Later, as I lay in bed scrolling through my phone, I heard the whooshing sound of an email being sent from my grandparents’ room. It was immediately followed by the buzzing of my own phone—an email from grandmother.

🏃🏻‍♀️ kuai dian 👩🏻👩🏻💋

I looked at my phone in horror for a full second before tossing it away for the night. I tried to sleep but couldn’t, and so now I’m staring into my computer screen, tapping at my keyboard, wondering what tomorrow might bring.

Chapter 18

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

You would have hated Taiwan. I hated it before we even boarded the plane, hated it as we sat tightly against one another, wearing our winter jackets to save space in our suitcases, hated it when we landed, walked out, and there was only the humidity, as we removed layer after layer, sweating right through them.

Have you visited Taiwan? It is much nicer than it was back then. Monica says it is her favorite place in the world. We used to return every few years to see Torou’s family before the journey was too long for me. We sent Monica to study Chinese while we played mahjong. She always came back with a snack for herself—a bag of fried popcorn chicken, skewers poking out, or a glistening cup of bubble tea, condensation forming as soon as it met the Taiwan humidity.

But instead of fast and clean trains or air-conditioned convenience stores on every block, Taiwan back then was a backwater island, just as your mother had said.

A military jeep picked us up. My father chatted with the driver, each exchanging names of other military men they knew, which ones had come to Taiwan, which to Hong Kong, which were still trying to stick it out on the mainland. The driver even knew Mr. Gao, called him a hotshot, though he was pleased to hear Mr. Gao had made it out, even if he had been sent to the south instead of the north, where we were headed.

Before reaching the city, we drove through sprawling encampments, barracks built for people like us, so many fleeing China during that time. The barracks were small and densely populated, a single dangling lightbulb for illumination. I dreaded finding out which one we would live in. But the driver took us straight past them and into the city.

“Not for you,” he said, his jolly tone grating against my sour mood. “No, for your service, you’ll have a proper house.”

He looked not at my father, but into the rearview mirror, at my mother. I shrank farther into my seat. So they knew our secret here, too.