No, it’s not “PayPal” – It’s “pen pal”. It is probably the word becoming so obsolete nowadays that my MacBook thought it needed to be autocorrected as I started to write this story.

However, the word “pen pal” has been more common than PayPal back in 1998. In July 1998, I set off to Malaysia and Australia as a member of a school exchange program. There were about 15 of us from my high school. We were all excited.

We spent a couple of days in Malaysia before heading to Australia. We visited a high school in Johor Bahru. The class we visited was all girls because, in Islamic culture, boys and girls were not allowed to study in the same classroom. 

So we were welcomed by the teenage girls who had limited access to boys, let alone foreigners. I have never seen my male classmates being so popular among girls. (One of them joked later that he wanted to move to Malaysia.) 

But it was not only boys. All of us were treated like movie stars. They wanted many photos with us. They asked about Japan and they asked us to be their pen pals. So we exchanged our street addresses —because back then very few of us had an email address— to exchange letters. 

A few months later, I found a letter for me in the mailbox. I looked at it with excitement. My name was written on the envelope in English. The envelope had many stamps indicating it had travelled very far. When I opened the envelope, there were some photos and handwritten pages inside. The texture, the size, and even the smell of the papers were all so different. 

I decided to write back.

With my kindergarten English, it was going to require a great effort.

First, I needed to figure out what was written in the letter I got. I could tell that the words had been very carefully chosen, but somehow those handwriting and wordings were unfamiliar. Also, I didn’t know what to write. There was no Google back then. I didn’t even know whether to start with, “Dear”, “Hello” or “To Ms. XX”?

Once I finished a letter, I put it in a nice envelope. And then I realized I was not sure what the correct Malaysian address was. My local post office clerk didn’t know that either. We concluded that what looked like a street number could be a postal code. I prayed (to Japanese gods) that the letter looked like “9” meant number nine, not a “g”. 

Thanks to Allah or Buddha or the global postal service system, the letter was delivered successfully and I received another letter a few months later. I think we continued exchanging letters for a little while. 

I still have the letters I received. I have no idea what I’ve written back. It would probably be really embarrassing to read those letters now, but I’m glad I had a PayPal… Oh, not again! “Pen pal” once.