Page 9

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

The first words I Reforged were hello, hello, hello!

It was from a sample pencil, one your mother brought down from the wall that customers used to decide which pencil heart

suited them best.

It was a heart without its wooden body, which made it all the easier to Reforge.

Mother demonstrated with a real pencil first, while you and your mother observed.

Mother closed the company early that day,

drawing all the curtains.

We did not have many customers during that time.

On the table between us, she laid a pencil, a small knife for sharpening, and a longer knife for something more sinister.

Your mother contributed a roll of bandages.

The last item on the table was a blank notebook.

“Have you been working on your sharpening?” Mother asked me.

I nodded eagerly.

Because I ran through so many pencils in my sketches, I sharpened often and thought myself very good at

it.

When she nodded at the pencil, I took the sharpening knife and began to show off my skill.

“Sharpen the heart as much as you can,” she said.

I carved carefully, my thumb guiding the knife, shaving thin strips of wood onto the table.

It was the most patiently I had ever sharpened a pencil.

I handed it to Mother.

She held it up to the light.

“The thing you need to know about pencils,” she said as she rotated it in her hands, “is that their hearts remember.”

She held out her hand.

I gave her the knife.

She somehow sharpened the pencil even further.

“Each time you make a stroke, what is left of its heart remembers that stroke. Like when you scrape your knee, your body remembers

through a scar. Your own heart remembers too—the next time you are close to falling, you will think of the other times you

have fallen.”

The way she held the pencil, the way she looked at it—it could only be described as love.

“And our family can Reforge those memories.”

At last, she rolled up her sleeve.

The scars, visible at last.

The phoenix in its entirety revealed, pale wings curving along

the sides of her arm, tail weaving to her elbow, head held high at her wrist.

My own arm ached at the sight, as if in recognition,

in longing.

She tapped the sharpened pencil heart on her wrist a few times, right at the phoenix’s head, the point where all the scars

on her arm met, at one of her blood vessels.

Then she stabbed the heart into her wrist.

I bolted upright, knocking back my chair.

Your mother grabbed my arm.

Mother winced from the pain but still held the pencil

to her wrist.

The heart melted, pooling into ink before being absorbed into her vein.

The pale scars that formed the phoenix

filled out and darkened, climbed up her elbow.

The heart melted entirely into her wrist, and the phoenix glistened, dark and

pulsing.

She shuddered.

I sat slowly back in my chair.

She handed me what was left of the pencil, just the hollow wood, its heart sucked out.

Then she picked up the longer knife.

She pressed the blade to the phoenix’s neck and sliced.

I flinched.

She brought her sliced-open wrist on top of the notebook, pressing her wound into the pale-yellow paper.

Yet instead

of coloring the paper red, the paper turned the black of a pencil heart as she bled.

“She’s not actually bleeding,” your mother assured me.

“It’s the heart coming out.”

Mother lifted her wrist carefully, then pressed it into the next page.

During the brief instant her wrist was raised, black

dripped from the gash.

At last, a bit of red crept into the ink.

Mother stopped, and your mother bandaged her wrist.

I continued staring at the notebook,

already knowing what was going to happen and not wanting to miss a moment of it.

Something would appear, fresh and dripping,

like my drawings from the pencil I had given you when you first came to Shanghai.

The wet mass of ink shifted right before our eyes, moving across each page, drawn to different corners.

It was not long before

the shapes turned into columns of characters falling down each page, the single mass separating into thin, elegant strokes.

“That’s what the pencil wrote before?” I asked.

“Before you are its memories, Reforged.”

“Can I try?” I asked Mother eagerly.

That was when your mother brought over one of the sample pencils.

Mother sharpened it

for me.

“Be careful,” she said softly before handing it to me.

With the pencil heart gone, her phoenix had faded to pale scars.

I hovered the pencil over my wrist.

I refused to let my nervousness show.

But I also could not watch the heart break into

my skin.

So I found your eyes instead.

You held my gaze as I pierced my wrist.

It stung only briefly when the skin tore.

Then a numbing sensation as I pushed the heart into my bloodstream, all the while never looking away from you.

But something strange happened as I pushed it into my wrist.

Your face faded, as if I was seeing you through fog, and another image appeared, students milling around the front of the pencil company.

One of them grabbing a sample heart and writing on a scrap of paper, a quick message to test it out, as he scratched the heart against the paper— hello, hello, hello!

Only when the heart had melted completely into my wrist did the image fade.

I looked down.

The same phoenix pattern that

adorned all of your wrists finally adorned mine.

Mother handed me the knife.

I tapped the blade to my phoenix.

Its dark lines gleamed, daring.

I sliced.

Again, it only hurt for a moment.

Black seeped out of my cut, and I pressed it to the blank notebook as Mother had.

It had

barely been used, and so the ink covered the center of one page before it turned into my blood.

Your mother was ready with

the bandages again.

hello, hello, hello!

slowly formed on the page.

More came afterward, words I had only caught glimpses of earlier— today is Tuesday , wow, this is smooth , and when will this war end?

“How do you feel?” Mother asked gently.

“I saw them,” I said.

“The people who wrote with the pencil before.”

