Letters to China and other ways of keeping in touch
As a kid, I remember seeing envelopes addressed to relatives in China. “China” was the only English word on those envelopes; everything else was written in Chinese. Even then, there wasn’t a single numeral (Roman or Chinese) in those addresses. When I asked my mother about it, she explained that the letters were going to villages too small for each house to have an address. Instead, the letters would be delivered to a main gathering place such as a sundry shop, and the villagers would go and collect their letters from there.
Compared to such basic mail delivery methods, we are fortunate today to have more sophisticated ways of keeping in touch.
Keeping in touch by letters sent by air mail is called “snail mail” nowadays, probably because it is the slowest way to keep in touch. Instead, there’s now electronic mail. Faster than even email is instant messaging. If you and the person you want to talk to are both online, you can chat in real time, using a variety of IM tools.
Keeping in touch by telephones used to be very expensive, too. Again, not many families would have their own telephones, relying instead on a common telephone located at a public place, e.g., the sundry shop.
Now, telephones are not only a must-have in every household, but also for every individual in the form of a mobile telephone (also called cell or hand phones, depending on where you are in the world).
With handphones, you have a choice of speaking to the person (which is what telephones are meant to be used for), or you can send messages.
My preferred mode of communication is the short message system via my handphone. Sometimes, it may not be convenient to talk to the person on the phone – they may be in a meeting, or some place where it’s too noisy. So, a short text message is a good way to keep in touch, even for something as simple as “need to talk to you. convenient to call?”
Of course, when I send an sms, I expect a reply. It may not be instant, but even a reply sent a couple of hours, or half a day, later, or even the next day would be much appreciated. More often than not, there is no response to my sms. A common reason is “handphone out of credit” or “out of battery”. And there are handphone users who think it’s too expensive to send sms, so they don’t reply. Instead, they wait till they have access to a computer, and reply by email instead.
