The hand-written Chinese "home letter," a traditional expression of personal experience, sentiment and love to dear ones, is on the way out because of telephones and instant messaging in the modern age.
There's nothing like holding a letter in your hands and reading the words of someone you care about or love. Pen and paper, they say, are better for nuance and for expressing feelings than instant text messaging. Yet, many love letters are instant messages or e-mails these days.
Many scholars and preservationists see the waning of the personal letter, in calligraphy on paper, as a great loss and have launched a campaign to preserve these letters. The same is true in many modern cultures - the old ways of personal expression are being lost to busy schedules and technology.
For example, a 25-year-old editor, Hu Sun, last wrote to her family in central China's Hubei Province six years ago. Today she is busy working in Beijing all day and contacts home mainly by telephone.
"I remember I wrote to my parents when I first entered university," said Hu at the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation.
"Now, I use my mobile phone, telephone and e-mail most often. It is much more convenient (than writing letters)," she said.
When the telephone and the Internet entered the lives of the Chinese people, traditional "home letters," written in black ink on white paper, have been fading, like the ink.
"For the sake of the country, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of our descendants, let's move to save the home letters! It is an urgent task!" said a group of Chinese cultural celebrities.
The group, including Ji Xianlin and, Ren Jiyu, made the appeal in an open published letter.
They have launched a campaign to collect and save home letters scattered both at home and abroad. It covers only paper letters, including the envelopes, no matter how long the letter, or when or where it was written.
"Traditional home letters, as part of the outstanding folk culture of the Chinese nation, are a comprehensive carrier of literature, aesthetics, calligraphy, etiquette, packaging and papers," the conservationists said.
"For thousands of years, letters have been carrying forward the endless kinship culture of the Chinese nation, maintaining human true love and also faithfully recording the changes of the times," it said.
The campaign, called "The Program of Saving Chinese Home Letters," has collected more than 15,000 letters since it was started in April by the China National Museum and the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society.
In China's biggest city, Shanghai, the post office delivered as many as 800 million letters of all kinds in 2004, and each Shanghai citizen on average received 60 letters.
However, private letters only accounted for less than 10 percent of the total, whereas the ratio was 90 percent a decade ago - the rest were all business letters and bills.
Telephones and e-mail are replacing mail carts. Statistics show that the Chinese sent a total of 210 billion pieces of text messages in 2004, or nearly 600 million per day, and the number of Chinese Netizens increased to 103 million by June 30.
(Xinhua News Agency September 14, 2005)
