By Fergal Keane
　　(Fergal Keane is a BBC foreign correspondent. He recorded this letter to his newborn son for a programme called From Our Own Correspondent while he was working in Hong Kong. Following the broadcast, hundreds of people jammed the BBC switchboard in tears because they were so moved by his words.)
　　
　　My dear son,
　　
　　It is six o’clock in the morning on the island of Hong Kong. You are asleep cradled in my left arm and I am learning the art of one-handed typing. Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I’ve ever known her, is sound asleep in the room next door and there is a soft quiet in our apartment. Since you’ve arrived, days have melted into night and back again and we are learning a new grammar, a long sentence whose punctuation marks are feeding and winding and nappy changing and these occasional moments of quiet.
　　
　　When you are older we’ll tell you that you were born in Britain’s last Asian colony in the lunar year of the Pig and that when we brought you home, the staff of our apartment block gathered to wish you well. ‘It’s a boy, so lucky, so lucky. We Chinese love boys,’ they told us. One man said you were the first baby to be born in the block in the year of Pig. This, he told us, was good Feng Shui, in other words a positive sign for the building and everyone who lived there. Naturally your mother and I were only too happy to believe that. We had wanted you and waited for you, imagined you and dreamed about you and now that you are here no dream can do justice to you.
　　
　　We have called you Daniel Patrick, but I’ve been told by my Chinese friends that you should have a Chinese name as well and this glorious dawn sky makes me think we’ll call you Son of the Eastern Star. Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. So much that seemed essential colour. Like many foreign correspondents I know, I have lived a life that, on occasion, has veered close to the edge: war zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its shapes and forms. In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it’s easy to be drawn in, to take chances with our lives, to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face, listening to your occasional glory and prizes were sweeter than life.
　　
　　And it’s also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory, suddenly so vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys. To tell you the truth, it’s nearly too much to beat at this moment to even think of children being hurt and abused. And yet, looking at you, the images come from flooding back. Ten-year-old Andi Mikail on a hillside in the Eritrea, how his voice cried out, when the wind blew dust on his wounds. The two brothers, Domingo and Juste, in Menongue, southern Angola. Juste, two years old and dying from malnutrition, being carried on seven-year-old Domingo’s back. And Domingo’s words to me, ‘He was nice before, but now he has the hunger.’
　　
　　Last October, in Afghanistan, when you were grown inside your mother, I met Sharja, aged twelve. Motherless, fatherless, guiding me through the grey ruins of her home, everything was gone, she told me. And I knew that, for all her tender years, she had learned more about loss than I would understand in a lifetime. There is one last memory, of Rwanda, where, in a ransacked classroom, I found a mother and her three young children huddled together. The children had died holding on to their mother, that instinct we all learn from birth and in one way or another cling on to until we die.
　　
　　Daniel, these memories explain some of the fierce protectiveness I feel for you, the tenderness and the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine anything happening to you. But there is something more, a story from long ago that I will tell you face to face, father and son, when you are older. It’s a very personal story but it’s part of the picture. It has to do with the long lines of blood and family, about our lives and how we can get lost in them and, if we’re lucky, find our way out again into the sunlight.
　　
　　It begins thirty-five years ago in a big city on a January morning with snow on the ground and a woman walking to the hospital to have her first bay. She is in her early twenties and the city is still strange to her, bigger and noisier than the easy streets and gentle hills of her distant home. She’s walking because there is no money and everything of value has been pawned to pay for the alcohol to which her husband has become addicted. On the way, a taxi driver notices her sitting, exhausted and cold, in the doorway of a shop and he takes her to hospital for free. Later that day, she gives birth to a baby boy and, just as you are to me, he is the best thing she has ever seen. Her husband comes that night and weeps with joy when he sees his son. He is truly happy. Hungover, broke, but in his own way happy, for they were both young and in love with each other and their son.
　　
　　But, Daniel, time had some bad surprises in store for them. The cancer of alcoholism ate away at the man and he lost his family. This was not something he meant to do or wanted to do, it just was. When you are older, my son, you will learn about how complicated life becomes, how we can lose our way and how people get hurt inside and out. By the time his son had grown up, the man lived away from his family, on his own in a one-roomed flat, living and dying for the bottle. He died on the fifth of January, one day before the anniversary of his son’s birth, all those years before in that snowbound city. But his son was too far away to hear his last words, his final breath, and all the things they might have wished to say to one another were left unspoken.
　　
　　Yet now, Daniel, I must tell you that when you let out your first powerful cry in the delivery rom of the Adventist Hospital and I became a father, I thought of your grandfather and, foolish thought it may seem, hoped that in some way he could hear, across the infinity between the living and the dead, your proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he would recognize the distinct voice of family, the sound of hope and new beginnings that you and all your innocence and freshness have brought the world.