“Their heart joins with yours, for a moment, when the heart goes into your wrist,” Mother said. “Everyone can read what they wrote if you Reforge into a notebook.” She nodded at the dripping words. “But as the Reforger, you are the only one who gets this connection with the writer.”

For one full day, I was happy. Even after I bled out the words, my arm still bore the ghost of a phoenix, not nearly as solidified as our mothers’, or even yours, which was barely visible. But I was thrilled. Your mother declared it a day for celebration. Mother showed me how best to bandage my arm after a Reforging, while you and your mother and Ah-shin went to the market to splurge. You brought back five-spiced beef and hot soy milk. Ah-shin cut the beef thinly and made shaobing. We flicked fallen sesame seeds at each other, and nobody reprimanded us. We ate so well that night even my grandmother seemed pleased.

That was the winter of 1941. We were fourteen years old. Most years are fuzzy, but that one is clear. A few days after our feast, Japan attacked many places, all at once. The Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Pearl Harbor—and finally, the International Settlement of Shanghai.

We hardly knew when it happened. A few British boats, or maybe they were American, were rumored to have tried to defend the city. But most of the foreign navy had withdrawn long ago. The Japanese tanks rolled in, their red-on-white flags flying.

“It’s over,” my grandmother whispered, before Mother drew the curtains firmly shut.

By the end of the week, the foreigners were rounded up. The untouchable Americans and British were placed under house arrest, limits established on how much they could withdraw from their foreign banks, ending their lives of luxury. The Japanese registered each one and made them wear armbands indicating their nationalities.

We overheard these pieces of news from the few customers who still came into the shop. We listened with a dulled numbness, as if everything was happening in an alternate universe and if we stayed inside the pencil company, we would be preserved in our little bubble of peace.

But not even a week later, Ah-shin reported that bronze statues throughout the city had disappeared, taken by the Japanese to be melted for their metal. You asked about the bronze lions outside the bank, the ones with the shining paws you had reached for that first month and wished for home. Ah-shin did not know, but she could not imagine they would be spared. Somehow, it was the doomed fate of the lions that broke us, and we finally let ourselves cry.