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[Life] 1989, Weekly Family LettersAuthor: JEFFI CHAO HUI WU Time: 2025-07-08 Tuesday, 4:15 AM ········································ [Life] 1989, Weekly Family Letters When I first arrived in Australia, there were no mobile phones, no computers, no internet, and no email. It was 1989, a time when even IC card phones did not exist. The only way to keep in touch with my family was to write letters. Making an international phone call was a luxury—3.7 Australian dollars per minute; even just to say "I'm fine" to my family, I had to hesitate repeatedly. At that time, I was staying with a Vietnamese Chinese family in Springville, Melbourne. The weekly accommodation fee of 160 AUD, plus transportation costs, was suffocating me, and my living expenses relied entirely on doing odd jobs. Not to mention that a three-minute phone call cost almost as much as my daily living expenses. My weekly accommodation and living expenses amounted to over 1000 RMB, while my father's monthly basic salary was 95 RMB plus various allowances, totaling less than 500 RMB, which was considered a high salary back then! My parents scraped together 6000 AUD for my study abroad, which covered my tuition and living expenses for half a year! I could no longer add to my family's burden; I had to rely on myself from then on! So I made a decision: to write a letter every week and send it home. Writing letters was the emotional lifeline for overseas wanderers of that era. I bought the "Aerogramme" air mail stationery specially issued by the Australian Post— a long strip of blue paper with dotted edges that could be folded twice to become an envelope, with a pre-printed stamp of 45 cents Australian. The most economical way. I bought three dozen at once and kept them on the top shelf of my desk, sending one or two each week without interruption. The first letter was written on the first day of my arrival in Australia. At that time, I was temporarily staying with a Vietnamese-Chinese couple. Every day, I took the bus for an hour to attend language school, and after class, I helped with cleaning and washing dishes, doing whatever needed to be done. In the evening, after returning home and taking a shower, I would sit at a small wooden table and start writing that week's letter. There were no complaints, no cries of hardship, just a calm message to my family: "I am doing well, please don't worry." After the letter was sent, it arrived in China eight days later. Waiting for my mom's reply, another eight days, makes a total of 16 days for a round trip. There was always at least one letter from home each week, and my family and I built a long-distance "heart-to-heart synchronization" in this rhythm of 16 days. Mom is usually the one who writes on that end. Dad occasionally adds a few words, but most of the content is written by Mom. She responds in detail to everything I mention in my letters, such as, "Is the weather in Australia really like you said, with four seasons in a day? Have you been eating well lately? Is that landlord easier to get along with than the last one?" She also tells me: the flowers at home have bloomed again, someone's dog has run into the yard, and both Dad and sister are thinking of you. There are often smudged ink marks on the letterhead, and I guess those are the places where her tears fell and were wiped away while she was writing. At that time, I was doing very well in language school, almost getting full marks. I told her that I was fine. She wrote: "We don't ask you to fly high, just to be safe." I think at that time she didn't know that I was actually eating discounted bread from the supermarket every day, canned food was my daily routine, I slept on a simple mattress, and I couldn't even bear to see a doctor when I had a fever. But as long as I could feel at ease at home, all of this didn't matter. The letter continued until 1996. I finally managed to bring my parents to Australia and have them by my side. That year, for the first time in my home in Sydney, I personally cooked dinner for them. Watching them sit beside me at a second-hand dining table, eating, I nearly cried into the bowl. Those letters, we still keep to this day. They are stored in an old iron box, with the green label of China Post and the blue "Airmail" sticker from back then. Sometimes I take them out to look through; each letter is a "breathing hole" that I dug out bit by bit from the mire back then; and each of her replies is the only tangible warmth I could grasp while being far away. I never told my mother how difficult it was to endure that loneliness and grit my teeth. She only knew that I was "having a hard time," but she never heard me talk about those days of waking up at four in the morning to work, dragging my exhausted body to write letters after one in the morning, and being sick alone, burning with fever under the covers until dawn without shedding a tear. It wasn't that I didn't want to share; I just felt that as long as I didn't make her worry, that was the only comfort I could give her. She is now 86 years old, still able to take care of herself and sharp in her thinking. Sometimes she takes the bus alone to the library or the supermarket. I know that if she were to read these articles now, she would still feel heartbroken. But this heartbreak, for me, is the deepest connection, the most cherished response of this lifetime. Those letters were the most tranquil yet powerful voices in my life. At that time, there were no mobile phones, no WeChat, no Moments, only ink and paper, mailboxes and anticipation. But that form of communication was more reliable than any today—because every word we wrote was evidence of our deep love for each other. In this letter, my mother's handwriting appears most frequently on the paper, but I know that my father's silence and lack of eloquence are also present between the lines. He is the one who lingers at the doorstep, yet never voices his worries. My father's story will be heavily penned in the chapters to come. Source: https://www.australianwinner.com/AuWinner/viewtopic.php?t=696739 |
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