I wrote to you during that time, at least once a month. I wrote often but did not send my letters, knowing they were unlikely to reach you and might cast suspicion on me, sending messages to red China, which at that point was thoroughly closed off from the world. But you were all I was living for then. Mother was gone, and I longed to bring you and your mother to America. There was a freedom to living in Boston I had never known before, comparable only to the brief period between wars, when we believed Shanghai was truly ours. The freedom relaxed me, the job helped me live, and the mahjong even made me some friends. But inside I was hollow except for my wish to find you again and the ghost of the thought that maybe I would find Torou.

When his eyes peered over his textbook as I placed his pork and radish soup down in front of him, I was not surprised. I had hoped for this meeting for too long. He was there at an odd hour, which was not surprising, nor the fact that he had ordered soup. If anything, he should have been surprised to find me there, for I’d had no prospects of leaving Taiwan the last we spoke. Instead, he smiled.

“The pencil girl.” His first words to me after years apart.

“The soup boy.” I tried to stay calm, to maintain his level of casualness even as I thought back to the time at the pencil company when our bodies were entwined.

He raised a spoonful of soup to me. “I haven’t changed.”

“I have,” I said.

“Tell me how.” Then he unstrapped his watch and placed it at the seat across from him. “Ten minutes?” he asked in a way I found infuriatingly presumptuous and yet irresistible.

He was no taller, even if he was not as scrawny as he had been in Taiwan. The full American meals had filled him out and enhanced the confidence in his eyes. He always had some semblance of it, accustomed to being the smartest, but now that he had made it to America and worked through a top institution, his confidence had soared. A few months would pass before I witnessed the way that certainty would shed off him when he was around his white classmates and professors—how quickly the gleam left him, replaced by wide eyes trying to hang on.

“I’m still working,” I said, and made to leave.

“Wait,” he called. “Who did you marry?”

“Nobody,” I said. It was true there were not many other ways a woman my age could have made it to America. “I need to get back to work now.”

“When will you be done?”

I pretended not to hear him. When I returned to the kitchen, Linda scolded me.

“You’ll never find a husband if you’re so cold.”

“I knew him from Taiwan.”

“Oh? Old enemies?”