小緣份

  A couple weeks I went to the university library to check out a book to copy a chapter for my students' reading assignment. Actually it's something I was asked to read when I was a graduate student. As I was flipping through the pages of that checked-out book, I noticed a postcard was left there by some previous user.

Out of curiosity I looked at the picture on the frontside of the postcard and then turned to the other side to see if anything's written on it. To my surprise, the handwriting is in Chinese! To my bigger surprise, as I kept on reading it, I saw my name and address on it! Turned out that it's sent to me in 1996. I had checked out that book from that same library, and I must have used the postcard to bookmark a page and left it there when I returned the book.* That must have been like 10 years ago when i left it there. Either nobody else has ever checked out that book since I did, or people are really nice not to throw away things!

Terence, a friend from my Hong Kong church, and his schoolmate Alex came to study at UCLA as exchange student for one quarter in 1995. They stayed at my parents' home briefly before they found a place to live. The postcard was sent a year later during his job training in England.

I don't even remember ever receiving such a postcard. Whether I have been the sole user of that book or not, it's a 小緣份 between me and the postcard.

* A student of a California public university is allowed to check out books from other California public university libraries.