It's a time of lists -- of those who get cards, or presents, or a telephone call, a season when people try to think in terms of a community. But for Americans of an older generation, community represents a much more regular current. PNS contributor Dorothy Chin is a psychotherapist and writer living in southern California.

LOS ANGELES -- Every year around the holidays, greeting cards arrive like a stream of ants at my parents' mailbox.

Addressed in awkwardly scripted English -- accompanied by beautiful Chinese characters that look like calligraphy -- they travel across the miles with astonishing consistency. As a child I took them for granted as something adults just do, but it's beginning to dawn on me that my parents and their friends have the sense of community that my generation seems to be seeking.

Perhaps the best example of this is the alumni association my parents helped form. Born in Canton Province -- now called Guangzhou -- China, my parents met as schoolmates in junior high in the city of Toisan. In the early 1950's, they left for Hong Kong, married, had four children, and moved to San Francisco to follow the American dream.

A few years ago, they decided to form an alumni association along with several classmates living in the United States. One by one, by word of mouth, they located other classmates across the United States and Mexico.

When the group grew to about fifty, they set their first goal: to build a new science facility for their old village school, a place thousands of miles away that most of them had not seen in forty years.

The alumni are ordinary citizens. A few achieved great wealth and some are middle-class entrepreneurs, but most live the typical immigrant life of hard labor at jobs such as waiting tables, sewing, and sweeping floors. My parents themselves have worked hard for 25 years -- my father as a hospital billing clerk, my mother as a waitress until the cafe where she worked went bankrupt last year.

To raise money for the project, each member decided how much he or she could contribute -- a sort of self-imposed sliding scale -- but even the poorest gave thousands of dollars. Then the group hired a contractor, talked to school officials, dealt with red tape, and after two years, the project broke ground. After another two years the new building was finished, and the group traveled triumphantly to Toisan for the ribbon-cutting.

When my parents returned from Toisan -- a trip that marked the first time they had returned to their birthplace -- they brought back pictures of their old and new schools. When they told me about their journey, remarkably, they didn't seem proud (though I knew they were), or overwhelmed by their complete success -- all the emotions I think I might have felt. Rather, they seemed unshakable, as if what they did somehow fell into a larger scheme of things, certain all along that they and this event fit into a community of which they were an essential part.

The more I think about this alumni association, the more it seizes my imagination. What might account for the strength of their bonds to each other, and to the community they've carried with them through the years?

It is ironic, but maybe not coincidental, that this is a generation of older Chinese immigrants who faced incredible societal upheavals and who have uprooted their lives to settle in a foreign place. Perhaps because they were forced to carry the ideals of their community in their hearts, these changes did not weaken the bonds, as one might expect, but rather strengthened them. When I asked my father why he wanted to do this, his answer was simple. "To give back," he said, "because that's where we came from. We all feel that way."

Perhaps the idea and practice of community belong to an older generation of Americans. Their offspring seem to have their hands full juggling careers, families, and fragmented identities. As I put off writing my holiday cards yet another day, I marvel at my parents who, without e-mail or fax, have held onto their community across decades, thousands of miles, and several new lifetimes.

And this community they carry in their imaginations has sustained them through the strangeness of a new homeland, the cultural differentness of their children, and the disorientation of a changing world. It tells them who they are.