Dear American Daughter

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 11.24.02 | 5:30 PM ET

Jennifer Adler had some bad experiences after giving out her e-mail address to people she’d met while traveling, so she made a pact with herself not to reveal her electronic identity again.

Then she met Lin, “an aged, slim man in slacks and a pale green crocheted sweater-vest” on a train in China. She traded addresses. It’s an exchange she treasures. “In the seven months since that morning, Lin and I have been writing about once a week,” she writes in a beautiful, moving essay in this weekend’s New York Times. “He addresses his messages to me ‘Dear American daughter.’ I have helped him with bits of English and tried to be sincere in answers to questions about American life; in turn he has bestowed his wisdom as only a stranger, a wise old foreign stranger, could.”