KUNSHAN, China — For the last seven weeks I have been trying to send a postcard from this “smallish” city of nearly two million (counting migrant workers), where I have been teaching at Duke University’s just-opened China campus.

Kunshan is just west of Shanghai, in the heart of modernizing China. But finding a postcard, finding a stamp, getting that stamp to stick, finding a place to mail the postcard — even just getting anyone on this state-of-the-art campus to accept the idea of putting a letter in the mail — have proved a challenge, and not just because of my wobbly Chinese. In my travels to the tourist traps around Kunshan, I have seen exactly one Chinese person writing a postcard.

I confess I am an outlier when it comes to letter writing. During a pre-Internet, pre-satellite-television Peace Corps tour in Africa, I learned to use an italic pen — the kind calligraphers use — and decent stationery to communicate with friends and family. The habit has stuck.

But I’m not alone. For many Americans, sending a postcard from an exotic locale is still a mainstay of modern travel, if only to prove you actually went somewhere. It’s short and sweet, no heavy messaging required, the Twitter of a block-print age. And who doesn’t enjoy finding a handwritten missive among the supermarket fliers and other invasive species that swarm our mailboxes?

So shortly after arriving at Duke’s campus, which like everything within view is soaring and modern and brand new, I set out to find postcards to document our arrival. I thought I’d hit gold when I found a store in a nearby mini-mall that sold magazines and school supplies. But amid all the paper products on sale, there wasn’t a single postcard.

Ditto for the downtown warrens of small businesses. You want some L-shaped angle-iron brackets, for a little home project? Sure. French perfume? Check. A kilo bag of mung beans? No problem. But postcards? No way.

Even the five-story bookstore was a miss. Glue sticks, recently translated inspirational books by Warren Buffett or a map of Kunshan (in Chinese only), but no postcards.

My wife and I finally escaped from Kunshan on the ultramodern bullet train that whisked us at 200 miles an hour to Shanghai, a serious city of 14 million-plus that sees many more foreigners than Kunshan. And finally, pay dirt, of a sort: At our hotel the English-speaking concierge had his own secret cache of postcards, black-and-white period photos of old Shanghai. Not a wide selection, but who were we to be picky?

He even had the correct stamps and a pot of glue to affix them, since he warned us that Chinese stamp glue was notoriously unreliable. We bought a half-dozen cards, filled out three on the spot and gave them back to the concierge, because it wasn’t clear where we would mail them.

We did eventually find other postcards here and there. One nice collection was in the heart of the lakeside resort town of Hangzhou, where I saw that sole Chinese postcard writer at work.

Hangzhou, about two hours southwest of Shanghai, is also the home of Alibaba, an online behemoth that dwarfs Amazon and is a symptom of the ballooning Chinese love affair with electrons. Even more than in the United States, people appear addicted to their smartphones. Waiting for the train home in the yawning ultramodern Hangzhou station, hundreds of faces basked in the cool blue light of an iPhone or Samsung. Not a pen was in sight.

My students here have assured me that the postcard is not dead in China, just moribund. You could say the same in America. But the Chinese traditionally have revered handwritten communication. Just walk through the floors stuffed with centuries of pen-and-ink calligraphy in virtually any museum. And Chinese schoolchildren still spend hours copying characters that began life thousands of years before, when they were etched on the shells of turtles.

That’s not to say that Chinese people don’t write anymore. But the relative rarity of the handwritten postcard here is symptomatic of a pell-mell rush toward a digital and depersonalized future. It seems sad to see the broad strokes of Chinese culture and communication shrunk to a 3-by-5-inch screen, and delicate brush lettering now reduced to pecking with two thumbs.

Americans like to imagine that we are the most tech-savvy, if not tech-addled country on the planet. But we have nothing on China. Which means if you visit the Middle Kingdom, plan on sending a selfie from in front of Mao’s tomb to prove you were here. But forget about mailing Mom a postcard.