But Shao had been reluctant to leave Minghua University. Professor Kang had asked him to lead a tutorial group, the first time he’d been given such a responsibility. The first-year students had been enthusiastic in their discussions and touchingly in awe of Shao, so he’d kept delaying his departure. Until the Japanese began their aerial attacks on the city.

Giving up on sleep, he lifted aside a corner of the blackout curtains. Overhead, a full moon glowed serenely behind a thin veil of clouds. Enough cloud cover, he hoped, that there wouldn’t be any air raids this night. Dropping the curtain, he reached over to his desk and turned on the lamp. He found his father’s letter and sat down on the bed. His father never wrote actual letters, just appended a few lines to the ones Shao’s mother wrote. It was her monthly missives that kept Shao up to date with every birth, marriage, illness—and sometimes death—in their large clan. He scanned his father’s words again, the handwriting elegant and spare, penned in a deep blue ink that exactly matched the border of his mother’s stationery.

I know how much you want to stay at Minghua, but you must come home before it gets even more dangerous to travel. Your mother is worried. Leave before Minghua University evacuates Nanking. Buy a train ticket and let me know the date.

His father had signed the note as usual with his seal, a red stamp with his name, Liu Sanmu, in traditional li-shu-style script. Unconsciously Shao picked up his own chop from the desk and rubbed his thumb across the cylinder of polished white jade, identical, but for the carved signatures, to the ones his father and older brothers carried.

Your mother is worried.

An oblique reference to his mother’s state of mind was always a cause for concern and always effective at ensuring his obedience. She could be withdrawn one day, vivacious with wit and charm the next. Shao recognized his own impulsiveness as one of his mother’s traits and always tried to keep it in check. He’d inherited little else from her. Like his brothers, his height, thick brows, and clean, square sweep of jawline were his father’s.

He read his father’s words for the third time and identified the sentence that bothered him.

Leave before Minghua University evacuates Nanking.

Not “in case Minghua University evacuates Nanking” but evacuation as a statement of fact. The Liu family owned Xinwen Bao, one of Shanghai’s major newspapers. Shao’s father was the paper’s owner and editor in chief, privy to information from a wide network of contacts. Liu Sanmu was careful never to criticize the Nationalist government, not even in private. But in advising his son, he had let something slip.

His father didn’t believe the Chinese could hold on to Nanking.