Though the house was nice, far nicer than the encampments we had passed, my father cursed as soon as we stepped inside. All of the doors were sliding, the flooring tatami, and the table and seating low to the ground. It disgusted him, to have spent so many years fighting the Japanese, only to live in a house of their style now.

If Mother was upset, she did not show it. You won’t find it surprising that she immediately got to work. She and I walked around the neighborhood, scouting the market, the school, the public clinic, the parks, while my father stayed behind and brooded. We came back with bedrolls and a small bag of white rice.

“Ah,” Mother sighed when she set the rice down. “I miss Ah-shin already.”

I never realized that Mother did not know how to cook until those first few days in Taiwan. Our rice was hard, and our vegetables burned, though the raw ingredients were better than anything we had in Shanghai. I wondered what Ah-shin was scraping together for you and your mother, and wished I was at the table with all of you, even if our meal was only millet.

“We will be here a few months. That’s all,” my father insisted. He sat awkwardly on the tatami, as if his body could not properly relax on something made by the Japanese.

For those first few months, Mother and I did nothing. She, in particular, was bad at doing nothing. We did not have the materials to make pencils. Mother cleaned the house, again and again, while I wrote you letters. The letters were checked and censored. Of course, we knew how to work around that. I did not want to waste money buying paper, so I used our old trick, writing on the sheet of my bedroll, using only a hand width of space, layering the characters over one another. I complained about the weather and the mosquitoes and how I missed Ah-shin’s cooking. I also mentioned the tension that even I, who barely left the house, sensed between the locals and the new arrivals. We were far from the only ones streaming into Taiwan during this time, far from the only ones from Shanghai. The locals called us waishengren, people from outside the province. They had recently been freed from Japanese rule, and now the Nationalists intended to rule over them.

I didn’t know then that only a year earlier, around the time when you were struggling over whether to follow your boy to Hong Kong, the Nationalists in Taiwan had killed thousands of local demonstrators protesting what they saw as an incompetent, corrupt new regime. It kicked off martial law in Taiwan. There were whispers of the incident, though never loudly, and certainly not in the circles my father ran in. His circles talked only of returning to the mainland, of freeing China from what they saw as an incompetent, corrupt new Communist dictatorship.