“The first time your father needed to receive a message. She didn’t mean for me to see. Something went wrong. Blood everywhere. Ah-shin was out at the market, your father at work, and only I was here to hobble around and save her from losing all her blood.”

“What went wrong?”

“How should I know?” she snapped.

“Is that why you don’t want me to learn?” I asked quietly.

“Only partly.” She reached over and smoothed my hair with her skeletal hand. “I understand the utility. But I have lived longer than all of you and have seen how the world can use your abilities for its own purposes. Sometimes it is best to forget and move on. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Grandmother,” I said. I knew if I was disagreeable, she would want her pipe.

“Good,” she said, and opened her newspaper to drown herself in news of all the battles China was losing.

I have not yet done anything with your pencil. I am glad to have it though. I would have been surprised if you gave me anything other than a pencil. Hurt, even. After all, if I boarded a plane (though I do believe those days are over for me) and showed up in Shanghai, on the doorstep of wherever it is you live now, would we even be able to understand each other? We’d probably spend too much time being polite. You would offer me tea. I would have a box of chocolates from Boston for you. We would nibble and sip, and I’d say, “My, how Shanghai has changed!” And you would either go along, and tell me exactly how Shanghai has changed, or you would slam down your teacup and order us to move on to what we really needed to talk about.

But the problem is, there isn’t really anything specific we need to talk about, is there? Nothing that can be said in an afternoon visit, or even a yearlong one. Written words are incredible in this way—they take a whole idea and condense it down with the help of the writer’s mind. The writer pulls in only the important parts. Each word is efficient, each tells the reader something. No, a trip to see each other would not do us much good now, not when I have so few good days left.

I will get to your pencil, though, I promise. I would like to explain myself to you first, independent of whatever it is you have to say to me. My time is short, and so I must hurry—to when I finally learned the secret of our pencils.

We stopped going to school once we reached middle school. There didn’t seem to be a point when the world was falling apart—and not only China, either. My grandmother reported every gruesome detail she learned of the bombs tearing through England, the massive German armies invading the Soviet Union.