Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

on the art of letter-writing

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when I was overwhelmed by the idea of a worldwide pandemic, afraid of germinating anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment throughout the States, and in lockdown, which meant staying at home even more than usual, I began a practice that ended up being one of the more sustaining practices of my life: I began to write letters. I wrote letters to people I knew and people I wanted to know better, spiky-handwritten missives that I’d stick in envelopes and send off to their respective destinations. Many pandemic friendships ended up sprouting from those curious letters I wrote in 2020, which usually began with me asking someone through email or DM, "Do you have a mailing address that you'd feel comfortable giving me?"

Once I received a mailing address, I'd lie in bed and write paper letters on bespoke Smythson stationary (I know, I know—but I purchased a ream of bespoke letter paper and envelopes ten years ago; it's lasted me quite a while!) and French A5 cotton paper, drafting with fountain pen and ink. Throughout 2020, my practice of near-daily letter-writing rewarded me with new friendships and a regular practice of reflecting on my days. I found that writing letters was a grounding activity at a time when nothing felt grounding at all. If I could pin my days, no matter how dull, on the page like a Lepidoptera with its wings outstretched, they could stop drifting past so carelessly. If I had a reason to tell someone what I was thinking about or doing, even if the latter seemed like very little, I would pay attention to my days with more attention than I would otherwise.

Like so many things that people endeavored during the early years of the pandemic (sourdough bread-baking, anyone?), letter-writing is a slow practice, with slow results. If I pose a question by letter, I may not hear back for months, if at all. If I am fated never to receive a response, I won't know about it for a good long while—however long I'm willing to wait.

But I have practice with the slow nature of letter-writing, because I was a zine kid in the 90s and early 00s. I'd make Xeroxed magazines of my own writing, cut-and-pasted together with vintage photographs and film photographs that I’d taken myself (film photography being another slow, slow endeavor). I'd pair those black-and-white booklets with long letters to far-off kids living in other towns, most of them lonely and in search for other queer, weird, emotionally troubled, creative teens, and then I’d send them off together. I’d happily accept the mailman's bounty every afternoon (except for Sunday, the grimmest day for a mail fiend). It's the antithesis of email, which is a method of communication shot through with urgency—by the time you've read the email, you're probably already late with your response.

For whatever reason, instead of writing letters to close friends, in 2020 I chose to reach out to acquaintances that I wanted to get to know better. Very few of them replied with snail mail of their own; I can only think of one or two people who replied with their own handwritten letters. Some activities need to be undertaken with no expectations (I try to train myself into this mentality for my career, which is wily and unpredictable and promises me nothing, even as I hope), and letter-writing is one of them.

These days, we have so many ways to get in touch with each other. My BFF and I have phone calls that regularly last four or five hours long, as if we were teenagers running up the family MCI bill. But the quick-and-dirty ways that we have of communicating now means that we have far fewer bounties of letters between interesting thinkers, the way we have Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop's letters, or the many letters of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Sally Rooney's epistolary novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (and in fact, so many other epistolary novels these days) are built on a framework that exists much more rarely these days than they used to. But don't you wish, while reading Alice and Eileen's letters to one another, that we did still have that framework to hang our thoughts upon?

(In fact, I asked my agent if she would mind passing on a letter to Sally Rooney, given that she and I are represented by the same literary agency. When my agent said yes, I wrote a long, sprawling letter to Sally, who never wrote back—and there is a tale for you of letter-writing that goes nowhere.)

I write this in Taiwan. This letter is coming to you via email, through a platform called Substack. But I’ve also brought pads of pink paper—yes, I write my letters on pink paper 90% of the time—and fountain pens to pen long letters to people. What will I say? And to whom will I write? I don’t know yet. But I know that letter-writing is a practice that will follow me throughout my life. Let me know if you decide to make it one of yours.