Fewer people were buying custom pencils, not when they could use their money at the amusement centers instead, or in the Badlands, the surrounding area where the Japanese made sure the opium usage was high and morale low. Our mothers began to make batch pencils almost exclusively, most popular among the students of Shanghai’s elite who continued their schooling at the foreign missionary schools, and who burned through pencils faster than any other type of customer. We could do math and speak Mandarin, Shanghainese, and a smattering of English. We were about as well-off as one could be for inheriting the Phoenix Pencil Company. However, business was slow.

As our customers dwindled, for the first time, Mother wandered around the complex with nothing to do. Your mother practically pounced on her.

“It is time to enjoy yourself,” your mother said with a wicked smile.

She forced herself into Mother’s room and let us watch as she brushed out my mother’s hair and carefully applied lipstick. It was late in the night—my grandmother was already asleep—which lent the moment an unfamiliar electricity.

“Doesn’t she look beautiful, Yun?” your mother asked, fluffing Mother’s hair. With a discerning eye, she chose earrings to match the qipao she had loaned—deep blue with pink orchid embroidery. Your mother put me in charge of choosing a perfume and purse. With her free hand, she held out a cigarette. You jumped at the chance to light it for her.

Mother sighed, though she went along with it. By then, it had been two years since my father’s departure, and we rarely heard from him. She was not the type to show her worry, but as your mother brushed her hair, she seemed to shed an incredible weight, leaning into her sister.

“I suppose it is nice to relax a bit.”

They would go out to play mahjong. Supposedly it helped them form connections, draw more potential customers to the company. But it was also a source of important information—rumors floating around the city, speculations on which way the war would turn, horror stories of what was happening outside the International Settlement.

Looking back now, I think it was also an important time for our mothers. Hours my mother could spend free from her mother-in-law, enjoying her sister’s company instead. And for your mother, it was how she integrated herself in her new home, formed the connections she so missed from the home she had to flee. A reprieve from a war and a failing economy.