Dear Alexander Chee,
Thank you.
Thank you for sending your book out into the world. Your stories traveled many miles and I caught them all the way up here, caught myself between of a town of 6,000 and a village down the mountain, population 500. They caught me when I'm having trouble catching up to my own thoughts.
No one can tell me that trip isn't made of magic.
Reading your book was like slowly opening a gift. Tied up beautifully, your story unraveled, ribbons of words, live and exposed, forming personal meaning as they dropped from your book into my outstretched hands. Each new chapter was a layer of tissue paper, delicate yet protective. Each layer gently revealed to me the parts of what makes you, you. The way your journey along winding paths formed you both as a writer and as a human being. It wasn't until the lid was carefully removed, that the ribbons unfurled, that the layers of tissue were slowly peeled away with anticipation that I found you revealed inside.
What a gift your stories are. You carefully shared yourself at your most vulnerable. The more I read, the more I gradually came to understand why your particular book found its way into my hands. It was a book I was meant to receive.
Your words taught me so much. You were generous in your giving and your teachings and I am grateful to have received so much. I don't know you - we are strangers after all - but that's the beauty of books, particularly a book like yours. I went from not knowing anything of you at all to gradually being immersed in your life as I read your writing.
It feels odd, this one-sided relationship. You know nothing of me except that I am a reader, yet I know some of your most secret of secrets. It takes a lot of bravery and trust for a writer to share so much of themselves and to send it out there into the unknown. For that reason, I want you to know that you touched right into the heart of me. Writers like you make me want to keep writing. Writers like you make my dreams richer. Writers like you wrap me with bravery and with each part of you that you share, it makes me feel less afraid of myself, of the world around me.
I'm sorry for your losses. I'm sad that you lost so many of your friends. That for much of your life, you've been persecuted and misunderstood. A target of bullies, young and old. I'm sorry that your country, the one right below mine, is currently a ship heavily listing in the midst of an unpredictable storm. But there is hope: it's stories like yours that allow us to unite and empathize and become better people. It's stories like yours that make me want to drop everything and pick up a pen and write my own story.
And even though you've been told "this isn't important, that it doesn't matter, that it could never matter"...it matters. It matters because the sparks that form when the words that pour out of the writer are seized by the reader who is open to receiving, it adds a layer of lushness to their world, it spreads courage, and it brings us together. It will never not matter to a reader like me.
Thank you for inspiring this fellow dreamer.
With respect and appreciation,
Christine
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