On 23 March 1953, Armi wrote a letter from Helsinki to her fiancé in Paris, whom she referred to as Chi, informing him of their banns of marriage made at the church the day before.

Armi and Chi had met only four months earlier in Paris during a brief visit Armi made to see friends in the city. After she returned to Helsinki, the two kept in touch by sending each other love letters, and soon decided to marry. In their haste to hold the wedding, Chi was unable to prepare the paperwork necessary to cross borders from France to Finland. However, this did not stop them from moving forward with arranging the banns, which did not require both parties to be present.

To make up for Chi’s absence, Armi displayed a framed photograph of him at a reception at her home following the church ceremony. Chi had never been to Finland and had never met her relatives—many of whom probably had no idea who she was marrying.

In her letter, Armi mentions the ‘sensation’ that arose when her guests discovered that Chi was Chinese. She describes how her relatives leaned in to inspect the photograph of Chi—the mysterious, absent groom.

‘But he is quite a handsome boy’ they proclaim. ‘He could just as well be somebody from the east of Finland. And to please me they say that there is something Chinese in my looks, too.’ (Helsinki, 23 March 1953)

Armi’s soft blonde curls and round blue eyes would hardly fit the physical attributes commonly associated with someone of Chinese descent, but to explain the roots of these racial perceptions and stereotypes, she writes:

Well, I must explain to you that an ordinary Finn thinks that all Chinese people still wear braids in the middle of their head, and that my friends and relatives were surprised to see that you looked almost like a European.

Armi Rautio was my grandmother. Lin Zongji, also known as ‘Monsieur Lin’ and Chi—the name I use for him in this essay—was my grandfather. Both are no longer alive.

Armi wrote to Chi during Helsinki’s bitter winter months. When she was not writing in haste, she responded to Chi’s letters in the evenings while sipping coffee with the radio playing softly in the background. Her typed—and occasionally handwritten—letters were composed on thin, almost transparent paper, and sent at least twice a week, sometimes even daily. In the early months of their correspondence, she closed her letters with ‘Yours forever’. After learning that she was pregnant, she began signing off with ‘Your fiancé’, always followed by her handwritten signature: ‘Armi’.

Their letters speak of their sense of curiosity and eagerness to explore the world. They were both committed to their studies—Armi was nearing the end of her degree in English philology at the University of Helsinki, while Chi had received a scholarship from Beijing to study psychology at the Paris-Sorbonne University.

In the letters, they shared their reflections and contemplations on topics about which they were reading and studying. They also described daily events, offered words of guidance, and disputed points the other had made. Issues of trust, jealousy, and future expectations surfaced across the letters, appearing and reappearing over the months of daily exchange.

The letters are also full of lists. Their acquired habit of list-making reflects an effort to organise the world around fixed points—something they continued to perfect well into old age. There are lists of elaborate health advice: ‘Don’t miss any meals, take an hours walk every day, rub your entire body with a rough towel of cold water starting from your limbs’, followed by an entire page detailing where and how to place the cold towels on one’s body (Helsinki, 8 January 1953). They provide lists of bureaucratic obstacles that were keeping them apart, and more lists advising one another on how to overcome these barriers with the Chinese Legation and Finnish Foreign Ministry.

‘Communism Makes Me Have Confidence in Love’

Surprisingly, they rarely dwelled on the more familiar subjects one would expect when getting to know someone. The letters are deeply personal, yet contain few introductory paragraphs about their pasts or family backgrounds.

Regardless of the deep familiarity the two seemed to share from the onset of their relationship, Chi and Armi came from vastly different geographical, political, and cultural worlds. Armi was born in Porvoo, a small port town on Finland’s southern coast not far from the Russian border. By the time she met Chi, Armi’s parents had already passed away and, with no siblings, she did not feel bound to her hometown, although she carried a sentimental attachment to it throughout her life.

Chi was born in the bustling frontier of Fujian Province in southeast China into a wealthy maritime trading family. The youngest of four children—and the only son—he was the pride of his family. By the time Chi met Armi, his relatives had migrated away from mainland China. Their departure mirrored the broader exodus of many Chinese citizens in the 1940s, who crossed the Taiwan Strait to begin new lives on the Nationalist Party–administered island of Taiwan.

Both Armi and Chi came from merchant families who valued educational merit and achievement. This commonality is also what brought them together in their habit of letter writing—an activity that, after all, reflects a writer’s level of education and class background. They considered themselves cosmopolitan individuals who savoured elegance and intellectual craft. Armi’s curiosity and love of travel took her to cities across Europe and America, where she embraced the freedom of work and adventure. As a single and childless woman in her mid-thirties, she was ahead of her time.

