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From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

Monica has Reforged your pencil.

She brought your words to me in a convenience store notebook.

There was a poorly applied

bandage on her arm, lopsided and peeling.

That she had cut herself to Reforge your words—it was the one thing I had wanted

her to avoid.

I know the dangerous places it can lead.

I tried to ask her about it, how she had felt, if it hurt.

She was

reluctant with her words, distant in a way that squeezed my heart tight.

There is a sadness to her I have never seen before.

I asked if it had to do with your words, if they changed the way she thought about me.

“I will always love you,” she said, with a serious melancholy that ached more than my hip, more than the nights alone in the

hospital.

When I asked if your girl had hurt her, she turned quickly away, changed the topic to the logistics of my surgery and recovery

instead.

She forced a smile upon her face, though I could still see the stain of her tears, no matter how she tried to hide

them.

“Did Meng... ?” I began.

She knew what I was going to ask.

“She forgave you,” she said.

Those were the words I wanted to hear for so long.

And yet, to have Monica deliver them, to see

her like this—I hated myself all over again.

Monica left at some point, I don’t remember, and there was nothing I could do

for her, not here in a hospital, not with my mind like this.

But she is strong in her own way, and I must believe that she

will find a way.

I’ve now read your words.

That you met Edward, that my father’s words helped him—that alone will take me a while to process.

And now that I’ve read your letter—well, I’m a little embarrassed by how long mine is in comparison.

There is unfortunately

more to my story that I haven’t gotten to yet.

I know, I can see you rolling your eyes.

I know your patience is thin.

But

I am finally starting to form the message I’d like to leave you with, now that I understand how you view the world.

I went to Boston because it was one of the few cities in the United States I could name, the only one where I knew someone.

He would still be in his program, I calculated, since I had come not long after he left.

I did not really think I would find

him.

I merely thought it would be useful to be able to say I knew somebody at the university.

If Torou had made it to Boston,

I thought it likely others from China and Taiwan had as well, that maybe I could find people who understood where I came from.

I found my job and my lodging the same way.

Our mothers would be proud.

I asked around Chinatown for mahjong gatherings.

I

ended up more than once in basements surrounded by mostly men.

I would lie and claim I had a husband.

“He’s a student at MIT,” I would say.

Most of the time we conversed in English, since the majority of Chinatown’s residents

spoke Cantonese.

The name MIT, at least, meant something to everybody there.

“You’re very good at mahjong,” a woman said to me during one of the early days.

Her English name was Linda.

I had been trying to sit at her table.

I heard she ran a restaurant.

She was a rarity—most restaurant workers were men.

Women were seamstresses.

I had spent all my life making pencils.

I was good with my hands, yet I had never learned to sew, so I thought working in a restaurant would suit me better.

“I played a lot back in Shanghai,” I said, because I knew she, too, was from Shanghai.

After all, millions of us had fled

in those years.

“Oh?”

It was not long until we were speaking in Shanghainese, when I dropped the hint I was looking for work, a place to stay, and

she welcomed me to her restaurant and gave me the address of a group of women who needed another person to live with them

and split their rent.

“What did your family do in Shanghai?” she asked.

I tensed, then told her the truth.

“My mother ran the Phoenix Pencil Company.”

“The Phoenix Pencil Company!” Linda pulled her hands from the tiles in the center.

The rest of us continued shuffling.

She

looked away from the game and stared at me.

“You know it?” I asked as casually as I could.

“But your surname is not Chen.”

She evidently only knew the company after you and your mother had taken over using your father’s name.

“That would be my mother’s sister,” I explained carefully.

“And my cousin.” I pulled down my sleeve.

Few people knew of our

Reforging.

Still, I suddenly did not want her to see my wrist.

She drew her tiles.

Her playing was messy after that—she matched on tiles that had already been played earlier, tossed rare

ones that resulted in losses for her.

“You seem unsettled.” I decided to confront the matter.

She slammed her tiles down when one of the other players called mahjong.

“My father loved your pencils.” I focused on the tiles, dreading what she would say next.

“Your aunt set up the largest surveillance system in Shanghai. We left soon after my father was killed. I’m sorry, but you are no longer welcome at the restaurant.”

“I left Shanghai before any of that,” I said.

We were both playing sloppily now.

“My father was with the Nationalists. We

went to Taiwan. I haven’t talked to my aunt since we left. Please. Give me a chance. I was only a child when I knew her.”

Of course, I did not tell her about the small surveillance system I had established in California before coming to Boston.

I was more than happy to denounce your mother if it meant I would have a job and a place to stay.

I knew in a way you had

denounced her, too, when you set the company ablaze.

In the end, it was not my charm that won her over.

It was her own soft heart.

We would be lifelong friends, though we never

spoke about Shanghai again.

The restaurant Linda ran was well known, having once been featured in the Boston Globe as serving tastier food than any that could be found in China, where the Communists did not know how to cook anymore.

“Do you get MIT students here?” I asked during my first week.

“Oh yes.” Linda grinned.

“Looking for a husband?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

After that, she made an effort to have me wait on all of the young men reading thick books.

“You’re not interested yourself?” I asked.

She had gotten over our initial confrontation.

I think she was lonely and had the

idea, like we all did, that those from Shanghai were above others from our country, and she was waiting for someone of a similar

background, someone who was more suitable.

She shook her head with a wink.

It would be another few months before I met her lover, a rich white woman who financed much of the restaurant’s initial costs.

Their story would have perhaps been more interesting to tell you than mine.

I wrote to you during that time, at least once a month.

