Retired mail carrier Ting Tsang-yuan (丁滄源) yesterday received Chunghwa Post’s Public Service Award for delivering more than 20,000 “dead” letters over the course of his career.
Dead letters refer to mail that cannot be delivered to recipients and cannot be returned to senders, because they have an invalid address and lack a return address.
Ting was a mail service inspector at the Taisi Post Office (台西郵局) in Yunlin County before he retired in 2008.
Photo: Chen I-chia, Taipei Times
One of the supposedly undeliverable letters entrusted to Ting arrived from Japan in 2004.
After spending two days locating the addressee, Ting found that the man had died more than 10 years before the mail arrived, so the man’s son accepted the letter on his behalf.
Ting’s dedication to delivering dead letters inspired director Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), who adapted the story for the 2008 blockbuster film Cape No. 7 (海角七號).
Ting said in an interview after the award ceremony that the letter was undeliverable because the address of the intended recipient, surnamed Chen (陳), was from the Japanese colonial era, when the county was still an administrative region of Tainan.
In the end, Ting said he delivered the letter to Chen’s son through the help of the son’s teacher.
The letter was about a NT$40 dividend that was granted to Chen for investing in an electricity firm in Osaka, Japan, he said.
Chen’s son was touched to have received the letter, even though his father had died before it arrived, Ting said.
However, in the movie Wei changed the setting from Yunlin to Pingtung County, and instead of a letter on stock dividends, it was a packet of seven love letters sent by a Japanese man to a Taiwanese woman he met during World War II.
Ting said that he considers delivering mail an obligation and a mission.
Chunghwa Post chairman Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said the company owed Ting an award, as he delivered so many dead letters throughout his career.
The award was given in recognition of Ting’s dedication to his work and the example he set for other mail carriers, Wang said.
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