u've got mail

when was the last time you looked forward to opening the letter box?
i never do these days, not even during my birthday.
each opening now is accompanied with lots of corporate envelopes, some of which you don't even wish to open cos you knew more or less the contents inside just by the look of the logo on the outside - THOSE FREAKING BILLS.

i used to enjoy opening the letter box. 'cos i had numerous pen pals, and one of which was my school mate, marilynn, whom i got to meet almost every day back then. but we still loved to write those secrets of crushes in school, the gossips of other girls in class and decorate the flower scented letter papers with stickers and drawings and then send the letters out with stamps of junk boats that cost only 10 cents each. marilynn was the one who taught me how to fold a leaf into a grasshopper.

i had another pen pal from japan, akiko kojima, who sent me a beautiful jade green piece of cloth, that was embroidered with flowers and birds. i wondered what was that for, it was too big to be a hanky, too thick and small to be a bandanna. and she said in the following letter that it was used in japan to wrap lunch boxes for school.

one from england, anne williams, who sent me a letter filled with different value of pence coins on it, telling me how much each coin is worth and what it could buy her. she did it 'cos i sent her a $1 note of singapore, showing off my country's currency design.

and a guy from portugal, francisco, who confessed his liking for me even though we never met and started plotting a romantic meet up in lisbon. i guess he never knew where singapore was and was convinced that the world was only the size of where he lived, lisbon.

those were the pre-internet era.

these days, i don't even get personal emails in my inbox. many are mass forwarded electronic chain letters that would instruct you to send the email to at least 10 other people, if not you'll be unlucky for the rest of your life. random mails that suggest products that could enlarge "my" penis, these junk mails should be written with gender differentiation scripts. and more.

so, start sending me nice emails with personal touch to my inbox will ya? it'll be super nice to get them in snail mails.

these letter boxes will extinct soon. even though not as pretty as what we get nowadays, they are boxes that spoke of the nostalgic tales of the wonderfully cool 80s and early 90s in singapore.

i only loved to open letters from this.

++++++

this was a pleasant email to receive after writing my previous note. the kind of email that i had not received for a long long time, compared to those nigerian scams and mass forwarded stuff. it brought me down memory lane and i could almost smell the chalk dusted classrooms and visualize the days back in zhong hua. nice one, tea. :)

+++++

Dear Shihui,

After reading your facebook note, I felt compelled to write you a really personal, customised email thats specially catered to you.

We met in the year 1992 at Zhong Hua Sec. You were sitting in the front, with Raymond Toh between us in the same row. You were in charged of all lighting and ventilation for the class as you were positioned under the switches. You were also responsible for the dissemination of documents for our row. Occasionally you were the look out to keep an eye out for teachers approaching while we were monkeying around in class. Of course, I was never part of the mob, merely a spectator.

We parted ways in 1994 as we went to different streams. Not that I enjoyed swimming much in the first place. I simply can't stand the possibility of having fish nibbling away on me. After that, we mostly stuck to a passing hi and bye. Sometimes you would come visit my class to see other people. I seldom go to your class as its further away down the corridor and your accounts teacher scares me.

Then the years drifted by, we met a few times at gatherings and chinese new year parties at my house. It wasn't until last year that I actually asked you out for, as far as I could recall, the first time out. We had a drink at a sake bar with another Raymond between us.

I have always found chatting with you rather comforting and it fills me with nostalgia, even though we never really kept in touch much in the first place. Talking to you is like walking into my old room. You know where everything is and I can just start off from when I last left. Maybe because you were from Ai Tong too. I can't quite put my finger on it but its one of those things that is just as it is.

Anyway I haven't written such a long email for such a long time. I am glad your note gave me some motivation to do so.

Yours truly,
Guofeng.