Getting a postcard from Hong Kong might not be that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But when the postcard has been stuck in the mail for 26 years and is addressed to some complete strangers who used to live at your address decades earlier, it’s easy to see how that might cause a bit of a flap.
Such was the case last week when Springfield, Illinois resident Kim Draper reached into the mailbox to find a timeworn photo of junks floating on Castle Peak Bay bearing a Hong Kong postmark dated “9 Jul 1993.”
Understandably surprised, and more than a little bit curious, Draper enlisted the help of the local paper — and later CNN — to try to track down the intended recipients, a “Leena and Muhammad Ali Kizilbash,” who had been sent the postcard by their dad, who was visiting Hong Kong at the time.
Well, the attention appears to have paid off, and the Kizilbash clan are about to finally be reunited with their wayward mail.
It was dated July 8, 1993 — exactly 26 years before it showed up at a home in Springfield, Illinois. https://t.co/zyDgZHYMqY
— CNN (@CNN) July 16, 2019
Muhammad Ali Kizilbash told CNN that he had found out about the mystery surrounding the postcard — which by then had been picked up by numerous media outlets — from a friend who heard about it on the radio.
As it turns out, during that fateful summer 26 years ago, Kizilbash’s father, Masrour, had stopped off in Hong Kong for a visit on his way to a dam construction project in China, which he was working on as an engineer. It was then that he penned the message to his kids saying he was “having a good time in this extremely crowded place,” and commenting on the freshness of the local seafood.
It was, Masrour, now 78 and living in Chicago, who reached out the Springfield State Journal-Register, the paper that first picked up the story, asking to be put in touch with Draper, whom he told in a subsequent phone call that he still remembered writing the postcard.
“He didn’t know that they never received it,” Draper said.
Now she’s planning to drive the roughly 320 kilometers from Springfield to Chicago to finally finish the job the postal service apparently botched more than a quarter-century ago.
“I hung up the phone with them crying because they’re such genuine people,” Draper said. “I can’t wait to meet them.”
Masrour’s son, Muhammad Ali, now a doctor, told CNN that rediscovering the lost postcard had brought back fond memories of his childhood, when his father would often send him and his sister Leena — also a doctor now — postcards from the far-flung locales he visited for work.
“It kind of reminded me of being young again, you know, when he used to be on those trips and we’d get those postcards and oftentimes we’d visit him wherever he was,” he said. “Nowadays, you don’t get postcards anymore. It was kind of nice to get them.”
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