So maybe it’s a good thing, for it to have ended in this ambiguous way. Part of me feared what I might learn about grandmother, what this rift between her and Meng might reveal. That she might become something other than the unfailingly supportive grandmother who walked me to my bus stop in the worst Boston snowstorms, patiently taught me Chinese even when I was a brat about learning it, and who held me after my father left and said over and over that she was here and she always would be.

So, it’s not all disappointment. Still, I was really hoping for more than a pencil.

Chapter 2

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

Right now, my words course through your veins.

I spent a long time this morning looking at your picture. It’s been more than seventy years since the last time we saw each other, sixty years since we knew each other’s stories. Monica, my granddaughter, found you. To be honest, I did not expect her to succeed. Hoped maybe she wouldn’t, even. But she’s an awfully determined girl with a knack for bending computers to her will—and while it might be our shared history, I know you and I told ourselves different versions of the same truth, and now that I have a thread back to you, I can no longer delay explaining myself.

I want to ask for your forgiveness, and I need you to understand how I perceived the world we grew up in, our world of wars and betrayals and pencils.

In the picture Monica sent, you were small as always, even if your back has not hunched as mine has. Legs dangling off a bench, modern-day Shanghai sprawled out behind you, shining buildings along the waterfront. Not far from where we grew up, no? Remarkable, how you remained in place, while I bounced around the world. I would have thought it impossible that day you and your mother arrived, that I would be the one to leave home while you stayed behind in the city you claimed to hate.

The only memories I have from before you are in swabs of gray. There was the time my father left for war, everything in harsh dark lines, the outline of his shoulders as he tried to embrace Mother and she turned away, back to her machines. There was the smoky haze of my grandmother’s room, where I attempted to find comfort and found only the sweet smell of her drugged exhalations—and then there was the pencil company, churning away under the guidance of Mother’s ever-steady hand. Her once white smock covered in dark fingerprints, her fingernails always black.