During the four years he lived in the highbrow pockets of Paris, Chi enjoyed a bachelor lifestyle. Studying in Paris for Chinese students had already become a popular trend at least three decades before Chi and his cohort of Chinese intellectuals arrived. In the 1920s, Paris was the place where many Chinese students first encountered and embraced Marxism. Several of these students later became prominent Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Chen Yi, as well as communist martyrs such as Wang Ruofei.

Of all the topics Armi and Chi pondered and discussed in their letters, their immediate plans for a shared future remained unresolved. Despite the pledges they made as a soon-to-be-married couple, they struggled to decide where and how to build a life together. Bureaucratic obstacles continued to keep them apart. In their letters, they reflected on both the euphoria surrounding the promise of New China and the uncertainty that came with it. As the months unfolded, their correspondence became increasingly dominated by discussions of bureaucratic challenges. Armi was hit by a sense of reality and her earlier optimism about building a life together in China gave way to fear about what the country’s future would bring.

At the time, China’s transition to communism had only just begun and, contrary to Armi’s apprehension, Chi viewed the future of his homeland with hope. Under Chairman Mao Zedong’s leadership, Chi saw his motherland’s future as full of promise. His words conveyed a sense of euphoria and faith in the possibilities of political transformation.

In one of the rare letters written by Chi to Armi that have survived, he tells her:

I am sorry that you have such prejudice in Communism. I hope this problem would not be our obstacles. Communism is for me as a kind of study, a kind of social science. Communism makes me have confidence in love, in the better future … I love communism not for power neither for situation. It is a play of ideas for me. (Paris, 28 February 1953)

With communism gaining global momentum, it became a mark of status for both Armi and Chi—though one that was fraught with tension. Outside their own country, people like Chi who belonged to the Chinese diaspora had the freedom to imagine what China was, and how to fall in love with it. For Chinese intellectuals, like Chi, love and liberty were not only personal ideas but also political ones—tied to a shared global drive towards a communist future. Ultimately, socialism for them was a moral project that transcended national borders and identities, uniting individuals through shared aims and collective virtues. With revolution at its core, communism in the way Mao Zedong envisioned it, was a continuous, unfolding endeavour full of possibility and imagination.

After months of letter writing, in anticipation of the birth of their first son (my father), Chi finally moved from Paris to Helsinki. During his years in Finland, he was unable to find work in his profession as a psychologist and scholar. Instead, he took on manual labour, working in hotel kitchens. Armi remained the primary breadwinner, working as a translator and English teacher. Two years later, after the birth of their second son, Chi convinced Armi that migrating to China would allow him to secure a university position—one that would be more beneficial for the family. The preserved letters trace Chi’s experiences in the months that followed, returning to and settling down in Beijing to find work as an academic.

‘Now China Is a Country of Miracles’

After living abroad for seven years, Chi’s return to China ignited his emotions. From Finland, Chi and his newborn son, my uncle, crossed the Russian border and jumped on the Vostok train crossing Siberia’s vast plateaus. It took them 15 days to reach Beijing. On the fifth day of their trip, when they had reached the Ural Mountains that mark the border between Europe and the West Siberian Plain, Chi wrote to Armi to inform her that they had safely entered Asia. His following letters expressed a poetics of the future, filled with euphoria for what was to come. He wrote:

The snow is so beautiful, and the sun shines brilliantly … Siberia seems to me so sweet and calm. Mountains are timid too. They lay there quietly like a nice sleeping child. (18 November 1955)

He also wrote to his wife:

You don’t know how much gratitude I have for my new government and my country. I start to love them immediately as much as I love you, my mother, my two sons. Now China is a country of miracles. (Beijing, 2 December 1955)

This euphoria increasingly pervaded his letters, reflecting the sense of elation shared by many overseas Chinese academics in the early 1950s. This sentiment was particularly pronounced in the wake of the Thought Reform Movement (思想改造运动), when China’s higher education system sought to sever ties with the North American–model university structures that had been dominant during the Republican era. Despite efforts to remove Anglo-American influences, many Chinese universities at the time recruited Chinese intellectuals returning from abroad—predominantly from the United States (Wang 2020). The Red Scare spreading across US society had seeped into academia, creating hostile, racially charged environments that affected ethnically Chinese scholars. For many, the desire to escape this discrimination became a powerful motivation to make the voyage back to the motherland and participate in building the New China.

