For As Long As One Could

The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy and cool, a fine mist lingering between the trees.

Yi-yun sat in the passenger seat, her hands resting loosely in her lap.

She gazed out the window and found herself thinking back to the first time she had driven up this road with her mother.

“You really have time to drive me all the way to Pinglin?” she asked at last, turning her head toward Zhi-hao. “Don’t you have training or something?”

He kept his eyes on the road and shrugged slightly.

“I do,” he said. “But I’m taking the time.”

Yi-yun lowered her gaze.

“But then...”

“It’s fine,” he interrupted gently. “Don’t worry about it.”

She looked at him, surprised by the certainty in his voice, and felt something warm tighten in her chest.

It wasn’t the words themselves, but the way he said them, as though the decision required no further justification.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Zhi-hao’s mouth curved into a crooked smile.

“Besides,” he added, “this is probably more relaxing than running endless sprint drills in circles again, just so someone can pretend it’ll make me hit better. No thanks.”

Yi-yun didn’t understand every detail, but the dry humor made her laugh anyway.

They drove on in silence after that, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.

When they finally took the familiar turnoff, she recognized the surroundings at once.

“It still smells the same,” she murmured, more to herself than to Zhi-hao.

The old house lay quietly among the fields, just as she remembered it, and Yi-yun paused for a moment after stepping out of the car.

“I haven’t been here in so long…” she said softly.

Inside, the air was cool, filled with the familiar scent of wood, earth, and dried leaves.

Yi-yun closed her eyes briefly, then headed decisively toward the cellar.

“She must have left something for me down here,” she said quietly as she opened a old closet.

Zhi-hao helped without a word, opening cupboards, pulling out drawers, checking behind curtains.

Suddenly Yi-yun stopped.

“Wait.”

One of the drawers was slightly ajar, just enough to be noticeable.

She pulled it open slowly and inside lay a simple wooden box.

Her breath caught.

“Is that…?” Zhi-hao began.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I think so.”

She carefully lifted the box, carried it upstairs into the kitchen, set it on the table, and opened it slowly.

Yi-yun’s heart began to race.

Inside it lay a bundle of leather-bound papers, densely filled with writing.

“It’s… a diary?” she whispered. “So she wrote everything down...”

Zhi-hao looked at her.

“Do you want to read it?”

Yi-yun nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I have to. I don’t want to put things off anymore.”

Then she looked up at him, a small, genuine smile on her lips.

“But first,” she said, reaching for the kettle, “let’s put some tea on. We can spare that much time.”

They waited in silence as the water slowly came to a boil.

Only then did she open the diary again.

She didn’t read from the beginning, but turned the pages until the story resumed where it had once been left unfinished, many years ago.

᯽᯽᯽

The nights were no longer quiet.

Even up here in Pinglin, far from the harbor and the city, the tremors reached us.

A distant rumble, shivering windows, dull impacts that made the earth shake.

Taihoku was burning.

Not every day, but often enough that it could no longer be dismissed as something far away.

In the first years after his reassignment, Shuichi still wrote to me regularly.

Always from a different battlefield, always from wherever he was needed as a symbol, as motivation for the war.

His face still appeared on posters, his voice occasionally on the radio, but it was never the man I knew.

Only his letters to me, brief and restrained, as censorship demanded, revealed between the lines who he truly was.

His caution. His concern for me.

Then, after the Americans entered the war, they became fewer.

One letter in spring. One in autumn.

And then… nothing.

For over a year.

My father had died in Taihoku several months earlier.

He had been visiting a business partner when the bombs fell, but he never made it to the air-raid shelter.

From then on, the responsibility rested entirely with me.

People still called me the Tea Princess, but the meaning of the word had changed.

It no longer spoke of beauty, grace, or prosperity, but of care, support and shelter.

The plantation had long ceased to be a place of tea production.

It had become a refuge for the wounded, for refugees, for families without homes.

We laid out mats everywhere, shared blankets, cooked thin soups from whatever we could still obtain.

Food shortages meant we no longer grew tea, but anything that grew quickly and could fill empty stomachs.

Every day was a quiet struggle for survival, without heroes.

And yet, in the rare moments of calm, when the wind moved through the tall grass and everything sounded as it once had, my heart grew heavy.

Because I thought of Shuichi.

Of the quiet moments we had shared.

Of where he might be.

Of whether he, too, might be watching the sky somewhere, hoping I was still here.

