The Letter Writer Is Waiting for Letters, Too

This essay discusses the plot and ending.

What stayed with me first after watching Love Letters to Grandma were the faces of two women.

Young Shurou has large eyes and wears her hair in braids. There is a plain, unadorned beauty about her, almost exactly how I imagine a girl from Lingnan or Chaoshan. The film does not spend long establishing her hometown: festivals and rituals, someone cycling into the village, blue skies, white clouds, rice fields—a few shots, and they are gone. Yet when those images mingle with her face, I feel that home has taken on a human form. Often, when we miss our hometown, it is the people there we are really missing.

Nanzhi reminds me of a familiar kind of overseas Chinese woman on screen. Straight bangs, hair of medium length, a sweet face and a mind of her own. Her smile is gentle, her manner capable; she has the strength to keep life going. Those bangs were among the first things that made her seem familiar to me.

The film is also more attentive to its images than I had expected. Reflections in mirrors, objects close to the lens, softly blurred foregrounds sometimes bring Wong Kar-wai to mind. Looking across a little space makes me more attentive to the expressions on people’s faces. I found myself watching Nanzhi’s hair in particular. As I remember it, before the fire her bangs often covered her forehead; later, they gradually parted, leaving it exposed. I do not know whether this was a deliberate choice in her styling, but I like to read it as a change: she is living more and more on her own terms, with less and less need to hide herself.

When Nanzhi and her father talk, they often speak indirectly. He keeps saying that a daughter will eventually marry and leave. It sounds like the repetition of an old rule, but I also hear a tentative question: does she really want to go? If she does not, this is still her home. Nanzhi has long been running the household. Her father depends on her, yet neither of them names that dependence outright.

The film tells us little about Nanzhi’s mother. Seeing how her father seems the less forceful presence at home, while Nanzhi is so capable, I cannot help wondering whether her mother was once the person who held the household together. Following that thought, perhaps some part of Nanzhi’s later efforts to care for others and sustain a home comes from a wish to rebuild the life she knew as a child.

Some of my favourite parts of the film involve writing letters, writing on someone else’s behalf, and reading letters aloud. The words on the paper concern the weather, someone’s health, news from home. Behind them are other meanings that need someone to explain them a little further. As I watched, I felt that what was hardest to translate here was the kind of unspoken language I have known since childhood. Missing someone, worrying about them, not wanting to let them go—all these feelings need an ordinary occurrence to carry them before they can be said.

Chinese can be especially intriguing. On the surface, the words have said all they need to, yet they can still hold a little feeling within them, leaving someone who understands to smile in recognition. Put together, the names “Musheng” and “Nanzhi” also bring to my mind Wang Wei’s lines: “Red beans grow in southern lands; how many branches do they send out in spring?” The south, home, and longing seem lightly tucked into those few words.

Musheng’s own life is already so hard, yet in the letters he sends home he still asks that only the good things be told. I, too, have gone far from home to study and to live. Of course, neither the times nor my circumstances can be compared with those of the people in the film, but the habit of sharing good news and keeping bad news to oneself feels familiar. Communication has become much faster; our relationship with home has not become much simpler. We do not want our families to worry, yet we carry a sense of owing them something. Before many things can be said, we have already turned them into good news.

So I can understand Nanzhi’s hesitation when she is about to send word of Musheng’s death. All those earlier letters assuring his family that he was well have already shown us what kind of household this news will fall upon. When the moment comes to send it, she cannot do it. As I understand it, she has no time then to weigh every right and wrong. Feeling, and a habit formed over many years, have stopped her first.

The photograph that comes later does hurt Shurou. But as I saw it, this felt more like an accident than an attempt by Nanzhi to hurt her. Looking back over those years, viewers can hardly see those letters only as deception. I think of Shurou raising her children alone and keeping the household going for so many years. Perhaps what she needed was not only to wait for Musheng to return one day, but also to have someone to whom she could tell the life she was living today. Nanzhi kept that bond from ending with Musheng’s death. The name on the letters was borrowed from someone else, but the time spent writing them, the things sent, and the care that returned again and again were all real.

Misunderstandings can be the most wearing things, and the most moving. Some may remain misunderstandings for a lifetime.

I also want to think of love and marriage separately. Musheng and Shurou share admiration, affection, and a reliance on each other. Yet with so many years spent apart, and life so hard, it is difficult to say that theirs is a happy marriage in the conventional sense. That does not prevent me from feeling that they have known a beautiful love. And through those long years, Nanzhi, too, has experienced a love of her own.

She admires Shurou and feels for her, knowing how hard it is for a woman to raise children and hold a life together alone. In her letters she shares her own life, and letter by letter she reads the other woman’s. Over time, the correspondence becomes like a diary written alternately by two people. Salted pork, a bicycle, kapok flowers, together with the small things written down and received, slowly become shared memories. In the unhappiness of their separate lives, they have comforted each other, and each has found something in the other that she sincerely admires.

Shurou does not yet know that it is Nanzhi at the other end of the correspondence. The longing she sends still reaches towards Musheng. Yet the life Nanzhi puts into those letters has also been read and answered. They do not know the same things, but the care in their letters has truly passed back and forth. Nanzhi gives her own time to them, and comes to have words of her own that she waits to read.

The eighteen years after Musheng’s death matter especially. At first, of course, the correspondence continues because of him. But the new things that happen, the new objects exchanged, and the new memories gathered belong to these two living people. To say only that Nanzhi has kept someone else’s love alive still places her too far outside it. She has been inside it all along, offering her concern and receiving understanding, admiration, and comfort. To my mind, this relationship has even given her many things that conventional love does not necessarily provide.

This makes me think of Shunji Iwai’s Love Letter. Two women enter each other’s lives through letters, slowly, over a long time. Someone who is absent sets the correspondence in motion; as it continues, something new comes into being between those who are alive. In my experience of watching them, the two films form a distant echo.

The letter office at the end of the film brings something else to mind. It is a small place. Some people write letters for others; some pass on messages. Overseas Chinese people help one another there, yet it connects many homes across the sea.

A few years ago, I was waiting for someone at the arrivals area of an international airport. Some people had brought children, some had dogs on leads. Some were meeting older people, and some parents had come to collect children. Everyone was waiting for someone returning from far away. At the moment they met, the children’s joy seemed almost to overflow, the dogs could not stop wagging their tails, and there was that embrace between an older and a younger generation that is so rarely offered in everyday life. I remember thinking how warm the place felt. The space itself was utterly ordinary, yet so much real affection had gathered there.

Neither the letter office nor that arrivals area is a home, yet both reconnect people far away with those at home.

I think that, in adulthood, longing for one’s hometown is sometimes bound up with the sense of safety we knew as children. Being looked after, being surrounded by familiar people, feeling that the world is steady and that life will go on just as it always has. At least in the family life I have known, home contains far more than a place to live. Only after leaving do we gradually understand how difficult it is to find that same security again. Yet we keep looking for it, in a new place, or in someone willing to listen to us.

With all those years of letters, Nanzhi and Shurou gave each other a place to speak.

Later, Nanzhi could no longer remember many things. But she still remembered to send Shurou salted pork.