We have written each other "roast letters" for thirty years
Monthly letters of pure mockery between college roommates — and inside every poison shell, real care: "Send your card number," "Ticket bought, come stay two months."
My friendship with Lao Ke began with an insulting letter.
We shared a bunk bed in university and went our separate ways after. In the first year he was a technician at a factory in the south and I was in graduate school here. One day I wrote him a letter with nothing kind in it. "I hear you've lost eight jin in a month. Is the canteen that bad, or have you finally started paying for the things you used to boast about?" At the end I tucked in half a page of notes on my graduate exams, written to sound as casual as I could manage.
Two weeks later the reply came. My name on the envelope was in a wild scrawl, and the letter opened with a counterattack. "So you're doing a master's now? With your IQ, your supervisor must have saved the galaxy in a previous life." Then the tone changed. He described in detail a process improvement he had worked out at the factory and said, "I've been chewing on this for three months. This is your field. Take a look and tell me if it's worth anything."
I wrote back three pages of serious analysis. He followed it, and it worked.
From then on the roast letter was a fixture between us. One a month, thirty years, unbroken. Inside them we were never civil. I got promoted; he wrote, "Has everyone else at your office died?" He bought a flat; I wrote back, "Have you worked out the interest on that mortgage, or did a PE teacher teach you maths?" (He did in fact go and have the numbers checked, by the son of the man who had taught him maths.) But both of us knew what sat under the abuse. The year my father was ill, he wrote, "Money is not the issue. Send me your card number," and transferred it before I could answer. The year his marriage came apart, my letter was one sentence: "Ticket bought. Next Wednesday. Come and stay with me for two months."
We did not meet often — once every two years on average, across thirty-odd years. But each time we picked the letters up where they had left off, as if no day had passed. Lao Ke said, "Meeting is a side dish. Letters are the main course. Side dishes now and then. The main course cannot stop."
The "roast" in a roast letter is the hardest kind of tenderness men allow each other. Everything you cannot say has to be wrapped in a shell of insults before it can be handed over.
The medium has changed several times: eight-fen stamps, then fax, then email, and now voice-to-text "electronic letters." But he insists on typing rather than sending voice notes. "Voice is for clients. Typing is for brothers. Typing costs you your hands, and costing you your hands is what makes it real." He types slowly, half an hour to a letter, full of errors. I have collected his typos for thirty years and call the file "Selected Misspellings." He has collected my boasts and calls his "The Complete Bullshit." We have agreed that at seventy we will combine the two into a book. We already have the title: Two Shameless Men.
Last year he had surgery. Before the operation he messaged me: "Reply may be late this time." I wrote back, "That's fine, I'll wait. I'll come afterwards and check whether you're alive enough to write the next one." From the bed he replied, "Obviously I am. I've already drafted it. It's all about how watery your last piece was."
The surgery went well. The first thing he did afterwards was have the nurse hand him his phone so he could send the letter. I read it and replied in the format we have used for thirty years: "Received. Too much rubbish, but the point is clear. See you Wednesday."
In the end
There is a kind of friend who never praises you, undercuts you at every turn, and shows up within the hour when you need him. He disguises care as insults and packages missing you as a takedown. The test is simple. When you are in trouble, the person who says "I told you so" first and the person who buys a ticket first are the same person.