The adults argued over the cause. My father blamed the Communists for trying to force radical ideology onto a country that needed stability. Your mother argued the Nationalists were to blame, that they were keeping an army as large as the one they had during the war against the Japanese and spent all their money on the military rather than using it for the aid the country so desperately needed.

My father scoffed and shook his head at Mr. Gao. He clearly thought Mr. Gao could do better than your mother. Mr. Gao gave a helpless shrug. Behind this exchange, you fumed. That was before my father suggested the worst.

“It may be time to leave,” he said one day at dinner. He had only been home a few months.

You flinched. It was the first time anyone had mentioned leaving Shanghai.

“We’ll be fine,” my grandmother insisted. My father and Mr. Gao exchanged dark looks.

“If the Communists win, we won’t be able to stay here,” my father said.

“They won’t win,” my grandmother said firmly.

“Why wouldn’t we be able to stay?” I asked.

“We fought with the Nationalists,” he said. “We own land. We run a capitalist business. They blame everything on landowners. Their peasant armies are rampaging through the countryside, killing anyone they want. They would take everything from us.”

“We don’t need everything,” you said quietly.

My father looked at you, tilting his head. He had never paid much attention to you.

“You have never had nothing.” His voice was cold. “We worked for the life of comfort you live now.”

“We could afford to give some of this up,” you continued even as your mother shot you a glare. “And you didn’t work for this life. Our mothers did.”

“Meng!” your mother exclaimed.

“I didn’t work for this life?” His eyes flashed. I shrank into my seat. His anger was one of the few things I remembered from the days before he left. “I fought for it with my life! Was it your mother at the end of a Japanese gun, spared only because he thought I was already dead? Was it you who could never sleep, because if it wasn’t the Japanese, it was the Communists who were going to stab you in the back even as we fought the same war? You think the war ended because your mother was making pencils? We ended the war—”

“The Americans ended the war,” you corrected.

“Be quiet,” your mother ordered. If you wouldn’t listen to my father, you at least listened to her. “Who made you think you are allowed to talk this way to your uncle? Was it that boy? Answer me.”