Politics aside, Chinese scholars such as Chi were also returning for the promise of full employment. The Chinese Government actively incentivised returnee researchers and academics with prestigious roles and high salaries—sometimes comparable with those of national leaders and high-level state personnel (Wang 2020). In addition to higher incomes, returnees received settling-in allowances and were allocated personal apartments. China’s university wage reforms proved beneficial for Chi. Three months after his return, the government secured him a position as a lecturer in psychology and offered him and his family subsidised accommodation on the university grounds.

With a stable job secured, his next task was to convince Armi to join him in China. In his letters, he provided detailed descriptions of the government-provided services, including free health care and childcare. He returned to his familiar habit of list-making, providing detailed accounts of daily expenses—listing the cost of fruit (pears: 74 cents, grapes: 96 cents, apples: 78 cents, bananas: 32 cents), as well as Western delicacies such as coffee (500 grams for $12.50), sausages ($2.40), cognac ($6.40), and even champagne ($5.60).

He reminded her that these foods were considered luxury goods in China, but listing them was his way of enticing her to follow in his footsteps and move to Beijing. These were acts of love—an effort to reassure Armi that they could build a happy and comfortable life in a city that, while different from Helsinki, was open to international markets and foreign visitors. He told her that many other Chinese returnees had moved to Beijing with their European wives and that she, too, would have European friends. The government, he promised, would provide her a job upon her arrival. In Beijing, they could visit the opera and cinema to watch Russian, Indian, and Eastern European films. They could go window shopping and eat Peking duck.

Not long after his return, Chi was appointed to his first position, at the Academy of Science Institute, and, later, at Beijing Normal University, where he taught psychology. He was also offered subsidised accommodation on the university grounds. His first task in his new role was to learn Russian and study theories of dialectic materialism. Five months after their separation, Armi left her job as an English translator in Helsinki and followed her husband’s path. She boarded the Vostok train with their first-born son—my father—and soon the family was reunited.

Their correspondence comes to a halt, though only for a few years, resuming when Armi returned to Helsinki for brief visits. Letters written between my grandparents in later years reflect the unfolding of nationwide campaigns, including the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the impact of the Great Leap Forward on Beijing’s university campuses. The gap between letters widened during the politically tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, until 1974, when my grandmother resumed writing—this time to her 21-year-old son, my father, who was finally permitted to leave China on a train to Finland.

What Can Love Letters Tell Us?

The love letters form one piece of a larger puzzle within my broader research project, which draws on multilayered empirical material to document the forgotten dreams and life stories of interracial intellectual families who came of age amid the turmoil of revolutionary Beijing.

My project is an intimate ethnography—a methodological approach coined by Alisse Waterston and Barbara Rylko-Bauer (2006; see also Waterston 2019, 2024, 2025)—which involves describing and analysing the rich, complex life histories of family members to link their stories to broader social histories. As part of this project, I have transcribed more than 700 pages of letters written from three locations: first in Paris, then in Helsinki, and, from the 1960s, in Beijing. In addition to these letters, I draw on textual archives and material artefacts, including photographs, family heirlooms, testimonies, passports, rare handwritten Red Guard pamphlets, and self-published newsletters. I also incorporate detailed analyses of autobiographical oral histories gathered through interviews—with my uncle and father, with relatives in Taiwan, and with my father’s childhood acquaintances, who, like him, grew up in intellectual families in Beijing during Maoist rule.

Today, my grandparents’ letters are stored in the basement of my parents’ home in Helsinki. From when I was young, with each move we made as a family—from Helsinki to Beijing, to Singapore, back to Beijing, and then to Helsinki again—the letters were always carefully placed in the same upper righthand drawer of a small cabinet attached to a much larger bookshelf. Filled to the brim, the drawer is heavy and, if you manage to open it, the letters spill over the sides; you might not be able to close it again.

The contents of the drawer are set apart from the necessary items of daily life, occupying a space of non-presence. They preserve moments of lived experience, sometimes of the most intimate kind, offering rare insights into private relationships across time. As archived traces, the letters reflect ways of seeing and making sense of the world. As a scholarly methodology, letters do not simply record history—they create it. Yet, they do not always speak in the tidy, univocal terms academics use. Instead, they can disrupt our scholarly discourses and force us to reconsider and question our training. The struggle lies in how to reconcile these narratives and produce a voice from the letters that is not merely ‘objective’ or ‘rational’, but also passionate—and sometimes politically partisan. The possibilities are vast. And, so far, I have only begun to uncover the promise they hold.