Pen Pals aka Pen Friends

Way back in the era before e-mails and Facebook, social networking involved the postal service (or the snail mail to some). One had pen pals or pen friends, both local and international. Remember writing that letter in your nicest handwriting to send to this friend at home in another state/town or over the seas? And sending your best photos by way of introduction? And then waiting for the postman to bring a letter to you? Better still if the letter had beautiful foreign stamps on it (because after all this inevitably becomes a 2 in 1 hobby; penfriendship and stamp collecting).

In the '60s and early '70s I used to have a couple of local pen friends and quite a number of internationals. The lingua franca was of course English, but I soon discovered that Malaysians then did  have a better command of the language, even when compared to the Americans, Australians and Europeans. We wrote and spelt better too, I think. Anyway I enjoyed finding out how my pen pals lived in their countries and told them about how we lived in our beautiful Malaysia. Of course after a while the letters ceased and we all got on with our own lives. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be able to seek out these friends again, maybe through that social network of Facebook?

Agatha Sciuto (right) from Australia (1965)

Sushil Kumar Sthapit from Kathmandu, Nepal (1967)

Cynthia Stange from the USA (1966)

James Thomson from Australia (1967)

Pirjo Karpinen from Finland (1968)

My pen friend from Japan wrote this in his beautiful handwriting (CNB 2011)

My Japanese penpal and his 79 yr old Granny (1974)