I wrote often but did not send my letters, knowing they were unlikely

to reach you and might cast suspicion on me, sending messages to red China, which at that point was thoroughly closed off

from the world.

But you were all I was living for then.

Mother was gone, and I longed to bring you and your mother to America.

There was a freedom to living in Boston I had never known before, comparable only to the brief period between wars, when we

believed Shanghai was truly ours.

The freedom relaxed me, the job helped me live, and the mahjong even made me some friends.

But inside I was hollow except for my wish to find you again and the ghost of the thought that maybe I would find Torou.

When his eyes peered over his textbook as I placed his pork and radish soup down in front of him, I was not surprised.

I had

hoped for this meeting for too long.

He was there at an odd hour, which was not surprising, nor the fact that he had ordered

soup.

If anything, he should have been surprised to find me there, for I’d had no prospects of leaving Taiwan the last we

spoke.

Instead, he smiled.

“The pencil girl.” His first words to me after years apart.

“The soup boy.” I tried to stay calm, to maintain his level of casualness even as I thought back to the time at the pencil

company when our bodies were entwined.

He raised a spoonful of soup to me.

“I haven’t changed.”

“I have,” I said.

“Tell me how.” Then he unstrapped his watch and placed it at the seat across from him.

“Ten minutes?” he asked in a way I

found infuriatingly presumptuous and yet irresistible.

He was no taller, even if he was not as scrawny as he had been in Taiwan.

The full American meals had filled him out and enhanced the confidence in his eyes.

He always had some semblance of it, accustomed to being the smartest, but now that he had made it to America and worked through a top institution, his confidence had soared.

A few months would pass before I witnessed the way that certainty would shed off him when he was around his white classmates and professors—how quickly the gleam left him, replaced by wide eyes trying to hang on.

“I’m still working,” I said, and made to leave.

“Wait,” he called.

“Who did you marry?”

“Nobody,” I said.

It was true there were not many other ways a woman my age could have made it to America.

“I need to get

back to work now.”

“When will you be done?”

I pretended not to hear him.

When I returned to the kitchen, Linda scolded me.

“You’ll never find a husband if you’re so cold.”

“I knew him from Taiwan.”

“Oh? Old enemies?”

I remembered how his fingers trailed along my legs beneath the table at the pencil company, how I had ached for him after

he left.

“Something like that.”

I left my shift depressed, Linda’s words ringing true as my own cut into me, wondering how I could alienate him in a world

where I was already so alone.

She and I left the restaurant together.

“Cheer up, now.” She jabbed me with her elbow.

I was staring at my worn-out shoes, pitying the way I could almost feel the

uneven floor beneath me and how I could not afford to replace them, when she jabbed me again.

“Maybe he likes the cold type.”

Only then did I look up and spot him, leaning against the side of the restaurant, angling his book toward the neighboring

restaurant’s light.

“Did you wait here for me?” I stammered.

Linda gave my arm a squeeze before continuing on, leaving me alone with him.

“I was at a good part in the book.” In fact, he did not even look up from the page.

I could just make out the title— The Mathematical Theory of Communication —and could not help smiling, remembering the awkward boy who once blurted out that he loved communication.

For a moment, I stood in front of him, smelling of garlic and oil, while he did nothing but read.

“Who did you marry?” I asked to get him to look up.

A part of me feared his answer.

“No one.” He finally closed his book.

“Though my parents are actively looking in Taiwan.”

“You don’t care who they find?”

“I asked them to find you.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said automatically.

It was so much easier to believe there was nobody who cared if I disappeared.

His words were incomprehensible.

“They told me you had gone to America, though nobody seemed to know where, or why. They told me your mother passed. I was

sorry to hear that. She was so kind to me. I assumed you found someone and they brought you here.”

He was not wrong.

But I was not ready to tell him the truth of how I had wormed my way across the ocean.

“I never understood why you took an interest in me.”

He shrugged.

The shrug was so familiar, something I had not thought about for years, yet which brought him back forcefully,

even more than seeing him again after so long.

“I think at first it was only because you worked at the pencil company and were mysterious. I wanted to know your secrets.

I love a good puzzle.” He smiled, and I did not smile back.

“But then it became clear you weren’t something for me to solve.

As I sought to unravel you, all I peeled back was layer after layer of sadness I could not comprehend. So when you pushed

me away, I left. I guess I’ve still maintained that same curiosity about you though.”

“I don’t think you would like what you’d find.”

“Hard to say if I don’t know.”

“I made it to America by sleeping with a man and then burning his house down.” And that wasn’t even the worst of my crimes!

I wanted to shock him, to convince him to turn against me now rather than later.

“How does that make you feel?”

If he had a visible reaction, it was too dark to tell.

“Mostly jealous,” he said eventually.

“Of my path to America?” If a child in Taiwan could architect their own life, it would follow the path Torou’s had taken—accepted

into America at a prestigious university through merit alone.

It was impossible he could be jealous of me.

“Of the man who got to have you, if only for a while.”

“You’re insufferable.” Linda’s accusation of being cold hit me again.

Being with him was a constant cycle of wanting him closer

and needing to push him away.

I did not like the person I had become, and I could not stand when he flattered, sure he was

only telling me lies.

“May I see you again tomorrow?”

I did not deserve his persistence.

I did not deserve this life in America, won from embracing the very worst our pencils could

offer.

But I could hear your voice and Linda’s voice in my head, the scolding I would get if I rejected him again.

“Yes,” I said, letting a bit of light into my dark, lonely world.