Letters from Lockdown

With help from Brian Wu

Last week, I dug up a box of my parents' old letters. They were written before my parents were married, while my mom was still in Taiwan and an ocean away from my dad in the United States. A surprising number of the letters were in English; the writing is stilted, and it's clear that English is neither of my parents' first language, but the mundane recounting of their days felt somehow both endearing and sacred. Holding the tangible artifacts of my parents' courtship in my hands, I imagined for the first time the twentysomethings they were when they wrote those letters.

Handwriting letters is more a novelty than necessity now. It seems silly to write and send a letter when a text message will solicit a response within minutes. My daily musings don't merit the ink, paper, postage, and time required to carry the words across the country; the use of those resources deserves more deliberation and depth of thought.

But as we are often reminded, these are unprecedented times. This pandemic, for those of us ordered to stay at home, has redefined time and distance. There's a simultaneous contraction and expansion of the old conceptions of space. In the six weeks since I was suspended from my nonessential role, the separation between me and the rest of the world has become vast. My weekly trip to the grocery store ten minutes away is now the longest journey I make. The closest physical proximity I have with strangers is while navigating the canned foods aisle, all of us eyeing each other distrustfully over homemade masks, a careful shopping cart's distance apart.

Meanwhile, downtown LA's skyline is crisper and the hills beyond more immediate. The newfound flexibility in our schedules has shrunk the distance from far-flung loved ones. This is a time of reconnection—with each other and with ourselves. Things are clearer, and the distance between mailboxes seems more surmountable.

I've started exchanging letters and postcards with some of my oldest friends. N