Island Letters

In this modern world, they tell us that there is no here or now – only the always – that we can always be reached. But how far apart we are is measured not by distance, but by reception.

Inked in deep black, and in carefree, balletic cursive, these words open a letter I received in early November from an intimate. Posted from leafy Yio Chu Kang, it took a full day to reach me, settling in my Lorong Chuan mailbox just four kilometres away, as the crow flies. Those four short kilometres between us, the letter journeyed and bridged with a tactile soul completely unfathomable of the email.

Ever since the relentless wiring and then unwiring of the 1990s and 2000s, personal correspondence via the postal service has been on the wane, attendant with it our use of letter-writing paper and Singapore's distinctive ‘1st Local’ stamps. These days, abstractedly glued to smartphones, Facebook and Skype, it seems we are always within reach of one another. Communicating with anyone and everyone has lost all sense of uncertainty, and distance no longer holds consequence, when any separation – even across borders – can be rendered moot with a minimal effort. Each one of us is often not more than several absent-minded clicks away from another.

But has the advent of effortless communication brought us closer to one another in this, our over-peopled city?

A people gone digital

For those of us who grew up in the 1990s, to be contactable on the move meant requiring several elements to align – having a pager, a phonecard, and a public payphone within stomping distance: none of us ever took for granted the act of getting in touch. This was a pre-mobile phone age when we could only ever receive telephone calls in our homes, and when caller ID was still rarely available. The magic resided in never being certain who was on the other end of the line till the very moment their voice carried across. Arranging to meet often rested on a flimsy but necessarily strict premise of place and time. Any deviation from either would land both parties in a limbo where all one could do was search for a public payphone to send a page, or sit tight and submit oneself to the vagaries of fate and chance.

Today, reaching out to one another has, in all its technological ease – you may intuitively feel this, too – lost a certain gravitas. In congested and wireless Singapore, even as we live cheek by jowl and pass each other every day on connecting buses and trains, the prevalence of social media and smartphones has engendered a faux sense of closeness, drawing us unmindfully into digitalised, removed relationships. We often could just as well be continents apart.

Eschewing the instantaneity of pixels and radio signals, the written letter carries the weight not just of ink and paper, but also of time, taking a comparative eternity to travel. This antiquated inefficiency has condemned letter writing to a slow demise, a fate shared with both the extinct aerogramme and telegram. Yet, in spite of the deep memory banks of personal messages I have archived in Gmail and Facebook, many of them thoughtful ones, a single letter retrieved from my mailbox often contains more humanity than all the former put together.

Letter writing today has changed little from the days of old. One still needs to procure a sturdy pen, choice writing paper, envelopes, postage stamps, and set aside the rarest of all these materials – not time, but intent. For in our ever busy lives, it is in the act of writing, and in it the conscious act of setting aside personal time and a writing space – be it at a desk, propped up on elbows in bed, or on one's lap – that intent blossoms and the distance between writer and addressee dissolves. It is an act of consideration. The last letter I wrote, I wrote in the morning, sitting in a passageway overlooking the large trees on Mountbatten Road, letter pad balanced on my left knee, paper creasing under the weight of my pen hand.

In the creases and folds of letter paper, and in a person's chosen words intently penned and sealed in ink, lies all the decency of the human spirit, and embodies all that the recipient means to the writer. Which is a considerable amount, when seen in the context of our manic, modern lives today, where time is often at such a premium that even blithe emails, Facebook messages and mobile txts can go unanswered for days, even weeks at a time.

Letters and distance

To be fair, many Singaporeans still write to penpals abroad, over vast distances. But what is to be said for those of us who choose to embark on an exchange of letters between the clustered postcodes of our claustrophobic island city? Letters that cross neither continents nor the sea, but instead negotiate neighbouring lorongs and avenues, when it would be far easier to fire off a WhatsApp message in seconds?

Bookstore assistant Renée Ting leads me down a narrow passage lined by bookshelves, dives into a hollow behind a white door, and emerges with a stack of mail nearly a foot high – rumpled pint-sized manila envelopes, hand-made cards, straw-coloured letters precisely folded into quarters. Renée has been exchanging letters with an old secondary school acquaintance for the better part of three years. At the height of their exchange, they were writing to each other every week. She lives in placid, low-rise Tiong Bahru; her correspondent, by the east coast in Tanjong Katong.

“We hardly see each other at all. We don't feel like we have to, and yet ...” Renée trails off, gathering her thoughts.

“I mean, we didn't really know each other in school, it was more on a 'hi' and 'bye' basis, but now she's more updated about my life than most of my other friends. She's one of my closest friends, but in a different way.”

The twosome pen their dreams and fears in their letters, and share with each other all manner of undistilled, nebulous thoughts that often only find their clarity when written down. A shared love for the written word was what initially ignited their commitment to an exchange of letters, but what they both quickly discovered was how letter writing – in spite of the separation that it imposes between correspondents – ironically brought them closer than they ever would have been as friends in the orthodox sense.

On an island: keeping a distance, to cultivate a nearness.

“Singapore is so small, but that doesn't make it easier to really connect with people,” Renée confides. “The other day, a friend and I bumped into a girl we knew from secondary school. The three of us grew up together. But we don't know her anymore. It wouldn't have happened like this if not for technology and social media. We somehow stopped putting effort into staying in touch because it was so convenient. I don't think we even realised it. At the back of our minds we know we can get in touch with anyone so easily, but we don't. Or we do and it's just short one, two-liners. It's a distance that nobody realises is growing.”

She speaks of an emotional distance, of the sort that is difficult to bridge when words come cheap and easy. Yet keeping a physical distance, and mindfully abiding by it – a distance measured not in kilometres nor by the space between corporeal touch, but rather by the ease of reaching out one to the other – can cover the inner distance that matters.

My confidante and I – we meet regularly, we phone, we even txt (though sparingly). And we continue to exchange letters. But we don't exist in each other's faceless Facebook worlds, nor do we know each other's email addresses. We're in a better place this way: where each time we reach out to the other we draw closer. As if we really lived on an island.

Words & Images David Ee

Illustrations Norman Teh