Refugees had poured into Shanghai during the war against the Japanese. Now the opposite happened. People began to leave out of fear of the Communists. The Nationalists lost battle after battle. Not even scrappy Ah-shin could find enough food to buy. There was no more hope of meat. The only vegetables we had were pickled, and every bit of rice was watered down. We once thought we had a good amount of money saved. It seemed we would blow right through it. Our mothers skipped dinner often.

“We spend all this money on the military, and they can’t even win these battles against a bunch of peasants,” my father complained. He read the news even more than my grandmother. Those days, she normally contented herself sitting beside my father and nodding off.

“The Communists have infinite peasants to throw around as they please,” Mr. Gao scoffed.

It was a soggy summer day a year into the civil war, as we ate our dinner of watery gruel, that you told us your boy and his family were fleeing to Hong Kong. His father, alarmed by the Communists’ crossing of the Yellow River into central China, had already arranged their travel. Your boy had offered to bring you, even to marry you if it would help get you out of Shanghai.

“I’m not going to, of course,” you said as you stared my father down, as if winning this argument with him was more important than your life.

For all the resolve you showed our parents, you broke down in our room. You wondered out loud if you were making a mistake, sighed that you would miss him, but it would be too much to marry him, to move to a place like Hong Kong, wouldn’t it? No, you would not leave home again, would not leave us, would not upend your life all over again, even if it meant living through another war. No, it was not possible, even if you already missed him.

You were depressed for days. It was your turn to write our story. You wrote nothing. Sometimes you made an effort to pick up a pencil, to tap at a newspaper article. Most often you were distracted by the contents of the articles—tales of savings suddenly meaning nothing, reports that there were now seven hundred trillion yuan in circulation, compared to only a few trillion a year ago, the never-ending string of suicides, businessmen found dead at the feet of Shanghai skyscrapers.

Your boy and his family, like many other families, left suddenly. Only a day passed between when he asked you to go with him and when his family fled. They owned significant land throughout Shanghai. We had all heard the horrifying stories of what had been done to landowners in the countryside.

“I wish,” you told me one day, “that he had left me something to remember him by.”