I carried the pendant he gifted me at all times, like a promise I had made to myself.

Then the day came.

It was the spring of 1945, and I still remember the mild morning air.

I was revising supply lists when a new transport was announced : wounded from the Marianas, for whom there was no room elsewhere.

When I speaked with the workers, assigned tasks, prepared places, I heard hurried footsteps.

“Miss Lin!”

One of the women came running, out of breath, her face flushed.

“Miss Lin! Lin Shu-fen!” she cried. “He’s here…!”

My heart stopped.

“Who?” I asked, though I already knew.

“With the wounded transport,” she gasped. “The one that just arrived!”

I didn’t wait.

I ran.

The truck still stood at the edge of the field, women helping the wounded down.

I searched frantically, my gaze jumping from face to face, and with every step the fear grew that I might not recognize him.

Then I saw movement.

Someone jumped down from the truck carefully, leaning on a crutch.

One arm bandaged. One eye covered.

But alive.

Our eyes met, and he smiled faintly.

That gentle, almost understated smile I had carried with me a thousand times, and which the posters never showed.

I ran to him without thinking and threw myself into his arms.

“Ah… careful,” he simply murmured, laughing softly. “Not so tight…”

But I didn’t let go.

The weeks that followed felt unreal, as though the war had held its breath for a moment and forgotten us.

Shuichi's wounds healed slowly, his arm remained stiff, his left eye was gone, but he lived.

And even then, that alone felt like a gift I did not dare question.

We didn’t speak much about the future back then.

Not because we couldn’t see it, but because we both knew how limited it was.

During the day he helped where he could, carrying crates, repairing fences, assisting with the care of the severely wounded.

Nothing remained of the “Devil of Xiaofeng” he had once been known as.

And yet his presence caused murmurs among soldiers and civilians alike.

Before long, they no longer saw a famous officer or a propaganda figure, just another man who had stayed, who was trying to keep things going.

In the evenings, when his strength allowed it, Shuichi insisted on helping in the kitchen.

He worked quietly, methodically, chopping vegetables with the same concentration he applied to everything else.

“You don’t have to do this,” I told him once.

He merely shook his head.

“But I want to,” he said simply.

The nights were short, but they were ours.

I don’t know when I realized that a part of him would continue to live on within me.

Perhaps I sensed it before I fully understood it

I never told him.

One early morning, when mist still drifted between the tea fields and we woke more slowly than usual, Shuichi said suddenly:

“They’ll call me back soon… maybe this week.”

He spoke calmly, matter-of-factly, as he always did concerning such things.

Everyone already knew that the war was lost, and that men like him were no longer needed to win, but to die, as was expected of them.

But there was no way out, and we knew it.

We didn’t speak of running, of the mountains or hiding places,.

It were thoughts without weight.

Someone like him, a known face, could not simply disappear.

Not without dragging others down with him.

So we chose the only thing that remained to us:

We married.

Not officially, without applications or forms.

Just the two of us, before Guanyin, at the old shrine where we had first met in secret that night long ago.

No witnesses but the wind in the trees.

He held my hands, and I knew this was the one moment the world couldn't take from us.

“No matter what happens,” he said quietly, “you are my wife. Now and always.”

A few days later, the order came, just as he had expected.

He packed his few belongings carefully while I helped him, tied the bag, smoothed the creases from his clothes.

When he left, the red ribbon was still tied around his arm.

We didn’t say much at our farewell because words wouldn't have changed anything.

One last embrace.

A smile.

Then he was gone.

And I never saw him again.

᯽᯽᯽

“…Since June 26, 1945, he has been listed as missing. But I never gave up hope that one day he would return to me.”

Yi-yun paused after finishing the line.

Zhi-hao leaned back in his chair, visibly moved.

”There... there’s something else right at the end…” she said with a shaking voice. “It looks like it was added later…”

She took a breath, then read slowly, word by word:

I now know that love is not measured by how long it lasted, but by whether it was lived, for as long as one could…

Yi-yun let the page fall.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Then something inside her gave way.

The tears she had held back until then did not come all at once, but quietly, one after another, as though something within her had finally been allowed to loosen.

She pressed her lips together, but a soft sob still escaped her.

Zhi-hao said nothing.

He stepped closer and gently placed a hand on her back.

Yi-yun leaned into him without thinking, the diary still held in her hands.

And she knew, the story of her grandmother had finally been told.