The lost culture of exchanging letters
Reminder to a poor correspondent self
The other day, a friend from high school reached out to me through e-mail. She was asking my address to send a holiday card. It was a strange feeling, being asked for the address to send a letter through a digital communication which could sufficiently achieve the same exact purpose. Most of those cases, I knew from experience, it would be a “formal” letter letting me know that the sender was either getting married or expecting a baby. So I was expecting that sort of announcement when I finally received a letter from her after a few weeks. Instead, it was merely a holiday card asking my whereabouts and wishing me a great new year. As much as I was surprised to read it, I found myself happier than I had imagined receiving a letter for the sake of a letter. There is something about receiving a letter with a sender’s handwriting that conveys what e-mails or text messages can never do.
As a kid, I collected letter sets and postcards. After all, what I could afford with a small amount of allowance was stationaries that oh so tickled my little girl heart. My collection included colorful Disney character letter sets and beautiful postcards with Norman Rockwell illustrations. I used to spread them out and admire my collection from time to time. There was a conflict between wanting to use them and hanging onto the pretty things. After all these years, there is still a good amount of my collection left unused in my desk drawer.
Back then, I had a few people to write letters regularly. It was a trend to have pen pals as I grew up and I had several. One of my pen pals was a girl I met at a ski trip when I was around eight years old. She was an ideal candidate for a pen pal, lived far enough that we could not meet up easily and went to a different school so we had something to talk about. We exchanged letters for years. We talked about our school lives, the TV shows and comic books we liked, what we did in summer. I had always wanted to write about the boy from school I had a crush on and also to ask her if she had someone she liked. I remember not being able to bring up the courage to do so for a long time, writing the questions and tearing up the letter right before posting it. As we entered the middle school, however, our lives became occupied with other things and exchanging letters did not seem so exciting anymore. We gradually slowed down writing to each other. We ended up just exchanging holiday cards until we finally fully stopped corresponding.
When I was an elementary school student, I received “the letter of unfortunate events.” If you were a kid growing up around the ‘70s-’90s in Japan, you have surely heard of this type of letters. The letter tells you that if you do not send the same letters to three different people in a week, a series of unfortunate events would happen to you. It was such a stupid prank that someone somewhere came up, but it ended up becoming such a huge phenomenon back then. If you are an easily influenced kid, which most naïve kids are, you would send letters to three different people, and something that has started from one person could quickly involve hundreds and thousands of kids nationwide.
I knew of that letter, but I still panicked when I received it. I did not want any unfortunate events to happen to me. I was half skeptical of the validity of the letter, yet sending out those letters anyway seemed like a necessary precaution. I considered who to write the letters. I could not send them to my friends in school, I saw them every day and it could easily become a big problem in the classroom. Then, to whom could a kid without much social life outside school send those letters? As the deadline approaching, I finally decided to send one to a friend from kindergarten. She went to another elementary school and I knew her address. I secretly wrote the letter and posted it. I do not even remember the other two people I sent the letters to.
A few days later, my mother received a phone call. I was in my room and could hear her apologizing in the distance. After she hung up, she stormed into my room. She was fuming mad saying, “what the hell did you do? What stupid thing have you done this time?” I was too scared to tell what I had done, so I pretended not knowing what she was talking about. She said, “did you send some kind of a letter to your friend from kindergarten? Her mother just called me and said your friend is deeply shocked by your letter.” I felt sorry for my friend and also speculated this very moment could be counted as an unfortunate event. All I could do was to tearfully defend myself yelling, “but I did not want unfortunate events to happen to me!”
When I first moved to the U.S. to study at college, I used to receive letters occasionally. One time, my long-time friend sent me a collage of photos of us together with the message “hope you are doing great in America!” I displayed it in my dorm room for a while. My childhood piano instructor used to send me beautiful cards periodically with a brief message. When I saw cute cards at stores, I used to think if she would like to receive them. I myself wrote letters more often. Whenever I traveled, I used to send cards to my family. I also did this thing with those I traveled with that we exchanged cards of our choice and wrote to each other so that we could later receive the cards from the travel destination.
It always excited me to see letters waiting as I opened my mailbox, which over time has become less and less. I am very bad at keeping contacts through e-mails, so writing letters seems even more daunting task. Yet, the pleasure of receiving a physical letter is way more than finding an e-mail in my inbox. Just a simple handwritten letter asking your whereabouts and wishing for your health can create tremendous effects on maintaining relationships, as they may be your family, friends, or anyone else. I see my stack of letter sets abandoned in my desk drawer. I see the address book I kept which has not been updated for a long time. Should I write a summer greeting to my piano instructor? Should I write to my old pen pal to see what she is up to? After all, the letter sets exist to be admired by the recipients, not to be stored attentively in my desk drawer without seeing the light of day. It is time to pick up a pen and start catching up.
