TAIPEI, June 23 (Xinhua) -- Among all his collections, renowned artist and collector Hsu Po-yih finds the profoundest connection with old letters written by people separated by the narrow Taiwan Strait.
"For me, every letter is healing," Hsu said at his Taipei residence, where hundreds of cross-Strait family letters are stored meticulously in boxes. "Behind every story of separation, one thing has remained constant -- affection."
He opens the fragile envelopes carefully, unfolds the yellowed paper, and begins reading words written decades ago by people he never met -- fathers comforting sons across the Strait, wives waiting for husbands who never returned, families separated by politics and war yet bound by affection.
Now nearing 80, Hsu has spent nearly half a century rescuing and preserving personal correspondence exchanged between families in Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. His collection, spanning from the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to the early 2000s, offers an intimate portrait of cross-Strait history told not through official documents or political speeches, but through ordinary people who miss their home.
Each letter is a story. Together, they form a collective memory of separation, migration and reunion.
SAVING MEMORIES
Hsu did not intend to become a collector of family letters.
In the 1970s, he began collecting stamps from the mainland. Old letters often came bundled alongside them as little more than disposable extras. However, after reading a handful, he came to see that what really mattered were the lives documented on paper, not the stamps.
"At that time, almost nobody paid attention to these letters," Hsu recalled. "Many descendants simply threw them away."
As a third-generation descendant of migrants from Quanzhou in Fujian Province, Hsu understood the emotional weight such papers could carry. He still remembers stopping his father from burning land title deeds of his ancestral home on the mainland and family correspondence.
"I was only a teenager, but I felt heartbroken," he said.
Those old documents became his own connection to a homeland he had never seen. Growing up, Hsu's grandmother often talked about the family's red-brick ancestral home in Fujian and the towering trees standing outside its gates. Through fading documents and family stories, the distant hometown gradually took shape in his imagination.
Determined to preserve similar memories for others, Hsu began searching relentlessly for old correspondence across Taiwan. He spent years going to auctions and flea markets, asking antique dealers and owners of used bookstores to keep an eye out for family letters.
The work required patience and luck.
On one occasion, a family agreed to sell him about 200 letters written by a veteran soldier separated from relatives on the mainland. At the last moment, they changed their minds.
"It's understandable," Hsu said. "As long as the letters are properly cared for, that is enough."
Over decades, Hsu amassed more than 10,000 cross-Strait letters.
Among his most treasured collections are nearly 100 letters written by a father named Sun Shangjie in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, to his son who left for work in Taiwan in 1946, shortly before a civil war cut off direct post communications between the two sides.
In these letters, the father talked about sending savings to his son in Taiwan while family hardships were deliberately downplayed to avoid causing worry.
"I have kept thinking of the Sun family even till now and wondered whether the father and son had reunited," Hsu said.
ACROSS DANGEROUS WATERS
Long before modern postal routes connected Taiwan and the mainland, migrants crossing the Strait relied on informal courier networks, remittance shops and trading firms to carry messages home.
One surviving letter now kept in an archive in Fujian dates back to the middle 19th century, a period under the Qing Emperor Daoguang, documenting early settlers from Fujian buying real estate in Taiwan.
During Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945), the prominent intellectual Lien Heng in Taiwan, known for authoring the "General History of Taiwan," wrote passionately to family members on the mainland.
"Taiwan's liberation," one letter read, "requires first building a strong motherland."
After 1949, however, the Strait became a geographical and political barrier. In 1949, the remnants of the Kuomingtang, defeated in a civil war with the Communist Party of China (CPC), retreated to Taiwan while the People's Republic of China was founded under the leadership of the CPC.
The unresolved civil war and foreign interference have left the two sides of the Strait in a prolonged state of political confrontation, with family members on both sides unable to visit each other and no formal mail services available.
Things changed in 1987. Within two years, some 13 million letters had reportedly crossed the Strait through a mail service via a third location. Direct post services only resumed in 2008.
GOING HOME
For many separated families, writing became the only available substitute for returning home.
"Many people who wrote these letters shared the same wish -- they wanted to go home," Hsu said. "But many never had the chance."
Hsu himself eventually fulfilled a family dream. In the late 1980s, after transiting through several places, he finally visited Quanzhou to honor his late grandmother's wish of seeing the hometown again.
"Everything looked exactly as she described," he recalled.
Later, this emotional bond led Hsu to donate portions of his collection to mainland museums and research centers because he thought the letters should return to the places where their stories began.
In 2020, he donated the decades-long correspondence between the Fuzhou father and son to a historical institute in Fujian Province.
Many more letters have since been donated to museums and universities across the mainland, including 3,559 pieces to the National Museum of China.
Interest in cross-Strait family letters has grown steadily in recent years.
The China Museum for Fujian-Taiwan Kinship in Quanzhou, which launched a preservation and research initiative in 2019, now houses nearly 10,000 letters donated by collectors and ordinary families.
"These stories are deeply rooted in Chinese cultural traditions and family values," said Shen Wenfeng, deputy director of the museum and chief editor of a recent research volume on cross-Strait correspondence. "They show in the most direct way that people on both sides of the Strait are family."
Back in Taipei, Hsu continues sorting and cataloging old letters, aware that time itself threatens the survival of these fragile memories.
"These family letters, filled with affection, survived turbulent times. They should be preserved and seen by more people in the future," he said. ■
