By Ban Zhang
More than thirty years ago, on the night before I left Shanghai for Europe to pursue graduate studies, my newly retired father handed me a black WingSung fountain pen. The brand’s name, meaning “eternal life” in Chinese, carried a quiet symbolism that I did not fully grasp at the time.
“This has been with me for half my life,” he said softly in the Shanghai dialect. “Now it’s yours. Use it well to write what matters.”
Thus, that pen travelled with me as I crossed oceans, marking not only my own milestones but also the lives of others.
At a beach wedding near Scheveningen in The Hague, I uncapped the pen and signed as a witness for the bride and groom, two classmates of mine from different continents. Waves crashed against the shore, and gulls wheeled overhead. For the first time, I felt writing could anchor me in a foreign land. That pen tied the Huangpu River, which winds through Shanghai, to the North Sea, the broad waters between Britain and northern Europe, giving me courage I didn’t know I had.
As I slipped the pen into my pocket, memories of its past rose. I recalled my father sitting under a desk lamp, laboriously holding the pen with a sigh. My mother once told me that this pen had been used by my father to write his self-criticisms during the Cultural Revolution—a political movement in China during the 1960s and 1970s—and, years later, had been used to draft business plans for his organization in its aftermath.
That was the pen. No longer merely a writing tool, it became an invisible thread, binding me to both home and history.
Years later, I crossed another ocean, this time to immigrate to Canada. Vancouver greeted me with rain, mountains, and cherry blossoms.
But the move was overwhelming—boxes stacked high, papers scattered everywhere. Somewhere in the chaos, the pen disappeared. I searched every pocket, shook out every book, but it was nowhere to be found.
I felt its loss more deeply than I expected. That pen had travelled with me through lectures, libraries, and a windswept wedding. Now it was missing, as if migration had claimed one more piece of my past. We leave behind familiar places, friends, even parts of ourselves. Why not also a pen?
My wife comforted me, saying, “Every loss brings a gain.” And over time, life in Canada offered its own enduring lessons.
What the pen represents
One summer afternoon, roses spilled over trellises, their fragrance mingling with sunlight. A young couple—two international students, the children of old friends from Shanghai—stood beneath an arch of blooms. When it came time to sign as a witness, I had no WingSung in my pocket. I borrowed an ordinary ballpoint.
At first, I felt the absence of the fountain pen. But then I realized what mattered was not the object itself, but what it represented: responsibility, memory, and the continuity of bearing witness.
Decades later, I returned to Shanghai for another family wedding, this time for a young couple who had just come back from studying in New York. The ceremony unfolded beside the Huangpu River. Sunlight glinted off the water and the Nanpu Bridge, like a blessing on the newlyweds.
By then, my father had long passed, yet as I leaned over to sign at the reception, I felt his presence behind me, steadying my hand as he once had.
Standing on the stage as a witness, I understood that inheritance is not measured by what we hold in our hands, but by what we carry forward in spirit.
Three weddings, three cities—The Hague, Vancouver, and Shanghai—charted the journey of my life across oceans: from wide-eyed student to immigrant to someone now entering retirement. The pen had mirrored the same arc, its story unfolding in quiet presence, in hollow loss, and in fleeting return.
These days, I write mostly on a keyboard. Yet I often think back to that night before I first left home, when my father pressed the pen into my hand. His words were simple: Use it well. The pen may be gone, but its gift lives on—in memory, in responsibility, and in the lives of many it has helped shape.
Ban Zhang is the author of Going to the Grouse Grind – Collected Essays. The Chinese edition is available through the Harvard Book Store and other online booksellers. Follow the Toronto Spark on X @TOSparkOfficial.
