Most of the older letters were not opened when the records were acquired. These letters were addressed to Wing Sang Co. to be passed on to a third party. They remained with the Yip family because there was no way of tracing the addressee. Letters from each year were tied and wrapped together. File titles have been transcribed from those wrappers. The sealed letters were opened in September 1993 by the project archivist and a subsequent content note of those undelivered letters follows:
The correspondence consists of approximately 600 letters in old style Chinese. They came from various parts of the world: China (mainly from Hong Kong and Guangdong Province), United States of America (New York, Seattle, Oregon, Chicago, and California), Canada (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Gainsbora, Regina, Victoria, and Port Moody), and Mexico. The addressees were either new arrivals in Vancouver or those who had been in Vancouver for some time. To the new arrivals, most letters were either notices of money sent to cover their journey expenses from their relatives or friends, or letters enquiring about their life in the new world. To those who had been in Vancouver for some time, letters were mostly routed via Hong Kong and written by family members or relatives (parents, wives, brothers or sisters, and uncles), requesting them to send their savings to cover their family expenses back home.
Other issues dealt with in these letters are: urging the addressees to come back home no matter what (for instance, wives informed their husbands of their hard life at home and their longing for them to be home; elderly father insisted his son come back and carry on his business at home; young sons and daughters wrote their father who got ill in Vancouver, begging him to come see doctors and recover back home; mother or uncle urged their son or nephew to come back home to get married); parents reminding their sons to be always hardworking and thrifty and never take to gambling or other bad habits while away from home; enquiries about the procedures to enter Vancouver, or the possibility of borrowing money for starting a new business or realizing the journey in mind to the West; accounts of happenings in their homeland (such as war, famine, and soaring price of food products); complaints from senior family members to the son for not sending money home for months; enquiries of those from Chinese communities in other parts of China about job opportunity in Vancouver; explanations of being unable to send out the amount of money as requested, or notices of the repayment of money borrowed.
