SINGAPORE – They began exchanging letters in 1983, when they were only 12 years old, and kept at it for 43 years.
Yet, even as they wrote to each other all those years, they had never met in person. Not until last week, when Ms Michelle Anne Ng, a Singaporean, flew to St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada, on Oct 17 to see an old friend, Ms Sonya Clarke Casey.
“We realised that visiting each other may no longer be a dream. We can make our sign-off dream ‘Hope some day we will meet’ come true,” Ms Ng told The Straits Times.
“I mean, I’m still young. So, if not now, when? Seize the day because with age catching up with us, travelling long distance may not be as easy as someone who is in her 30s or 40s,” she said.
Both 55 now, Ms Ng and Ms Casey were paired through the International Youth Service (IYS) in 1983, when Ms Ng was in Primary 6 and Ms Casey was in Grade 5.
IYS is a now-defunct Finnish service that matched those aged 10 to 20 as pen pals or “pen-friends”, people who wrote to one another and sent letters across vast distances through postal mail.
When they met in Newfoundland, they did an interview together with Canada’s public broadcaster CBC. Ms Ng said then: “I was struggling a bit with my English, and one way to improve was through writing. One of the teachers encouraged us to have pen pals.”
She said she found Ms Casey’s name in the “looking for pen pals” section of a magazine – it was likely placed there by IYS.
Ms Casey still remembers the very first letter she received from Ms Ng. “She had written on the outside of the envelope ‘First Letter’, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is golden!’” she told CBC.
What followed was a long and faithful exchange: 43 years of letters, Christmas cards, birthday greetings, newspaper clippings and small gifts – a friendship that has survived the decline of postal mail.
Ms Ng said she had other pen pals, but Ms Casey was the one who stuck around. Each letter was a celebration, she said, because letters back then really moved at a snail’s pace.
She said it took at least a month for a letter to travel from Canada to Singapore, so there would be a pause of three to four months in between their correspondence.
For her, waiting for her first letter to arrive was like being in The Carpenters song Mr Postman.
When the mail finally arrived, she said: “I was exhilarated.”
Their first letters were cursory takes on the weather and the differences imposed on their lives by a distance of 13,000km.
Ms Casey had asked her mother to help locate Singapore on an atlas, and she wondered how she could possibly get there. She marvelled that there was a place where the sun shone all year round, and there was no snow.
“I was learning about what it meant to get a letter so far away,” she said.
