I’ve now read your words. That you met Edward, that my father’s words helped him—that alone will take me a while to process. And now that I’ve read your letter—well, I’m a little embarrassed by how long mine is in comparison. There is unfortunately more to my story that I haven’t gotten to yet. I know, I can see you rolling your eyes. I know your patience is thin. But I am finally starting to form the message I’d like to leave you with, now that I understand how you view the world.

I went to Boston because it was one of the few cities in the United States I could name, the only one where I knew someone. He would still be in his program, I calculated, since I had come not long after he left. I did not really think I would find him. I merely thought it would be useful to be able to say I knew somebody at the university. If Torou had made it to Boston, I thought it likely others from China and Taiwan had as well, that maybe I could find people who understood where I came from.

I found my job and my lodging the same way. Our mothers would be proud. I asked around Chinatown for mahjong gatherings. I ended up more than once in basements surrounded by mostly men. I would lie and claim I had a husband.

“He’s a student at MIT,” I would say. Most of the time we conversed in English, since the majority of Chinatown’s residents spoke Cantonese. The name MIT, at least, meant something to everybody there.

“You’re very good at mahjong,” a woman said to me during one of the early days. Her English name was Linda. I had been trying to sit at her table. I heard she ran a restaurant. She was a rarity—most restaurant workers were men. Women were seamstresses. I had spent all my life making pencils. I was good with my hands, yet I had never learned to sew, so I thought working in a restaurant would suit me better.

“I played a lot back in Shanghai,” I said, because I knew she, too, was from Shanghai. After all, millions of us had fled in those years.

“Oh?”

It was not long until we were speaking in Shanghainese, when I dropped the hint I was looking for work, a place to stay, and she welcomed me to her restaurant and gave me the address of a group of women who needed another person to live with them and split their rent.

“What did your family do in Shanghai?” she asked.

I tensed, then told her the truth.

“My mother ran the Phoenix Pencil Company.”

“The Phoenix Pencil Company!” Linda pulled her hands from the tiles in the center. The rest of us continued shuffling. She looked away from the game and stared at me.