Your father never told you he loved you.
Not once.
Not when you were born, not when you graduated, not when you got married, not when you placed your first child in his arms and his hands shook slightly and his jaw tightened and he looked at the ceiling for a moment before looking down.
He never said it.
But he said it every day.
He said it at 5:45am on school mornings, when he started the car in the carpark while you were still brushing your teeth.
He sat in the driver’s seat with the engine running and the radio on Class 95, waiting, because he drove you to school every day for six years even though the bus stop was two blocks away.
He never explained why.
You assumed it was on his way to work.
It was not on his way to work.
His office was in Jurong. Your school was in Bishan.
He drove twenty minutes in the wrong direction every morning and then turned around and drove forty minutes to work, and you did not know this until you were 26 and your mother mentioned it at a dinner you almost didn’t attend.
Then there was the torchlight.
There is an image you carry from childhood that you have never told anyone about.
You were eleven.
Your bicycle chain had come off on a Saturday afternoon and you wheeled it home and left it in the corridor because you didn’t know how to fix it.
You went inside. You forgot about it.
At nine o’clock that night, you walked past the kitchen and saw the front door open. Your father was in the corridor, crouching beside the bicycle, with a torchlight between his teeth and both hands black with grease.
He was threading the chain back onto the gear.
He had not told you he was going to do this. He had not asked you what happened.
He had seen the bicycle in the corridor and he had gone out and fixed it, the way he fixed everything in that flat, quietly, without asking to be thanked, in the dark, with a torchlight between his teeth because he needed both hands and there was nobody holding the light for him.
You stood at the kitchen doorway and watched him for a moment.
He didn’t see you.
You went to bed.
In the morning the bicycle was in its usual place, chain on, tyres pumped. He was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table. Neither of you said a word about it.
That was how your father spoke.
He spoke in door locks checked twice before bed, every night, including the gate latch that he jiggled three times because it had been loose since 1994 and he never replaced it but he never forgot it either.
At the bus stop on the first day of Secondary 1, he stood beside you without saying anything, just hands in his pockets…
Watching the road for the bus, until it came and you got on and he watched it leave and you saw him through the rear window still standing there, smaller and smaller, until the bus turned.
He spoke in money.
Not generously, not lavishly, but steadily.
The red packet at Chinese New Year that was always heavier than it looked.
The $50 he pressed into your hand when you went to university, every Friday, folded once, slipped across the table without a speech.
The way he never asked what you spent it on, because the giving was the point, not the accounting.
And then there was the overtime.
The years he worked late so your mother could work less.
You didn’t understand this as a child.
You understood it as absence.
Daddy is working.
Daddy will be late.
The door opening at 9pm, the shoes at the rack, the plate of rice covered the way your mother always covered it. He ate alone, at the same table where you had eaten three hours earlier, and the clink of his chopsticks in the quiet flat was a sound you heard through your bedroom wall so many nights that you stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing rain.
But his loudest language was silence.
The long drives to your grandmother’s flat in Geylang with the radio on and neither of you talking.
The dinner table where he sat across from you for eighteen years and the longest sentence you can remember is “pass the soy sauce.”
The school report he looked at for thirty seconds, nodded, and placed on the table without a word. You waited for more. You waited for good job, or well done, or I’m proud of you. The words didn’t come. The nod was supposed to be enough. For a long time, you thought it wasn’t.
You were wrong, but it took you twenty years to understand why.
You were 32 when your son was born.
The nurse placed him in your arms and your hands shook and your jaw tightened and you looked at the ceiling for a moment before looking down, and you did not know that you were making the same face your father had made, in the same hospital, 32 years earlier.
Your son grabbed your finger.
And something in you rearranged.
You drove home from the hospital and you pulled into the carpark and you sat there for a moment with your hands on the wheel. Your grip tightened the way it does when your body is working something out faster than your mind can follow.
Jurong to Bishan.
20 minutes in the wrong direction.
40 minutes to work.
Six years.
Your hands stayed on the wheel for a long time.
3 weeks after your son was born, his mobile fell off the cot rail and the winding mechanism broke. Your wife said just buy a new one, it’s $12 at Kiddy Palace.
You didn’t buy a new one.
At nine o’clock that night, you were sitting on the kitchen floor with the mobile in pieces on a newspaper, a screwdriver in one hand and a torchlight between your teeth because you needed both hands and nobody was holding the light for you.
You had not planned to do this.
You had not thought about it.
Your hands had picked up the torchlight the way your father’s hands had picked up the torchlight thirty years ago in the corridor outside your bedroom, and your knees had found the floor the way his knees had found the floor, and you were crouching over something small and broken in the dark, fixing it because it belonged to your child and your child would wake up and it would be done and nobody would need to know.
Your wife walked past the kitchen doorway.
She looked at you on the floor with grease on your fingers and a torchlight between your teeth.
She said something you didn’t hear, because the blood was loud in your ears and your eyes were burning and you had just understood something so large that your body was doing the understanding for you because your mind was not big enough to hold it.
You fixed the mobile. You wiped your hands on a towel. You went to bed. In the morning it was hanging from the cot rail, working perfectly, and your wife said oh you fixed it, and you said yes, and your son was asleep underneath it with his fist curled around nothing.
You did not call your father to tell him you finally understood.
You called him three days later. On a Sunday evening. The phone rang five times. He picked up.
Ba.
What.
Have you eaten?
A pause. Yes. Then, after a longer pause: You?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
The call lasted 40 seconds.
Neither of you said anything else.
But when you put the phone down, your chest unlocked in a way it had not done in years, because you had just spoken to your father in his own language, and he had answered.
And the forty seconds had said more than three words could have, because three words would have embarrassed him, and forty seconds of “have you eaten” was how love had always sounded in your family, and for the first time you were not translating. You were fluent.
If your father is still here, call him as soon as you can
.
Don’t say the three words.
He doesn’t need them.
Ask him if he’s eaten.
He will say yes. Then he will ask you.
And in the pause between his question and your answer, you will hear it. The thing he has been saying your whole life, in a language that doesn’t use words.
And if your father is no longer here…
You are in the corridor now. The one with the torchlight between your teeth. Driving twenty minutes in the wrong direction, checking the gate latch, folding money across a table. Your child does not know what you are saying. They will not know for years. They will think you are being quiet.
One day, they will be on a kitchen floor at nine o’clock at night, fixing something that could have been replaced, with a torchlight between their teeth and no one holding the light.
And they will understand.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀.
𝗜𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀.
3am stories. Pass it on
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