All three of you nodded.

“Their heart joins with yours, for a moment, when the heart goes into your wrist,” Mother said.

“Everyone can read what they

wrote if you Reforge into a notebook.” She nodded at the dripping words.

“But as the Reforger, you are the only one who gets

this connection with the writer.”

For one full day, I was happy.

Even after I bled out the words, my arm still bore the ghost of a phoenix, not nearly as solidified as our mothers’, or even yours, which was barely visible.

But I was thrilled.

Your mother declared it a day for celebration.

Mother showed me how best to bandage my arm after a Reforging, while you and your mother and Ah-shin went to the market to splurge.

You brought back five-spiced beef and hot soy milk.

Ah-shin cut the beef thinly and made shaobing.

We flicked fallen sesame seeds at each other, and nobody reprimanded us.

We ate so well that night even my grandmother seemed pleased.

That was the winter of 1941.

We were fourteen years old.

Most years are fuzzy, but that one is clear.

A few days after our

feast, Japan attacked many places, all at once.

The Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Pearl Harbor—and finally, the International

Settlement of Shanghai.

We hardly knew when it happened.

A few British boats, or maybe they were American, were rumored to have tried to defend the

city.

But most of the foreign navy had withdrawn long ago.

The Japanese tanks rolled in, their red-on-white flags flying.

“It’s over,” my grandmother whispered, before Mother drew the curtains firmly shut.

By the end of the week, the foreigners were rounded up.

The untouchable Americans and British were placed under house arrest,

limits established on how much they could withdraw from their foreign banks, ending their lives of luxury.

The Japanese registered

each one and made them wear armbands indicating their nationalities.

We overheard these pieces of news from the few customers who still came into the shop.

We listened with a dulled numbness,

as if everything was happening in an alternate universe and if we stayed inside the pencil company, we would be preserved

in our little bubble of peace.

But not even a week later, Ah-shin reported that bronze statues throughout the city had disappeared, taken by the Japanese

to be melted for their metal.

You asked about the bronze lions outside the bank, the ones with the shining paws you had reached

for that first month and wished for home.

Ah-shin did not know, but she could not imagine they would be spared.

Somehow, it

was the doomed fate of the lions that broke us, and we finally let ourselves cry.

Our mothers were now poring over the accounting books that you and I had taken charge of the last few years.

They had trusted us with it, and we were lucky the company had done well enough that our mothers had not needed to fuss over the finances.

But now they were always whispering to each other, falling suddenly silent when you or I entered the room.

“You aren’t thinking about leaving, are you?” you asked darkly.

Our mothers exchanged a look.

“We’ll see how things go,” your mother said carefully.

“I’m not leaving again,” you warned.

“We might not have a choice,” Mother said.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” you said, voice rising.

“They’ve taken over everywhere.”

“Not everywhere—”

You had already stormed out, and I followed close behind.

We ended up in our bedroom, sitting together on your bed.

“I wish this war would end,” you said miserably.

I understood, and not only from my own experience.

It was an echo of the words I had Reforged, the writer who asked that same

question.

“Maybe it will soon,” I said, trying to be optimistic.

“They say the Americans are getting involved.”

“But why do we need to rely on them? Why can’t we do anything?”

I nodded, resonating deeply with the sentiment.

“I feel like I finally got what I wanted.” I admired my arm, which was starting to look like yours.

“And I’m glad I know about

the pencils. Really, I am. But it’s like I wished for one thing all this time only to find out it can’t help us. Not now.”

Not when our home was no longer safe.

I thought we had, for once, agreed on something.

But you shook your head vigorously.

“The pencils are important. If you had Reforged those poems, you’d understand. I felt that writer’s hope, his love for his

family, his love for his country. And we both saw how much it meant to that woman to have her husband’s words again. These

stories the pencils can revive—that’s important, especially now.”

I was peeved you were so eager to disagree with me.

“It’s not useful,” I argued.

“If a soldier were to come in right now, point his bayonet at our mothers, what could we do?

Show him hello, hello, hello ?”

“Maybe in immediate situations it’s not useful,” you conceded.

“But in the long run, being able to bring somebody’s words

back to life, being able to tell their story after they have lived it, written it—”

“That’s what books are for.”

“But not everybody gets a book! Especially not the people who are going to die now that we’re occupied.”

“ We might die, even with our power.”

You stood up from your bed and crossed the room, rummaging through your backpack.

When you did not find what you were looking

for, you tore through mine, the one I had not used since we stopped going to school.

“What are you—”

You took out my notebook, the one I mostly used for doodles, and my bag of pencils.

The misshapen ones from the company.

“I’ll show you what stories can do,” you said fervently.

“How they can bring hope. Write this down.” You pushed my notebook

and pencil into my hands.

“In an old building in Shanghai lived two girls,” you recited.

I reluctantly wrote down your words.

“They didn’t like each other very much,” you continued, “and in many ways they were very different. But they both had a special

ability, and they were going to use it to change the world.”

I managed to smile.

“What comes next?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” you said.

You sat next to me.

“It’s your turn.”

And so I wrote another line, and then you wrote a line, and together we began piecing together our story, our only weapon

against the invasion of our home.