I STILL remember the early 1990s, when a phone call from Sandakan to Kuala Lumpur could cost about RM1 a minute - enough to make every sentence behave itself.
In plantation life, communication travelled from typewritten letters, telegrams, costly calls and fax machines squealing like injured cicadas, to satellite phones, email, smartphones, WhatsApp groups and now Starlink.
For interior estates, it was never a luxury, but a lifeline for work, emergencies, families, schools, clinics and the simple need to know that a message had arrived.
Perhaps that is why, after writing so often about palm oil and its many branches, bunches and battles, I felt it was time to rest the harvesting pole and turn to something more human: friendship, memory and how the past still whispers into our artifical intelligence-driven present.
Once, friendship too arrived with a stamp – not a blue tick, not a notification, not a ping from a phone trembling like an excited grasshopper.
For Gen X and those before us, “pen pal” was how we reached the world before the world fitted into a handphone screen.
When letters were little ships
In my early childhood, I had pen pals. Each name and address carried a small geography lesson before Google Maps existed.
A letter from another state, or somewhere beyond our shores, felt like a little ship entering harbour.
I waited for the postman with the patience of a small boy pretending not to be impatient.
The envelope itself was half the excitement. Before reading the letter, I studied the stamp – its colour, country, design and postmark – because I was also collecting stamps then.
So friendship arrived twice: first as a message from a person, and then as a tiny artwork from the wider world. Some children collected marbles, bottle caps or football cards.
I collected small, perforated proof that the world was larger than my street.
Alas, as we moved house over the years, those stamp albums along with my treasured comic books disappeared.
What remained were memories of pages filled with colour, countries and childhood wonder.
A pen pal was a friend you had not met, but somehow knew. You knew their handwriting before their voice. You knew their favourite colour, school subjects, pets, weather, family stories and sometimes even heartbreaks.
All this arrived slowly, folded into pages, often with stickers, drawings, pressed flowers, photographs or that wonderfully dramatic phrase: “Please reply soon.”
Blue ticks and modern betrayal
“Soon” meant something very different then. Today, it means within ten seconds before someone suspects you are angry, asleep, kidnapped or ignoring them.
In WhatsApp, delay has become emotional evidence. One grey tick is uncertainty. Two grey ticks are hope. Two blue ticks with no reply are modern betrayal.
In the old days, silence meant the postman had not come. Today, silence means someone has seen your message and decided your emotional parcel can wait.
Back then, we wrote with pens, not thumbs. We bought envelopes, not data plans. We licked stamps. We waited weeks. The waiting was part of friendship.
A letter did not interrupt life; it entered life. You opened it properly, read it slowly, perhaps twice, and kept it safe, because words on paper had weight.
I remember admiring cursive handwriting: elegant loops, disciplined strokes and graceful curves that made ordinary sentences look as if they had attended finishing school.
Some letters seemed dressed for weddings.
Today, handwriting has suffered a quiet retirement. Many young people may never have held a fountain pen, wrestled with an ink stain, sharpened a pencil with a blade, or felt the pride of forming a sentence neatly by hand.
We now have keyboards, touchscreens and hundreds of font types, but very little real exercise for the fingers, wrist and patience that handwriting once demanded. The hand has outsourced its personality to the keyboard.
From dear so-and-so to typing...
A message today can arrive while we are brushing teeth, crossing roads, half-listening in meetings or pretending to exercise.
It comes with emojis, stickers, voice notes, GIFs, forwarded videos, fake news, prayer chains, birthday reminders, political outrage and one uncle convinced every message beginning with “Please forward urgently” is a national duty.
We are more connected, yet strangely more scattered.
We have hundreds of contacts, thousands of followers, endless groups and enough digital acquaintances to populate a small municipality.
But among all these names, how many are truly friends? How many are pals in the old sense - not merely people who have our number, but people who have our story?
The pen pal era taught patience. Email taught speed. WhatsApp taught immediacy.
Instagram taught presentation. Facebook taught memory. TikTok chopped attention into bite-sized pieces and served it with music. LinkedIn proved that even inspiration can wear a blazer.
Email was a revolution. Letters flew without stamps. The postman lost weight and the inbox gained weight.
Email still had dignity: a subject line, a greeting, paragraphs, perhaps even “Dear so-and-so” and “Warm regards.”
It was the bridge between the letter and the lightning bolt.
Then came WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.
Suddenly, the boy who borrowed your eraser in the 1980s could reappear in 2026 with grandchildren, gardening photos and strong opinions about politics.
And now, with artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT, even our feelings and writings have found a new assistant, if not a new ghostwriter.
Once, we struggled for the right words, crossed out sentences, reached for the dictionary or thesaurus, chewed the end of a pen and waited for the heart to instruct the hand.
Today, we can ask AI to polish our grief, sharpen our joy, soften our anger and make birthday wishes sound as if they graduated from Oxbridge with honours in emotional diplomacy. It is marvellous, useful and slightly frightening.
