“Don’t mess with me,” you whispered in perfect Shanghainese.

I was in awe.

As punishment for my bullying, every night for a month, Mother lit a stick of incense in our room and forced me to hold a

chair raised above my head, while you watched to ensure I did not set it down before the incense burned out.

You complained

it was punishment for you, too, to have to hang around me, though neither of our mothers listened or cared.

During this time,

I was supposed to speak to you in Shanghainese to help you with your pronunciation.

The problem was that, by then, you did not need help.

You picked up the language quickly.

You spent this time taunting me.

“You don’t know the first thing about pencils, do you?” you asked, dangling your legs off your bed while I stared past you,

arms straining against the chair, determined not to show any weakness.

“I know I’m good at using them,” I retorted.

Your hands went instinctively to your forehead.

I would feel bad about that much later, when you made an effort to always

wear hats or grow out your bangs.

The buckteeth I had completely made up for the cartoon.

The large forehead was only a slight

exaggeration of the truth.

“But you don’t really know about pencils.”

I ignored the goading comment.

“Our pencil company was much bigger than yours,” you sighed, falling back onto your bed.

I took a chance and lowered the chair slightly when you looked away, hiding the fact that I had not known there was another pencil company.

No wonder your mother had been able to step into her role so quickly.

“That’s only because there’s more room in the countryside. Not like here.” Shanghai was becoming more and more crowded every

day.

The International Settlement especially so.

You and I were not allowed to leave each other’s sights on the walk to school.

Our mothers made us practice bowing, which we had to do anytime we passed a Japanese soldier.

“It was my mother’s idea to expand the company to Shanghai,” you boasted.

“Then why didn’t she do it?”

Your face fell.

“My father didn’t want her to. He said Shanghai was full of crime and foreigners who don’t let the Chinese even use their

own parks. He wanted to stay where we were.” You brought your knees to your chest.

“I wish we could have stayed there.”

“Oh.” I lowered the chair a bit more.

“What happened to your father?”

“He joined the war.”

“Mine too. What was yours like?”

“He was always reading. Especially Russian novels. He wanted China to have a revolution like Russia’s.”

“My father also wanted a stronger China,” I said.

“He called the old dynasty a tumor.”

You looked at me.

I quickly raised the chair back up.

“I won’t tell if you put the chair down,” you offered.

I dropped it in relief.

Before it even hit the floor, you yelled for my mother.

“Yun stopped holding the chair!” you cried, dashing to open the door.

I was so shocked I did not think to pick the chair back

up.

Mother came, and I was still standing there speechless.

Mother lit a new stick of incense and waited for me to raise the chair over my head again.

She closed the door behind her without a single word.

“Are we even now?” I snapped as you smiled triumphantly.

“No. You embarrassed me in front of the whole school.” You took a moment to inhale and savor the incense.

“But we are closer

to even now.”

As much as you and I disliked each other, we reluctantly found common ground.

We were the same age, we both loved pencils,

and we both, when suddenly confronted with our aunts—each other’s mothers—began to idolize them.

Your mother fit into the decadence of the city in a way I found irresistible.

Though she had arrived with only a few belongings,

she quickly restocked her wardrobe, her French perfumes, her American cigarettes.

She styled her own hair, showing me how

she tucked and curled it, so it hugged her neckline perfectly.

I helped her clasp her qipao, treating each small nub like

a pearl.

She found other women from her hometown, who spoke her dialect.

It was not hard, in Shanghai, where people from every

part of China were fleeing.

They formed a mahjong group.

She tried to convince Mother to join, but like you, Mother preferred

to remain at home.

Despite her extravagant weekends, on the weekdays, your mother rose early and got right to work at the front of the pencil

company.

It was not until she came that I developed an interest in these operations.

She stood at the storefront, directing

customers to our samples, laughing with them even if she could not completely communicate with them.

I used that as my excuse

to sit beside her, to translate as needed, mostly to admire her charm.

Behind us was a wall of pencil hearts, dotted lines against brick.

Each heart was made of a different ratio of graphite to clay, lending it a distinct softness and therefore darkness.

The wall was arranged from lightest in the top right corner, to darkest in the bottom left, creating a gentle gradient.

Your mother would ask the customers what they were looking for in a pencil.

The Russian bodyguards wanted dark hearts, the rich students wanted thin tips and lots of them, the gang members wanted the most intricate casings, the Japanese businessmen wanted the logo removed, and your mother’s socialite friends wanted light, elegant ones to use for their invitations.

Your mother would close her eyes and nod thoughtfully, hand on her chin, subtly showing off a jeweled ring, then turn and delicately select a few pencil hearts.

