A letter to a letter-less world

Dear stranger, I am a sucker for salutations. Even when the recipient potentially finds them extremely awkward (as they often do, in today's largely letter-less world). Letters have been dear to me, ever since I was a little girl. I lived apart from my parents between ages 3 and 6, when they were pursuing grad school in the States and I was living in China with my grandparents. I wrote to them, because we could not visit. Eagerly I waited to meet them, because I had no memory of what they looked like. My favorite letter in the world is one that my father wrote to me when I turned 18 and had just left for college. It was about the day of my birth. It is poetry as much as it is memory. It is precisely about me, and yet it is also not. Throughout my school years, I poured myself into letters. I was trying to be like the literary heroes whose letters I read copiously from – Kafka, Plath, Hemingway, Nabokov, Woolf. I was too afraid to write outside of letters, to shout into the void.…