I opened my bag, my box of pencils. I had every type, each for a different purpose. The shortest by far was the 80:20, which I had used for my caricature. I handed it to you.

You twirled it between your fingers. I tried not to admire how you handled it, how it flitted through your fingers, frictionless.

“Do you mind if I try it out?”

“Oh. Sure.”

You pocketed my pencil.

That night in our shared room, I crawled through my mosquito net into my bed. The last I had seen of you, you were at the front of the complex, watching Mother guide the machines to press the wood that would encase the pencil hearts.

I was almost asleep when the door slammed open.

“Yun.”

I bolted upright. Mother’s voice in such a tone always made me do so. Through the mosquito net, she was dark and distorted. You an outline behind her.

“Mother?” I asked tentatively, pulling aside the netting.

She turned on the light and held a piece of paper in front of her like a wanted poster. I was not surprised to see my caricature of you, complete with buckteeth and large forehead and frothing gibberish. But the shape of the drawing unsettled me. My lines had been light, the way only an 80:20 pencil can convey, fleeting and carefree, a thoughtless doodle to stave off boredom in class. In the drawing before me, the lines were dark and thick and dripping, as if someone had taken a calligraphy brush and outlined my caricature, then hung it up and let the ink bleed down. Your face became a mess, a facade where teeth dripped into chin and ears I had not distorted drooped.

“What is that?” I asked, only to wince at the click of Mother’s tongue.

“Do not act like you do not know.”

“That is not my drawing,” I said honestly.

“Not the original,” you said quietly.

“Maybe someone at school drew it,” I tried to reason. “There are always people trying to copy my doodles.”

“How about this one?” Mother held up another piece of paper. It unfurled into the doodle I had made the day before, of the math teacher. I had even gone and signed my name at the bottom. Yet this one, too, had nearly the same dripping distortion.

“Yes, but also no—”

“You will defend Meng as if she were your sister,” Mother interrupted. “If I learn you have made another one of these drawings, I will disown you and send you straight to the Japanese.”

I barely knew about any threat from the Japanese at the time, the war still a rumor to my sheltered mind. But I understood the tremble in her voice. She was angry beyond the point of even physical punishment, and so I knew the threat must be terrible.

“How did you—?” I braved, desperately wanting to know how they could have recreated my drawings in this manner.