Forty years at the lighthouse, a lifetime of letters in the mailbox

There is a lighthouse on a lonely island in the north. The keeper was Old Tao, and he kept it for forty years.

The rule was one shift of three months; you went home on leave only when it ended. In forty years, three quarters of his life went to that stretch of sea. No television on the island. No neighbors. At the beginning he even generated his own electricity. Two things carried him through the long solo watches: the light, and the letters.

The letters were from his wife, Xiao Man. Before he first went out she told him, "You keep the light, I'll keep the letters. One from you, one from me, and we save them." So for forty years the first thing he received at the start of every shift was not supplies. It was a thick bundle of letters. Her handwriting was small and even, and the letters contained everything: their son's first lost tooth, the jujube tree in the yard split down one side by lightning, the new noodle shop at the corner that wasn't any good, the sea she dreamed about at night.

His replies were slow. The mail boat came once every two weeks. His letters were rough, the characters large, the content simple: the light is on, the sea is reasonable, I miss you. Sometimes a whole letter ran to a dozen words. She teased him in her next one: "Your letters are turning into telegrams." So the time after that he filled three pages. He wrote about how a thunderstorm at sea splits the sky open, about the pod of dolphins that passed beneath the lighthouse, about how brightly he had polished the lens — every boat for miles around steers home by this one light.

One winter a storm stopped the supply boat for more than twenty days and his food ran down to nothing. Only later did he learn that during those weeks she went to the dock every day for news, came home, and wrote to his mailbox. "Writing calms me down. He can't see it, but I can keep writing."

Forty years, more than four thousand letters. The year he retired he carried them all home and the two of them counted. Stacked up, the pile came to half a person's height. Their son said, "That isn't letter-writing. That's serializing your life."

In the old days the horses were slow and the letters traveled far. But it was that slowness that made every sentence worth setting down carefully, and gave every spell of missing someone a receipt.

Xiao Man died in 2016, ahead of him. He stayed on the lighthouse two more years and then retired properly. The first thing he did was sort the four thousand letters by year and bind them into volumes. On the title page of the first volume he wrote: Author, Xiao Man, holding the pen. Sea conditions supplied by Old Tao.

Last year the maritime authority turned the old lighthouse into a museum of navigation and invited him back to talk about keeping it. At the end he did not talk about storms or heroics. He took a yellowed letter out of his bag and read it to the room. Xiao Man had written it in 1983.

"Old Tao: today our son asked me what his father does. I said, your father keeps a light for the people at sea. He asked, then who keeps a light for you? I said, your father's letters are the light. Mother lights them every night."

When he finished, the room was completely quiet. He said, "After she died I kept thinking: I kept a light my whole life, but she was the one who lit the first one. The letters were her lamp oil."

The display case in the farthest corner of the museum holds those letters now. A small card is taped to the glass: More than four thousand family letters. Correspondents: the lighthouse keeper Old Tao and his light.