Hello Readers,
This Halloween, my ASTU class took a trip to the Rare Books and Special Collection section of the UBC library, where we had the opportunity to explore Joy Kogawa’s fond. There, I was able to go through various fan letters that Kogawa received shortly after the publishing of her first and most famous novel Obasan. I found it extremely interesting to read the letters as they led me to think about how the genre of fan letters has evolved from then to present day.
These letters were dated in the early 1980’s which is long before social media was a prominent method of communication and therefore, writing letters was the easiest way to reach important people you admired. What surprised me about the letters was how personal they were. Her fans were writing to her in a very open and friendly way as though they were well acquainted when in reality, they were strangers. The content of the letters in the collection was varied including a letter from a girl in high school asking Kogawa for advice on a school paper, which to me now seems like a strange thing to ask of someone you do not know well, let alone someone of the same status of Kogawa. Personally, when I think of writing letters to people with influence, I think of them as being very formal and saved only for important issues. For example, the only experience I have had writing letters to influential people was in my previous school where the Amnesty International club gathered students to write letters to government officials on behalf of people imprisoned for exercising, or fighting for their right to free speech. I however, do not see myself writing a letter to an author or celebrity simply to express my appreciation or admiration.
From my experience, the genre of fan letters today seems as though it has evolved greatly. It is not as necessary to write a fan letter when most celebrities have social media accounts from which they can be contacted. The situation has changed and so has the form required for the genre. I feel as though fan mail now has multiple forms. Fans can show appreciation for someone they admire by re-tweeting a tweet, sharing a Facebook status, or even liking a picture posted on Instagram. The possibilities have grown but I feel as technology advances, these methods of admiration seem less personal or meaningful. A fraction of the time it takes to write a letter is needed to communicate on social media. This means that the actions on social media take less effort and therefore less thought needs to be put into them as the action is easily replicated. I would make the argument then that although social media is more of a convenient method of communication, it does not hold the same value as a physical letter.
This is not to say that physical fan mail is completely obsolete. Although a higher percentage of communication is done online, there is a greater appreciation for mail that is sent physically. Multiple articles online encourage people to send more snail mail, such as an article published by The Pen Company titled 8 reasons to send snail mail today, promoting the idea that snail mail has a larger sentiment than online communication, and even makes the argument that “the joy it brings the recipient has increased over time” due to its rarity in present day.
Therefore, even though it was in an earlier time, I feel it speaks well to the work of Kogawa that her fans made the effort to send her fan mail to show their appreciation of Obasan. It shows that they were able to connect with what she had written and that the novel was incredibly relevant in Canadian society at the time.
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