“All I do is play mahjong and make pencils.”

“I bet there’s more to you than that. Here.” He took off his watch and turned its face to me. “Talk for five minutes. I won’t interrupt or say a thing.”

Five minutes did not sound long, and I had nobody else to talk to, so I agreed. I spoke in halting sentences at first. I did not hide the fact that my father was a proud Nationalist, though most locals did not take kindly to that. If Torou cared, he did not show it. I told him we came from Shanghai. That we ran a pencil company there. That we were reestablishing it here. That I left behind my aunt and cousin. When I began to talk about you, the words came easily. I talked about how we used to compete to settle the accounts, how we wrote a story together, how we slept in the same room every night for ten years, whispering deep into the night through our mosquito nets. I told him about Shanghai and startled myself with the longing in my voice, for the home we had left.

“You sound like you really miss your cousin,” he said. I glanced at his watch. I had talked for more than ten minutes, and he had stayed silent the whole time.

“I guess I do.” I tried not to think about how I had received no news from you or your mother since we arrived.

“I’d write a story with you,” he offered.

I laughed.

“Our stories were silly,” I said, and yet I ached for those nights all the same.

“What were they about?”

“Girls with special powers who fought the Japanese.”

“I like that,” he said. “But you’re right, I probably wouldn’t be very good at writing that. If there’s anything else you and your cousin did, I could help you with that instead.”

It was such a startlingly nice gesture that I did not know how to respond.

“Or maybe we could go see a movie or something.” I remember he stared intently at his empty soup bowl as he said it.

“How old are you?” I asked. He looked young compared to the rest of the crowd.

“Almost eighteen,” he said. He was three years younger than me, which at that age made me think him impossibly young. No wonder he was not officially a university student.

“Maybe in a few years, then,” I said lightly.

“I won’t be here in a few years,” he sighed.

“Oh? Where will you be?”

“America. I’m going to study engineering at MIT. Have you heard of it?”

“You’ve already gotten in?”

“No.” His face turned red. “But I will.” He sighed again. “I don’t want to live here anymore. It’s occupation after occupation here. America though. That’s the place to be free.”