Years ago, whenColleen Kinderwas teaching a class at Yale University, travel author Pico Iyer shared a haunting encounter with a stranger who had walked the streets of Reykjavik, Iceland, with him for hours.
Yet the woman appeared nowhere in his magazine story on the trip. Kinder, a former San Franciscan, asked if he had written about the stranger. When he replied “no,” it inspired her to create a home for stories like his, “the one I hadn’t gone seeking, the one shaped by serendipities and so often featuring a stranger.”
She and co-founder Vince Errico launched the “Letter to a Stranger” column in 2016 for the online literary magazine“Off Assignment.”Spanning over 80 countries, the letters written on this theme have now been collected into ananthologypublished Tuesday, March 22, which reminds us of the possibilities of connection when we travel, especially now that the world has started to reopen.
Flipping through the table of contents reminded me how much I missed traveling abroad after becoming a parent and during the pandemic.
Many of us have revived wanderlust, hope to see beloved family or need to travel for work or research. Waiting at the post office to renew my passport a couple of months ago, I realized the woman ahead of me, and the one behind, were there for similar tasks.
Withan uptickin coronavirus cases looming, the anthology provides tantalizing glimpses for those whose travel plans might get delayed once again. The essays are each just a few pages long and are grouped into sections: symmetry, mystery, chemistry, gratitude, wonder, remorse and farewell.
The titles intrigue. Essays by local authors includeMeron Hadero’s“To the Man Who Sold Me Shoddy Film,”Faith Adiele’s“To Mario, 26-Year-Old Bestie to My 78-Year-Old Mom,”Jamil Jan Kochai’s“To the Logari Who Asked About the Sun,”Akemi Johnson’s “To the Poet Who Disappeared” andAnnie Schwiekert’s “To the Face in the Subway Glass.”
When I heard about the call for letters, I instantly remembered a woman I met in 2008 on a local bus outside of Xi’an, China. I’d been traveling with my husband for about a week or so, conducting research for my novel.
We were on our way to see the terra-cotta warriors, a buried army designed to protect the country’s first emperor in the afterlife.
The woman’s eyes lit up when she spotted me and my husband.
每一个中国人到目前为止我们在旅途中遇到的had assumed that only my husband — sandy-haired, hazel-eyed — was American. The woman must have leaped to the same conclusion as we walked to the back of the bus, where she sat with her son and her friend.
“How does a Chinese person speak English so well?” she asked me.
I explained in Mandarin that I was born and raised in America, then added, “That’s why my Chinese is so terrible. I’mhuaqiao. From America.”
“I’ve heard of Chinese like that,” her friend chimed in. “In Shanghai.”
“ABC,” I said. The acronym for American-born Chinese, which made them laugh, even if they didn’t understand the meaning.
The boy, 8 or 9 years old, looked at my husband. “Will he understand me?”
“He only speaks English,” his mother explained to him. “If you study hard, when you grow up, you can speak English. If you eat enough, you’ll grow as tall as him.”
Her words took me aback; they had the potential to make her son insecure about his height, if he ended up shorter than my husband.
That night, I wrote about the encounter in my journal and later told and retold it as an anecdote, before finally writing an essay that sorted through my complicated feelings and now appears in “Letter to a Stranger.”
At first I addressed the letter to the boy, but Kinder helped me figure out that I meant to write her — and ultimately, to myself.
“Letter to a Stranger” book launch:4 p.m. Wednesday, March 30. Featuring editor Colleen Kinder and other contributors. Virtual event.whitewhalebookstore.com