A letter to a letter-less world

07 May, 2026

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. Sometimes, friends replied with kind thoughts and equally embarrassing and comical experiences. Sometimes, potential love interests silently recoiled at my oversharing.¹

To desire that a man should retain everything he has ever read, is the same as wishing him to retain in his stomach all that he has ever eaten. He has been bodily nourished on what he has eaten, and mentally on what he has read, and through them become what he is.²

As an avid reader, I am deeply touched by this quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, a notable optimistic-pessimist who I have enjoyed reading. I don't claim to retain all that I have ever read, but in many ways, the letters that I have written and received over the years have left a lasting impact on me, perhaps more so than literature, proper.

Letters to me are profoundly nourishing because the exchange reminds me of all the perspectives out there that contrast with my own. It pulls my writing away from mere complaint and navel gazing, toward instead compassion and harmony. It makes space for the pedantic, and somehow elevates it.³ Letters are also arguably the most delightful antidote to writers’ block⁴; I’ve lost count of how often I’ve read that professional authors regularly draft multiple simultaneous projects on a kind of rotation, to keep their thoughts fresh and free from moribund stagnation.

Essentially, I started this blog because I realized I wanted to write much more than what my small group of writing friends were capable of reading and responding to. In many ways, I was thinking of this remark from T.S. Elliot that he made in his Norton lectures at Yale:

The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don't want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written.

It's been so frustrating, and scary, to have a public writing outlet, but also kind of beautiful to practice. I don't know where it will end up. Partially I resisted the idea for a long time because I thought I wanted to work at something longer, more serious, a manuscript of some sort, autofiction that I've been reading and really admiring (Ferrante being the biggest influence for me). Blogging has its upsides, though. There is a satisfying immediacy to it that is otherwise impossible with a proper manuscript which might take years of solitary effort. It's somewhat like letters in that it is more raw and intimate, but there is no reliance on just one person to read and write back. I suppose in many ways I’ve simply gone about the process as if I were writing directly to tell a story to someone.

I've always had a tendency to box myself into deeply intimate writing that is personal and tell-all – an inclination that is endlessly suitable to letters, provided one is discerning about the recipient. And I've always felt guilty about it since reading Woolf's A Room of One's Own, where she outright challenges the women who never push themselves to write anything beyond letters. My tendency for confessional writing is for the most part not safe or sane to just simply push out there into the internet, you know? And yet it feels empowering to know that people are actually reading my writing, now. That it has its own little nook, regardless of who stops by or doesn’t.

Writing in today's postliterary, attention-depleted age feels properly bizarre. I think maybe there is just a certain type of melancholy to my current phase of life that can't be addressed with a mere blog. I’m still unsure as to how I feel about it. Maybe I just need to wait until baby's old enough and get a properly soul-sucking but socially interfacing job and forget ‘serious’ writing altogether. Is that so bad, to live a creatively unchallenged yet uncomplicated life? My mom seems to always prod me toward that path. She just wants me to be happy, in the simplest way possible.

I realized I've begun this letter with a quote from an optimistic-pessimist. I don't quite know where to place myself on the spectrum. As a mother, I'm optimistic. As a writer, perhaps most of the time, I have to admit to being pessimistic. Some part of me believes that I can pragmatically embed my despair into my writing as a kind of emotional release, so that my lived experience might have a proper chance to flourish.

If perchance you are a reader here, I’d love to hear your thoughts on reading and writing, or perhaps not-reading and not-writing instead...


Sincerely,

Soleliu