“It may be time to leave,” he said one day at dinner. He had only been home a few months.

You flinched. It was the first time anyone had mentioned leaving Shanghai.

“We’ll be fine,” my grandmother insisted. My father and Mr. Gao exchanged dark looks.

“If the Communists win, we won’t be able to stay here,” my father said.

“They won’t win,” my grandmother said firmly.

“Why wouldn’t we be able to stay?” I asked.

“We fought with the Nationalists,” he said. “We own land. We run a capitalist business. They blame everything on landowners. Their peasant armies are rampaging through the countryside, killing anyone they want. They would take everything from us.”

“We don’t need everything,” you said quietly.

My father looked at you, tilting his head. He had never paid much attention to you.

“You have never had nothing.” His voice was cold. “We worked for the life of comfort you live now.”

“We could afford to give some of this up,” you continued even as your mother shot you a glare. “And you didn’t work for this life. Our mothers did.”

“Meng!” your mother exclaimed.

“I didn’t work for this life?” His eyes flashed. I shrank into my seat. His anger was one of the few things I remembered from the days before he left. “I fought for it with my life! Was it your mother at the end of a Japanese gun, spared only because he thought I was already dead? Was it you who could never sleep, because if it wasn’t the Japanese, it was the Communists who were going to stab you in the back even as we fought the same war? You think the war ended because your mother was making pencils? We ended the war—”

“The Americans ended the war,” you corrected.

“Be quiet,” your mother ordered. If you wouldn’t listen to my father, you at least listened to her. “Who made you think you are allowed to talk this way to your uncle? Was it that boy? Answer me.”

The others couldn’t tell, but I knew you. I knew when you were upset, you lashed out, then went quiet. Any further speaking might cause the tears to fall, and you would not let that happen, not in front of this many people.

“There are far worse things than leaving a home.” My father’s voice was low.

“Calm down and eat,” my grandmother ordered. She was the only one who could speak like that to my father. We ate the rest of our meal in silence.

At night, you paced our room.

“He was going to hit me,” you said.

“I don’t think he was—”

“He was. I could sense it. He would never hit you, but he would hit me, without a second thought.”

“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t only sorry for the way my father had treated you. I was sorry that my father returned and yours didn’t. That yours had been replaced with Mr. Gao, a man you refused to trust, who never showed you any love, only your mother.