Graded Reader: 一封来自广东的信 — A Letter from Guangdong (HSK4-5)

A letter arrives at a Singapore HDB flat. The envelope is addressed in careful brushstroke characters. The sender: a great-uncle in a Guangdong village, ninety-three years old, writing after seventy years of waiting.

一封来自广东的信 follows the Chen family as a single letter upends everything they thought they knew about where they came from. What begins as a mystery becomes a journey — from Toa Payoh to the hills of Meizhou, from a cramped HDB living room to a three-hundred-year-old Hakka roundhouse on the edge of a fishpond.

This is a story about what gets lost when a young man boards a ship alone and never comes back. And about what, against the odds, gets kept.

Who This Is For

Written for HSK 4 learners, and especially for Singapore Chinese heritage readers — those who grew up with Mandarin as a school subject, who have grandparents whose stories they never quite got around to asking about, and who sometimes feel caught between two languages. The Chinese is natural and unforced. No pinyin. No English translations. Just the story.

What's Inside

Over 50,000 characters across 37 chapters, moving between present-day Singapore and Guangdong, and back into the 1950s. The story touches on the history of Nanyang migration, Hakka culture and weilongwu architecture, Singapore's dialect loss, and the food that travels with people long after everything else is gone. Cultural notes are woven throughout — not as interruptions, but as context that makes the story richer.

50,009 characters · 37 chapters · 140 pages · No pinyin · Simplified Chinese For HSK 4-5 learners