The Phoenix Pencil Company

The novel alternates between two interwoven narratives: the present-day diary of Monica Tsai, a college sophomore and computer science student, and the letters of her grandmother, Wong Yun, addressed to her estranged cousin, Chen Meng. Together, these accounts trace a family's history across wartime Shanghai, Cold War-era Taiwan and California, and contemporary America, connected by a secret power hidden inside the pencils their family once made.

Monica, raised by her grandparents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after both her parents left, has spent a year searching for Meng as a belated birthday gift for her grandmother. Her search leads her to EMBRS (Electronic Memory Bank Enabling Radical Sharing), a search engine designed by her professor, Prof. Logan, that matches personal data across social media. EMBRS links Monica's queries to a post by Louise Sun, a Princeton undergraduate who photographed herself with an elderly woman in Shanghai identified as having run the Phoenix Pencil Company, the same business Monica's family once operated. Louise confirms the woman is Meng and delivers a single black pencil with a phoenix carving that Meng sends for grandmother.

Monica meets Louise at a frozen yogurt shop in New Jersey and is immediately drawn to her, though she is disappointed that Meng's gift appears ordinary. When Monica returns home and presents the pencil, grandmother accepts it quietly. That night, her grandfather, Torou, tells Monica that grandmother has been diagnosed with a progressive memory-loss illness consistent with Alzheimer's disease. Devastated, Monica decides to take the fall semester off to care for her grandparents, and Prof. Logan offers her a paid remote position developing EMBRS from home.

Meanwhile, grandmother begins writing a long letter to Meng, racing to record her memories before the disease erases them. Her narrative reaches back to 1937 Shanghai, when Meng and her mother arrive at the Phoenix Pencil Company as refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion of China. The two girls clash immediately, but their rivalry gives way to a reluctant bond as Yun discovers that the women in her family possess a secret ability called Reforging. By stabbing a sharpened pencil heart, the graphite core, into a vein at the wrist, a Reforger absorbs the memories of everything that pencil ever wrote, experiencing a brief, intimate connection with the original writer. She then slices the darkened phoenix scar on her arm and bleeds the words out as black ink onto paper. Yun's grandmother long forbids her from learning, but relents when a desperate woman arrives seeking her dead husband's poems and Meng successfully Reforges them.

During the Japanese occupation of Shanghai's International Settlement from 1941 onward, the family Reforges coded intelligence messages for the Nationalist underground, directed by a severe operative named Mr. Gao. The work takes a harsh physical toll on their mothers. To cope, Yun and Meng write a collaborative story about two girls with pencil-based superpowers, sharing chapters by Reforging each other's pencils and burning the evidence. After Japan's surrender in 1945, the Chinese Civil War forces the family apart. Yun's father insists they flee to Taiwan, while Meng and her mother, whose late husband fought for the Communists, stay behind. Before parting, the girls finish their story. Meng declares it should end with a smile. They exchange pencils, and Yun promises to return.

She never does. In Taiwan, Yun and her mother establish a new branch of the Phoenix Pencil Company, which becomes a front for Nationalist surveillance. Yun meets Torou and begins a relationship during which she discovers a second form of Reforging: an orgasm can release the absorbed words from the body without bleeding, keeping them private. Yun panics and pushes Torou away. He leaves for MIT without saying goodbye. Meng, meanwhile, sends a desperate letter revealing she burned down the Shanghai pencil company to sever the Communists' surveillance supply. Yun resolves to reach America, persuading Mr. Gao to send her to California to run a restaurant that doubles as a surveillance operation. Isolated and guilt-ridden, she Reforges stolen pencils from Taiwanese students, betraying their private words. When her mother dies, Yun sets the house on fire, destroys the remaining pencils, and flees to Boston, where she eventually finds Torou again.

In the present, Monica and Louise's relationship deepens through nightly exchanges of their highs and lows, phone calls, and Louise's visit to Cambridge. Louise reveals her academic interest in "memory work," a form of digital archiving focused on surfacing underheard stories, and asks if Monica's family would share grandmother's story for a grant application. Monica is torn between attraction and suspicion that Louise values her only for access to the family's history. When grandmother demonstrates Reforging by stabbing Monica's pencil into her own wrist, she inadvertently surfaces Monica's private scribbles about her feelings for Louise, revealing Monica's attraction. Grandmother responds with quiet acceptance, telling Monica to invite Louise over.

Grandmother teaches Monica to Reforge, insisting she learn to release the words through pleasure rather than pain. With Louise's encouragement over text, Monica achieves this during a late-night exchange and Reforges grandmother's brief, loving message. The experience leaves her awestruck by the depth of understanding it provides.

When grandmother falls down the stairs and is hospitalized with a fractured hip, Louise drives through the night from New Jersey. At the hospital, however, Louise presses grandmother to share her story before it is too late, and grandmother angrily orders her to leave. Monica, overhearing, feels betrayed.

Monica Reforges Meng's pencil, experiencing a flood of Meng's words: her forgiveness of Yun, her encounter with Monica's father, Edward, in Shanghai years earlier, and her faith in the next generation. When Louise offers to help complete the Reforging, Monica accuses her of wanting access to Meng's story. Their argument escalates. Louise points out that Monica's own work on EMBRS scraped people's data without consent; Monica counters that Louise tried to force grandmother's story from her in a hospital bed. Louise leaves the house.

Monica also discovers that EMBRS's business model depends on selling users' private journal data. She submits a journal entry exposing how Prof. Logan misrepresented her grandmother's story in his investor pitch, routing it to all prospective investors. Prof. Logan revokes her access.

Monica's father invites her to Shanghai and promises to return to Cambridge so she can resume school. A package arrives from Louise containing a pencil letter written with a Phoenix Pencil Company pencil that Meng gave her. Monica Reforges it and experiences Louise's apology and declaration of love. Louise confesses that her desperation to belong drove her to prioritize stories over people and announces she is taking the next semester off to travel to Shanghai.

In Shanghai, Monica meets Meng at a park near the old pencil company site. Meng asks Monica to Reforge grandmother's pencil, saying Monica has not yet had her last conversation with her grandmother. Monica pushes the heart into her wrist and experiences the full sweep of grandmother's life. She bleeds the story into a notebook for Meng but consciously keeps the words from Louise's earlier pencil inside herself, choosing not to release them. Meng tells Monica that both she and Yun ended up writing their stories not only for each other, but for Monica.

That evening, Monica meets Louise at the Bund, Shanghai's historic waterfront. She gives Louise a scarf grandmother knitted in Princeton colors. They take a photo and send it to grandmother and Meng. Monica kisses Louise for the first time, reflecting on the chain of people who survived wars and displacement to bring her to this moment, and chooses to keep Louise's most intimate words held within her body, private and shared with no one.