I have the greatest dad in the world. But like most Asian dads, you never knew how to show your love. I always knew anyway.
I was a sensitive soul, a crybaby. I was afraid of the dark, so I would run into your bedroom and say, "Dad, I want a pok pok" — meaning I just wanted you to pat me gently until I fell asleep. And you would.
"Dad, there's a cockroach in my bedroom!" I would yell, and you would rush in, finish the cockroach, and leave with a sassy comment: "You are a boy. If you are afraid of even a cockroach, what else can you do in life?"
When I needed a quieter place to study in secondary school — back when Bluetooth wasn't quite a thing yet — you built yourself a thirty-foot-long headset, so you could keep listening to your news channel without disturbing me.
You kept every single prize I ever won. You arranged them carefully in the cabinet and showed them to our relatives. I knew you still brought them out and cleaned them from time to time.
And yet you would do anything to stop me from studying. "Ah boy, if you put down your book, dad will buy you your favourite roti canai." "What about I bring you to your favourite restaurant?" My colleagues still don't believe me when I tell them my father used to bribe me not to study too hard.
Your favourite catchphrase was, "You know, your grandpa knew no words, but he was an honest man. I just want you to be an honest man."
You never interfered with my choices. Even when I dropped out of high school to pursue gaming, you would just stand behind me while I played, and say you had no idea what this was.
I idolized you. I would point at a skyscraper and tell my friends, "My dad built that."
I am not sure when it started, but as I grew older, I felt I had never learned how to talk to you. Maybe to you I was still the seventeen-year-old who first left home. You wanted to protect me, to pass on your wisdom — but you were still speaking to a high-schooler. Every time I came home, we ended up in a big argument about something.
When you had cancer during my graduate school years, you hid it from me — even though jie jie had already told me — and you simply stopped talking to me for a year, until the treatment was over. That was your way: to protect me by keeping me out.
I must admit that I have resented you. Not because I ever doubted your love. But I have been struggling with life. The strenuous people politics, a career impossible to navigate, the endless curveballs life has thrown at me. None of it could be settled with a simple pok pok.
I resented, too, that you seemed so contented. I never understood why you refused to fix your knee, or to wear your hearing aid. My statistical mind treats every question as an optimization problem.
But not everything is a problem I can solve. I never knew how to mend your heart after you lost your younger brothers.
So I argued with you about politics, complained about the shows you loved, and kept insisting: fix your knee, wear your hearing aid.
Underneath all of it, I was lonely. I was yearning to be understood — for you to come, or at least for the company of someone I once idolized. Life has been much harder since I left home at seventeen, and it had grown almost unbearable.
I know you were waiting for the same thing.
And yet, even though we rarely talked, we still found a way to communicate.
I have a homepage, and I knew you read it religiously, comparing it line by line, just to catch a glimpse of what I was up to. Then you would put it gently: "Ah boy, I think you are taking up too many students." "Ah boy, stop giving so many talks. How can you find someone if you are always on the road?"
It broke my heart that when your browser history was cleared, what worried you most was not being able to find my homepage again.
You may never have known this: I largely built that homepage for you. Every time I learned a new skill that might help you read it, I used it — generating podcasts of my publications, annotating my papers. I knew you didn't have much to say to me, so I built a voice chatbot.
People sometimes ask why my website is so fancy. The true answer is that I always knew I could count on one reader.
When you grew frail, I got spooked.
"Ah boy, when I am gone, who will take care of your mum in Malaysia?"
"Ah boy, and who will take care of you when your mum is gone too?"
I can calculate in detail how stars orbit in a galaxy. I can test the very fabric of our universe. But I had no solution for becoming the son you thought you could have. And perhaps you never knew: it was truly not for lack of trying.
So I raced against time. I told myself I could figure out my life, I just had to do it efficiently. I worked tirelessly. I kept every problem to myself. I stopped telling you anything I was facing. I moved out.
Everything stopped this week. The clock ran out before I found a solution. And I have lost the one reader who mattered, at the time I needed him most.
But daddy — thank you.
Thank you for loving me unconditionally.
Thank you for never putting your own need for me ahead of my academic dream.
I meant it when I told you that I have everything I need to take care of myself. You gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted, and so I learned enough to make a living anywhere.
I will be fine, precisely because I have followed your insistence on being an honest man, and on taking the hard road instead of the easy one.
And by the way — you always told me to save. I should tell you that I have already saved more than the target you set for me.
Thank you for trusting me to make the right choice for myself, even when I wasn't making it.
I will solve my problem. That is the last thing you need to worry about now.
You never once told me you were proud of me. I hope you were.
It may be belated, but I love you, daddy. Thank you. I forgive you; please forgive me.
I hope you have found peace. You loved to travel. I hope you are visiting all those places again now.
Rest well, daddy.