When I traveled to China in my teens and twenties, I inevitably committed cultural faux pas.
For instance, when I spent the summer of 1995 in China, I kept in touch with friends and family by writing letters. I had been using e-mail in Hong Kong for about a year at that point, but this new way of communicating was virtually non-existent on the mainland.
I wrote many letters that summer in China.
When I went to the post office in a small city in Hubei province, where my former in-laws lived, I paid for enough postage to send this letter (left) to my grandma in Albany, New York. I then took the stamps to a counter where I planned to adhere them to the front of an envelope with a sticky paste, not unlike a gritty rubber cement.
“You don’t put stamps there,” my then husband told me.
He flipped the envelope over and glued one stamp over the envelope flap. And then another.
“Like this,” he said as if I had never mailed a letter. Soon five stamps lined the back of the envelope, right over the sealed flap (plus a small stamp below it).
I’m not sure how this custom started. Was it to prevent censors from steaming open envelopes to see if letters contained anti-government writings? Or was it just a cultural difference without a story behind it?
It seemed like an extra step for the postmaster to check the destination, then flip the envelope over to verify the correct postage. But who was I to argue with tradition?
our home was well-stocked with aerogrammes and stamps by my mother, so no need to buy – more a help-yourself job! i did, however, post many in those red boxes strategically dotted round kowloon. as a matter of interest, after the handover one of the first things the ‘new boys’ did in an attempt to wipe the former colony clean was to rid itself physically of the colonial red post boxes. it eventually had to give up, as in many cases they were so entrenched into the pavements it would have caused extra cost and work that they hadn’t bargained for. the solution? a lick of paint with the new sea-green hk post hue (with er still visible in relief) !! there is still one on cheung chau all these years on 😉
I remember when they painted those post boxes green. I still have a bank of one of the red ones, the one that is shaped like a cylinder. You’re supposed to get the money through the bottom, but the top came off, so we can dip into it from both ends. That’s so sweet about the box in Cheung Chau. Street signs are another thing I like there. The old ones with both Chinese and English, but the Chinese going from right to left.
That Chinese post office also had those little paint brushes! Did you ever use those mobile post offices in Hong Kong? We had a red van that came to the Chinese University during the week. People queued up to wait for it and then we bought stamps and posted letters. It was nice to have that service rather than trekking to Shatin during the day. I also went to a nice little post office in Homantin where there was just one person who spoke English. An old framed photo of the Queen hung on the wall. Those were the days!
post offices can be odd places! the first time i was in portugal (78) they made me write the sender address in the top left-hand corner (i had done so on the back…) oh and the stamps were glued with a gelatinous substance spread on with a mini paintbrush at a side table …. these days we don’t seem to have stamps, more’s the pity 🙁