If handwriting once carried the shape of our hand, and letters carried the pace of our thoughts, AI now asks a deeper question: when words become easier to produce, how do we make sure they still carry the truth of the person behind them?
The miracle, mischief of connection
This digital world is both miracle and mischief.
The miracle is obvious. We can reconnect. We can find people life had misplaced.
We can send encouragement instantly, pray across distance, laugh across time zones and share weddings, funerals, anniversaries, medical updates, grandchildren’s photos, recipes and durian harvests without waiting for a stamp.
Distance has been defeated, or at least badly bruised.
But the mischief is real. Friendship has become easy to signal but harder to sustain deeply.
A “like” can look like care, but may only be thumb reflex. A heart emoji can be warm, but also digital small change. A “Happy Birthday!” posted because Facebook reminded us is kind, but not quite the same as remembering someone because they live in the cupboard of our heart.
In the old days, being a pen pal required effort. You had to choose paper, find time, think properly, write legibly, buy a stamp, post the letter and wait. Friendship had postage cost. Today, the cost is almost zero, and perhaps that is why we spend it too casually. When communication becomes too easy, attention becomes the rare currency.
What makes a pal?
Even the word “pal” carries old warmth.
It is believed to have come from Romani, where it meant brother or comrade - not merely someone in your contact list, but someone close enough to be counted almost as kin.
In that sense, a pen pal was never just a person with an address. He or she was a companion of the written heart.
Nowadays, we call almost everyone “brother” or “sister” with cheerful ease.
Friends, colleagues, stallholders, Grab drivers, mamak operators, strangers at airports and even insurance sellers may become “bro,” “sis,” “abang” or “kak.” It is warm and very Malaysian.
But does the word still carry the weight of relationship, or has it become social sugar sprinkled on daily conversation?
The real test is whether the “brother” remains a brother when trouble comes, and whether the “sister” still stands nearby when convenience and emojis have moved on.
That is why “pal” deserves reflection. A pal is not merely a contact. A contact is stored in a phone. A pal is stored in memory. A contact can be deleted. A pal lingers, even when the number changes. A follower watches your life pass by. A friend may admire your polished post.
A true pal knows the unposted version of you.
We all have layers of friendship: seasonal friends, work friends, school friends, neighbourhood friends, WhatsApp group friends, makan friends, crisis friends and the rare “call anytime” friends.
Not all friendships must be equally deep. Some are pleasant greetings. Some are shared jokes. Some are memories from one chapter. Some are sturdy bridges across decades.
The danger is not too many platforms, but mistaking platform presence for personal presence.
A person can comment on every post and still not know your burden. Another may rarely appear online but will come when needed.
One friend may send daily inspirational quotes but disappear during trouble. Another may send no quotes but quietly pay the hospital bill, fetch you from the airport, sit with you in silence, or remember the anniversary that still hurts.
The digital world has made friendship louder. But the human heart still measures friendship by quiet things: loyalty, memory, kindness, time, forgiveness and showing up when life is not Instagram-ready.
The old values still matter
Many of us are the bridge generation. We remember waiting for letters, yet know the tyranny of unread messages.
We understand the romance of handwriting and the convenience of forwarding a PDF. We can still smell old paper, but also know how to mute a noisy group.
We survived floppy disks, dial-up Internet, Hotmail, Nokia phones and family WhatsApp groups that reproduce faster than rabbits.
This gives us a duty: not to pretend the old days were always better. Letters got lost. Calls were expensive. People disappeared when life moved and addresses changed. Yet today’s platforms have given us real gifts: a grandchild overseas on video, a schoolmate after forty years, and a prayer request travelling faster than sorrow.
But we should bring old values into new tools. Write with more than emojis. Call when a message is too thin. Visit when presence matters. Reply because someone matters, not merely because the blue ticks accuse you.
Do not let friendship become a forwarding service. Some people message daily but remain shallow; others appear rarely but carry depth.
Once in a while, write a proper note. It need not be on paper, though paper still has its old magic. Thank someone before the eulogy stage. Tell an old classmate, colleague, sibling, priest, teacher or mentor that the small thing they did was not small after all.
In a world obsessed with speed, thoughtfulness has become a quiet rebellion.
The pen pal may seem outdated, like a fountain pen in a touchscreen world, but its spirit should not die.
The tool will keep changing: from pen to keyboard, from phone to platform, from blue ticks to whatever comes next.
The stamp has changed. The envelope has vanished. The postman has become an algorithm. Yet the heart, thankfully, still needs delivery.
Perhaps this piece also learns from my writings about oil palm: roots matter, seasons teach patience and meaningful harvests rarely come from rushed work.
Written early, but in the spirit of the International Day of Friendship 2026 on Thursday, July 30, it reflects on the friendships we planted, the ones we lost, and the few that still bear fruit across time, distance and all our modern pings.
A true pal is not the one who merely receives our message. A true pal is the one who still receives our meaning.
Joseph Tek Choon Yee has over 30 years experience in the plantation industry, with a strong background in oil palm research and development, C-suite leadership and industry advocacy. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
