YIYUN LI
I grew up in a Soviet-style apartment block in Beijing in the 1970s, and our ground-floor unit was right next to the green mailbox for the building. Twice a day, the postman put letters and newspapers in the box with a dangling door, and the moment I learned how to read, I started to peruse the newspapers before the legal subscribers arrived and checked out the postcards and letters coming into the unlocked box.
The postcards, drab colored with the official post office signs, were sent not by people on holiday, but by those who wanted to show the world that they hid nothing in their correspondence. And one’d be better off, in my country and at that time, not to have any secret.
Letters arrived, of course. The envelopes offered limited information: names of recipients and senders, the value of the stamps, penmanship that was a good indication of the educational level of the senders. I paid extra attention to the stamps: an eight fen stamp meant the letter was sent from out of town; a four fen, however, meant the letter was sent from the same town, which was of great interest to me. It did not happen often that a person would send a letter to another person living in the same town. There was no telephone, but there was plenty of time for anyone to drop by at another person’s place. I had a detective’s mind then, treating those letters with four fen stamps with suspicion. (Later, I would understand that those letters were often written from a young person to his or her lover. When I came to that understanding, I liked to pinch the envelopes to feel the thickness of the letters.)
A sealed letter was an impediment for me to get to know a few things about our neighbors, but I was a law-abiding child. The only letters I stole and read were to my parents and my grandfather, who lived with us. An open envelope was too much of a seduction.
Then one day a letter came to my father, written in a foreign language instead of Chinese characters, with a stamp of a foreign woman’s face, sent from England, as my father explained to us. He worked as a nuclear physicist, but his own interest was in quantum physics. The story was that he spent his spare time thinking through a problem in the field and writing to a foreign physics journal. His letter got into print. The English scientist disagreed with my father’s approach and sent a letter to discuss their difference.
My father was wise enough to use our home address for his correspondence with the journal. But a letter from abroad was a sight for all the neighbors, and there was, as the old saying went, no wall in the world that does not have a crack for a sniff of air to go through. My father was summoned by his work unit to explain the letter. He got a warning of some sort. Soon after, he applied to transfer to a research institute of quantum physics that had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. For a while, the transfer seemed certain, and he seemed cheerful, but all of a sudden, everything changed and he was assigned to a place called the Institute of Marxist Dialectical Materialism. It was one of the many reasons that my father was not a happy man for the rest of his life. Instead of doing research he loved, his job there was closer to a clerk’s.
An epistle from abroad spelled danger, but that did not happen only in communist China. In the United States, as mandated by Postal Service and Federal Employees Salary Act of 1962:
Mail matter, except sealed letters, which originates or which is printed or otherwise prepared in a foreign country and which is determined by the Secretary of the Treasury pursuant to rules and regulations to be promulgated by him to be “communist political propaganda,” shall be detained by the Postmaster General upon its arrival for delivery in the United States, or upon its subsequent deposit in the United States domestic mails, and the addressee shall be notified that such matter has been received and will be delivered only upon the addressee’s request, except that such detention shall not be required in the case of any matter which is furnished pursuant to subscription or which is otherwise ascertained by the Postmaster General to be desired by the addressee.
In 1963, the post office retained a copy of Peking Review, addressed to Dr. Corliss Lamont, a director of the ACLU for twenty-two years. (Peking Review, established in 1958 by the Chinese government and published in five languages, was a tool for the Chinese government to communicate with the rest of the world in the Cold War era. History, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, was not isolated.)
Lamont did not respond to the notice of detention sent to him but instead instituted this suit to enjoin enforcement of the statute, alleging that it infringed his rights under the First and Fifth Amendments. The Post Office thereupon notified Lamont that it considered his institution of the suit to be an expression of his desire to receive “communist political propaganda” and therefore none of his mail would be detained. Lamont amended his complaint to challenge on constitutional grounds the placement of his name on the list of those desiring to receive “communist political propaganda.”
In 1965, Lamont won a suit against the US postmaster general for violating his First Amendment rights by opening and withholding his mail. The Supreme Court held the Postal Service and Federal Employees Salary Act of 1962 to be unconstitutional:
The Act sets administrative officials astride the flow of mail to inspect it, appraise it, write the addressee about it, and await a response before dispatching the mail.… We rest on the narrow ground that the addressee in order to receive his mail must request in writing that it be delivered. This amounts in our judgment to an unconstitutional abridgment of the addressee’s First Amendment rights. The addressee carries an affirmative obligation which we do not think the Government may impose on him. This requirement is almost certain to have a deterrent effect, especially as respects those who have sensitive positions. Their livelihood may be dependent on a security clearance. Public officials, like schoolteachers who have no tenure, might think they would invite disaster if they read what the Federal Government says contains the seeds of treason. Apart from them, any addressee is likely to feel some inhibition in sending for literature which federal officials have condemned as “communist political propaganda.”
The Cold War ended. The Iron Curtain, lifted, was placed into the museum. We have long moved onto digital forms with our communication. But are we better off now? When I travel back to China, I cannot get access to my Gmail, Google, and the New York Times website, all of them blocked in China. But more than that, I cannot get a cell phone number in China as an American citizen because all cell phone numbers in China are directly logged in along with citizens’ ID numbers. It is not a secret that all things that happen digitally in China are supervised and censored by the government. But the danger, one must assume, is not far from us in America either. The US Border Control is increasingly using questionable authority to search the cell phones of passengers arriving in America. In May 2018, US District Judge Denise Casper in Boston ruled that a lawsuit by eleven travelers had raised a plausible claim that such border searches violate the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. One can, however, see the possibility of such scenarios migrating from the US border into everyday American life. Would it be far-fetched to imagine—as an immigrant, with the history of the internment of Japanese Americans always close to my thoughts—that should the political atmosphere continue as it is under the current administration, that one day we would be required to unlock our cell phones to show that, in our texts and emails, we have not expressed any thoughts of disloyalty?