Monica has already figured out much of it on her own. Though I desperately wish she hadn’t, and I don’t completely understand how she did, something about technology. I’ve done a lot of things I regret—bullying you, Reforging that boy’s poems, being too hard on Edward, the list goes on and on—but I’d rank my time in California at the top of that list. I wish I could have told her about it myself.

And so I suppose it is time to write about the most difficult years of my life, which also happened to be the loneliest. I sent you a note before I left Taiwan. Every time I moved in the United States, I sent you another with my updated address. At least one of them must have reached you, since you did eventually write to me. But that would not be for many years.

They put me on a plane to California. When I looked at the map, I was stunned and disappointed to see how far it was from Boston. I would be looking at multiday bus itineraries I could not afford if I wanted to see the only other person I knew in the country.

In the summer of 1953, I landed in America. A colleague of Mr. Gao’s collected me from the airport. We drove straight through San Francisco. He did not stop. The city might have been easier for me. The buildings we passed did not look so different from parts of the International Settlement, and there was a bustling Chinatown. But Mr. Gao was not interested in the city. He was interested in the universities around it, where the students gathered. He placed me in the most foreign situation possible—a suburban neighborhood.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an American suburb. I only have two words to describe them—wide and isolating. I could not get over the wideness of the roads, how much space between the boxy vehicles, such a far cry from Shanghai’s cramped streets filled with rickshaws and workers. Mr. Gao’s men had bought a small house, and this, too, sat on a wide street. They could have fit another two houses between mine and the neighbor’s. Can you imagine a place like this existing back then?

Eventually, the area would be known for its protests, its fight for free speech. But when I was there, it was quiet and, like the rest of the nation, paranoid. The university had recently required a loyalty oath from its staff members that they were not members of the Communist party. Anti-Communist sentiment was rampant. This worked well for us. We knew students from Taiwan were gathering to scrutinize martial law and viewed the Korean War with a skeptical eye too. It was this group that Mr. Gao wanted to control, before there was a chance of them drawing national attention to their cause.