She hesitated. Since the night you had shown me your scars, I had taken to observing our mothers. I had always believed their long sleeves a conservative act, the same way they told us to keep our heads down and move quickly down the street, to be ready to hide should a Japanese soldier pass by—our whole bodies were to be hidden from them. But our mothers were too perfect about it. Even in the damp Shanghai summers, their sleeves remained. They never so much as rolled them up, no matter how close to the fire they worked.

Your mother must have pitied me enough to give me this consolation. She rolled the cuff of her sleeve just once. The scar was clear, much more prominent than yours. It was the head of something larger, something all too familiar.

“A phoenix?” I asked in wonder. The lines were the same as the ones carved onto our pencil. I would have recognized that phoenix head anywhere, even if it was a few minimal lines. I had carved it into our pencils many times.

Your mother pulled down her sleeve and said no more.

A few days later, my father left home again, this time bound for the wartime capital of Chongqing, where Japanese bombs supposedly fell all the time. Whatever message the pencil had carried connected him back to the underground network, and he was ferried away. It was as if he had never been home at all.

Mother took me to the department store that same day to choose a new qipao. She even let me look at the fabrics, offered to pay to have one custom-made. I knew she was trying to cheer me up, since she hated shopping. But none of the materials seemed to shine anymore. I insisted on going home empty-handed.

As we walked through the rooms of the company to the living quarters, Mother stopped me in her workshop. She picked one of the pencil boxes off the shelf and handed it to me. Inside was a single pencil, a few centimeters long, worn down from intense writing.

“Your father’s,” she explained. “From when he was younger.”

“What was he writing?” I asked. I rarely kept a pencil around long enough to wear it down that much.

“Love letters.”

“To you?”

“Who else?”

“Can I read them?”

“I think you would find them embarrassing.” She laughed. I loved when she laughed.

“Please. I want to remember him.”

“Fine. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Instead of a bundle of aging papers, she handed me the pencil. I looked up at her.

“One day you’ll find them yourself,” she said softly, then left me with his pencil pulsing in my hand.

Chapter 5

From the diary of Monica Tsai, backed up on five servers spanning three continents

August 20, 2018 (2018-08-20T23: 29:09.208112)

loc: Cambridge, Massachusetts. United States of America (42.3721865,71.1117091)