Page 31

From the Reforged pencil of Chen Meng

I will keep this concise because I know you are longwinded.

First thing, I am not mad at you.

I haven’t been, for a long time.

But also for a long time, I was.

You have reason to be

mad at me too.

I knew you were alive.

You see, I met Edward, maybe ten years ago now.

He told me all about you, and I asked

him to tell you nothing about me.

My impression was that you two were not talking much, and so I did not think it a difficult

task for him.

Edward looks like your father.

That was my first thought when we met shortly after he moved to Shanghai.

He would have been

around the same age as your father the last time I saw him, the last time I saw you.

Edward was in an awful state.

I won’t go into detail, except that he seemed lost in many ways—far from home with few friends,

unsure where home was anymore.

I was a last resort.

He was so pitiful that even though I thought I had long moved on from

you, I decided to help him.

I hated your father—do you know that?

The times when he was away during the war were the most stable of my life.

As soon as he came back, everything went wrong.

Mr.

Gao spent more time at the house.

A new war began.

And of course, he took you away.

The circumstances were dire, I know that now.

But at the time, I absolutely hated him.

Yet for some reason, I kept his pencil.

You left it here, do you remember?

You were mad at him and threw it across the room

that first night he suggested leaving.

I found it months later, under my bed, and recognized it for what it was if only because

it was one of the older designs, ones that would have only been made when our mothers were young.

I kept it.

I thought you

might want it back if we ever met again.

In a way, I kept it hoping it would allow that to happen.

Instead, Edward showed up, looking so much like your father and reminding me that I still had his pencil.

Edward told me he

had never met his grandfather, that by the time your family was able to return to Taiwan, he had already passed, that he only

knew him from a tombstone on a mountain where he’d burned paper and hadn’t known what to say.

But I still had his pencil.

And when Edward came, I Reforged it.

It was the first I had Reforged in decades.

I had sworn off it.

It was easy to avoid after I burned down the company.

Mother

was furious with me all the time.

She continued to Reforge, but the pencils weren’t ours, and she was sick more often than

not.

I know that is my fault; her death is on my hands.

I was devastated when I learned your mother had died.

I looked up

to her more than my own mother even.

I didn’t hear about it until decades later.

There was a small bit of relief, though,

too.

Your mother still became ill, Reforging our own pencils.

It made me think that maybe I was not entirely to blame for

my mother’s illness.

Pencils and this power we possess ruined my life.

I think it may have ruined yours, too.

Yet when Edward came, I realized

I might have something that could help him, and so reached for the pencil again.

You know how close you feel to someone once you Reforge their words.

I didn’t want to feel close to your father, and yet it happened anyway.

The pencil was from when he was young and full of hope for himself and his family, and for China.

He described your mother with such admiration.

He loved her, he really did, and I realized you can both love someone and hurt them irreparably, as he did when he made your mother continue Reforging, even after it was clear it was killing her.

I did the same when I burned down the company.

As maybe you did, when you pushed Edward toward your own dreams and watched him fail.

I gave the Reforged message to Edward, told him it was written by his grandfather, for his grandmother.

I told him there was

nobody I respected more in the world than his grandmother.

I told him he might be unsure about himself and where he comes

from, but that I knew, and there was nothing to fear.

He cried into me like a child.

I never had children.

I never wanted them.

But when he buried his head in me, I thought—so

this is the feeling.

This is the reason.

Why people have children, why people share their stories.

These small moments of

connection.

We used to know that, didn’t we?

Back when we wrote our own.

Edward kept in touch.

He began to find his footing here.

He updated me on his life, and once things were stable for him, I

saw him less and less.

I haven’t seen him for years now.

I don’t mind.

I am happy for him, that he has found himself.

He does

not know this, but I will tell you because I think you may need to hear it—seeing his reaction to your father’s letter helped

me too.

To really understand someone I once hated, in such an intimate way, to see their words help someone they never could have

imagined.

The few stories your father told in his letter grounded your son, gave him a sliver of connection to his history,

his family.

To watch him interpret your father’s story for himself.

Most people will never understand or experience a story the way you and I can.

And yet they’re always trying, and there’s something beautiful in that we can help them.

What I thought of as a curse for so long maybe—when the world is not consuming itself in war and betrayal—is not so bad after all.

That was the state of mind I was in when that eager girl showed up.

My god, they grow so tall these days, don’t they?

We got

along, which surprised me, given that I have not had a conversation with someone her age in years.

Looking back, it was not

so surprising.

You see, she was a lot like you.

Let me explain in a way that even you will not be able to deny.

There was that brief period of our lives when I knew about Reforging and you didn’t.

You knew there was something we were

hiding from you, and how furious you were in those days!

I would have told you in a heartbeat, but Mother warned that your

grandmother was the last person we wanted to cross, that we only had a home because she agreed we could stay.

You probably

don’t even remember how much you threatened me, how much you lied to both of our mothers to try to get more information.

You

were so desperate to have this family link.

The day your mother finally said you could learn was the best of your life.

Still not convinced?

Then how about when only you did not know the other way of Reforging?

We were so young then, even our

mothers, and we had no idea how to talk about sex or pleasure.

And when we wouldn’t share this knowledge with you—how easily

you set fire to our relationship, the final weeks of our time together.

That tall, eager girl was much the same.

She was so desperate for a connection to something, anything, really, to feel a part of her own history and family.

And I saw how Edward had changed from having a story of his own to hold on to.

Nobody was around to tell me I couldn’t, so I told her our secret.

I figured she might take it for the babbling of an old woman, but that if it could help her, she would latch on to it.

You cannot imagine my surprise when, right before she was due to head home, she told me your granddaughter had contacted her.

It was fate, it seems, some string that has always tied us together across decades and continents.

And so I write this note for you, using one of the few Phoenix Pencil Company pencils I have left.

I’m not interested in filling

you in on all that has happened since we parted.

It would be too painful.

But I needed to tell you about these two—your son

and this girl.

They don’t know each other, don’t even know the other exists, and yet they came to me with the same look in

their eyes, and it was your look, the one that wanted to belong to our family so desperately.

I had thought of Reforging as nothing but pain after years of war and separation.

Then I witnessed your son’s transformation,

and I let myself hope again.

And when that girl gushed about the power of stories and how she wanted to dedicate her life

to preserving the history of ordinary lives—it was hard to drown in the darkness of that pain when her light shone so bright.

All that to say, my oldest friend, though we may never see each other again, though you may have closed your heart to our

stories the way I did, I hope you will at least take this one.

I hope you can see that perhaps this world is less cruel than

the one we grew up in.

We made hard choices, wrong ones, because we had no other way.

But these girls, growing up now, will

have a better life, will make better choices, and you played a part in making that happen.

Perhaps their story can reignite

the hope we once had.

—Chen Meng