Stoic dads get a bad reputation...
...but I have learnt to love the language mine speaks.
Stoic dads get a bad reputation, but I have learnt to love the language mine speaks.
It’s in the way he was relentlessly dedicated to our health, education and discipline: our junk food quota was something like one bag of Lay’s Sour Cream & Onion chips per year, shared amongst our family of 4.
It’s also in the way he would drive us to school daily before the sun was up, at 6.15am sharp—if either of us was any more than 5 minutes late, he would simply leave without us.
At age 58, rather than take chances on the teachers at school, he decided he would download and learn the entire Cambridge GCE A-Level Mathematics syllabus himself, and do every single exam paper issued by all of the colleges throughout the country for the last 10 years, just so he would be able to teach it to me (this ended up snowballing into my peers at school coming over to be tutored by him for the next 5 years—and yes, I got an ‘A’).
I may never get the “I’m proud of you” in words, but if I sleuth on his computer for long enough, I find a dedicated folder of scans containing every publication—newspaper, magazine, academic journal—that’s ever featured either of his children. There’s Linying Breaks Into Boys Club from when I first signed to a major label; there’s an article from when my brother’s first book was published. And there’s an entire Excel sheet where my Spotify data is manually charted, meticulously sorted according to listener age and region, and then expertly converted into a graph.
As an adult, I now get to enjoy the softer, funnier sides to him, like his obsession with fitness and self-improvement, his intensely precise culinary endeavours, his love for technology and weird fascination with snake-versus-honey badger videos—all of which remind me of what a joyous privilege it is to be able to get to know and then love your parents as the people they are.
Happy Fathers’ Day to all fathers past and present and to be, even though mine thinks the whole thing is a commercial scam…
The Excel sheet is particularly impressive.
Much Applause for your pop 👨 for his never-ending dedication to Learning for himself in order to teach you and to boost you up . You're dad is one in a Trillion