It was like this for what seemed like years at our young age. Each of us prowling around the other, deeply jealous. I wanted your elegance, apparent even at the age of ten, and you wanted my stability, how I had never had to move in my entire life. I knew Shanghai and could without hesitation call it home. We were so absorbed in the war we were waging against each other that we were completely oblivious to the one right outside, dropping bombs around our city.

In Monica’s American history textbooks, the war does not begin until 1941, with Pearl Harbor. But for us it began a decade earlier when Japan invaded Manchuria. By the time you came to Shanghai, Japan had been ruthlessly cutting through China for six years. Luckily, we were insulated from much of the violence, thanks to the International Settlement. Whether the Japanese did not want to anger the English, the French, the Americans who lived there with us, or were simply biding their time for another invasion, we had no idea. But for a few years at least, we lived a relatively normal life.

Your mother insisted we go out and enjoy the safety of the Settlement, that she had heard so much about Shanghai and we had to show her around. My own mother rarely took me anywhere since Japan had taken over the surrounding districts. But that first week, we visited the largest department store in the city.

Inside, the salespeople flocked to your mother, holding pearls to her ears, lengths of silk to her torso, begging her to buy a custom-made qipao. She laughed and, because she could not speak Shanghainese, declined with brisk waves of her hand. She admired the French cloche hats, the Scotch whiskies, the German cameras, the American lipstick. You hated how busy it was, everybody buying and selling with a frenetic air, fueled by the war right across the river, by the knowledge that the Settlement could fall any day.

But as much as you disliked the store, outside was even worse. Nanking Road was the busiest shopping street in the Settlement. Rickshaws mixed with motorcycles mixed with coolies hoisting bamboo poles over their shoulders, buckets of anything from live chickens to vegetables swaying on either end—and everybody had to make way for trucks and automobiles carrying the wealthy foreigners in their silk suits to their mansions along the river. You clung to your mother as I made a show of pretending I was accustomed to this bustling life. Peddlers shoved pastries and tea beneath our noses. One even had your mother halfway into a chair, ready to give her a haircut, before my mother told him off in Shanghainese.

That same day, we visited the Bund, the waterfront lined with foreign buildings, a mix of columns, domes, clock towers, murals.

“Why are these here?” you asked, one of the few things you said all day.