My name is Daniel. I was an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea, and am now a writer who has

published three books including South Korea: Our Story by Daniel Nardini.

                           I have been corresponding with a penfriend for 34 years now. She was born 

and raised in what used to be the German Democratic Republic, or popularly called East Germany.

For seven of those years, we had managed to carry on a correspondence despite the fact that I was

in the United States and she was in East Germany. How and why the East German government even

allowed this letter correspondence to even occur I will never know. It was in 1989 that I went to visit

her and her family not too long after I had escaped from China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

I was in East Germany for 20 days.......the miracle was I was able to stay in the country that long and

not get locked up in jail. No, the authorities were not friendly to me; I was from an "enemy" country.

I am sure that this was not all that pleasant for my friend either---the East German government

had suspicions on anyone who had friends from capitalist countries. During that time period I saw avery

repressive country and I myself had to be careful. At the same time, I saw a country in decay and

felt that it might not survive too much longer. It didn't. Two and a half months after I left, the Berlin

Wall collapsed and my friend and her family were free at last. For all those years we were able to

freely correspond and it has been beautiful. She got to do all of the things she could never do in

the former East Germany, and more than that she could see the world instead of being locked up

in her own country. Being part of a unified Germany has been wonderful for my friend, and she

can now travel on a Federal Republic of Germany passport. On this anniversary, I wish her all of the

best!