I would slide each one into a temporary casing to mimic the wood that might eventually encase it.

The customer would write something, usually their name.

They would try a few, make observations, and almost always order a set of their favorite, smiling happily at your mother.

You, meanwhile, took to observing my mother in the room right behind us.

With your mother at the front, my mother could finally

focus on what she loved—the actual crafting of the pencils.

You sat quietly as Mother mixed different graphite and clay mixtures,

sent them into the kiln to harden.

Only a few days after you came to live with us, she gave you the delicate task of carving

the phoenix into the ends of each finished one.

Because most of the complex was used for the company, our rooms were small and there were only three of them.

My grandmother

had the largest, farthest from the workshop.

Our mothers shared the one closest to the workshop, which left the smallest,

middle room for us.

Sometimes we could hear my grandmother’s coughs through the wall, or the crinkle of the newspaper when

she flipped a page.

On the other side, our mothers kept their voices low, though like you and me, they often clashed.

“Will you keep her in the dark forever, then?” your mother’s voice rang.

I could not hear Mother’s reply.

You shifted in the bed across from mine.

“You have a duty the same way Mother had to us,” your mother continued.

She wanted us to hear.

My mother spoke quickly in hushed tones, clearly trying to end the conversation.

“What are they talking about?” I whispered.

You shifted again.

I understood it meant for me to be quiet.

“Our power is not one to leave alone,” your mother said, her voice rising at the end of the sentence.

“Silence,” Mother ordered.

I shivered, hugging my blanket closer.

I had never heard her raise her voice like that.

She was

the eldest, but until then, it always seemed like your mother was the one in control.

Your mother quieted down after that.

Still, she had succeeded.

I could not let the topic go.

“What was that about?” I asked you urgently.

It had something to do with the drawings they had shown me, replicas of my own.

That you knew and I did not infuriated me more than anything my mother could have done.

To my surprise, you answered my question.

“There is a power in the pencils made by the Phoenix Pencil Company,” you said.

“And we have the ability to unleash it.”

“What’s the power?” I asked, desperate to understand.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Please tell me. I’ll draw a better picture of you. You’re so pretty, do you know that? That’s why I was mean to you. I was

jealous. I won’t do it again.”

“I’m sorry,” you said.

“I don’t understand it, and I’m not allowed to tell you anything about it.”

“Why not? Who said that?”

“My mother said if I do, we will get kicked out. And then where would we go?” We frequently walked past the warehouses and movie theaters that had recently been converted to refugee housing, seen more than enough people sleeping on the streets while the foreigners’ mansions loomed in the background.

I would not have wished that life on anybody, no matter how much I wanted to know this secret.

But the isolation of not knowing was unbearable at that age.

“I’ll give you a hint,” you said.

“But then I really can’t say more.”

You padded over, and I felt your weight on the edge of my mattress.

There would come a day when we camped out freely on each

other’s beds without a second thought, but that was the first time you came so close.

In the dark, you guided my hand to your

forearm.

I felt the lines—long, thin scars—that traveled to the crook of your elbow.

They looped and intertwined.

I shivered,

my body recognizing it before my mind caught up, a buried memory, one from when my father left and I had held Mother’s arm,

wormed my hand beneath her sleeve, and she let me run my fingers over the strange pattern on her arm—and there it was on you,

too.

“How?” I whispered.

My grandmother let out a violent cough.

You retreated to your bed, the warmth of your arm against my fingertips gone.

I ran my hand over my own smooth arm.

It was a cold night.

I pulled the blankets closer, my body curling in on itself, wondering

what it was that I was missing, how my exclusion could be branded into my skin.

Like Mother, I have kept the truth of the pencils a secret.

Monica does not know.

I can see you shaking your head—after how

desperately I wanted the truth back then, how can I not tell her, when I have so thoroughly felt the sting of isolation?

But

Monica is different from me.

She has never thought to ask about the pencils.

Why would she when her world is digital?

And

if I don’t tell her, the secret might die with us.

Would that not be for the best?

Or am I just setting myself up for missing

a chance for the two of us to understand each other a little better?

There is one more thing I have not told her.

She returns home tomorrow, and I cannot be more excited or more anxious to see her.

It wasn’t that we intended to keep it a secret.

The diagnosis came shortly after she left for her summer internship, and it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to share over the phone.

We’ll tell her when she gets home, I told Torou, who agreed, perhaps the only person less willing to hurt Monica than me.

The doctor says consistent mental stimulation might help slow the disease’s progress—and it turns out a convenient side effect

is that your earliest memories become the clearest.

So really, my writing this to you isn’t only for you.

It’s for me as well,

to cling to something.

And maybe, in a way, it can be for her, too.