The White Ghost Is My Father

This Story is My Bio & Introduction

Today I just watched the day roll on. I didn’t write. I didn’t know what to do. I felt the emptiness inside me. My brain is like a hollow that I see nothing, but I watch any words and ideas are just flying away into thin air.

I wish I could write a thousand words a day, but here I am, contemplating a blank screen on my laptop. Switching from one web to another, reading, checking out Amazon prime day. What did I want to buy from there?

I always wanted to give something to Dad for Xmas. A gadget perhaps, but I bought him an iPad air last year and the year before that, a smartwatch.

I haven’t spoken to him for many months, four or five months since COVID.

My childhood was rough. In fact, I was bullied at school because I was a little different, dark skin and skinny, flipping pages of the comic books drowning myself into the graphic stories. Weird and geeky, they said. But comic books to me were like a door to escape from the harsh reality around me.

From the bullies at school, then came along a bad-tempered young father who abused my mother and yelled at me, in turn. I always imagined him an angry giant from the cave, deep underground that one day he would vanish into the cave never returned.

There was so much anger in him that memories forced me to remember only his rage from his love — if there was once one. I wish I knew what caused the outrage, but I was just a kid. All I had was a wild fantasy.

Then the giant walked out the door one night. I could only watch him walk vanish into the dark, and it was the last time I saw him. He didn’t turn around, and I didn’t call him. Maybe he went back to the deep land beneath my feet. He never returned. That was it, the last memory of him. Other than that, I didn’t remember him much.

I was twelve when my mother started dating a man, and then another man. Maybe there were three or four of them until he met the man from the vast land of the south where oceans were deeper and bluer, the soil was gold and orange, and the sun was brighter — he told me the story of his land one day.

I thought he looked a little different from many men my mother dated before. My childhood friends called him Ang Moh, literally means ‘white ghost’. But it is really a racial profiler to address any white Caucasians in the multiracial nation of Singapore, with majority Chinese origin.

Then there were the bullies again, but this time the quiet boy who learned to read too many comic books didn’t hold back any waves of anger. I would defend himself, anyone, who called him Ang Moh at school.

‘The Ang Moh is my father!’ I yelled at them, pushing them down the ground, tussling with them. I never told my parents all the fights.

He was a quiet Aussie man working for an aviation company at a military-based airport Singapore. I remembered looking into his eyes, and I thought he looked like a superhero from marvel comic books I read after schools. His arms were bronze glazed by the tropical Singapore sun. He spent his days at work mostly outside, fixing helicopters and aircraft. I remembered he took mum and me to the airport we had always watched from afar before.

I could fall asleep buried my head under marvel comic books on the floor of an unassembled aircraft. He would carry me on his arms. I never saw mum happy before.

Only a few weeks ago since the pandemic, I had a chance to catch up with him. 80 years old now or maybe a year bit. Still, he’s as quiet as a mouse. Those glazed bronze arms had long gone. His hands were a little shaky as he picked up his drink from the table at an old restaurant in Newcastle, a little coastal town a two and a half-hour train trip from Sydney where I live.

He didn’t talk about mum. Not even after eight years of her death. I never asked and let her memories tucked away in his memories. Perhaps, grieving is a room with a locked door. Only you have the key. Only you could unlock and enter the room.

‘Dad, remember you used to take mum and me out on a picnic on the East Coast beach back in Singapore?’ I asked him.

‘I didn’t know there’s a beach in Singapore,’ He replied.

I looked at him while he was digging in his lunch. Has he become senile? I asked myself.

‘Yes, Dad. There’s a few in Singapore, but East Coast was the one you always took mum and me on the weekend,’ I said, maybe I could help him recalling a little memory of it.

He stopped eating, recalling all the memories, but in the end, he took a long breath.

‘I don’t remember any of it, son,’ He said.

And soon I realised that it is the beginning of an end — the end when memories begin to fade away.

‘But I remember your mum cooked so much food each time we went out on a picnic. She got us the towering, stackable lunch boxes,’ He said.

Then all of a sudden, images of multicolour bento boxes popped up on my laptop screen. I remember when I was thirteen or fourteen, we went out on a picnic in a park by the beach in the summer day of Xmas. We often did it actually since we moved to Australia.

Here in Australia, the memories of Xmas are summer breezes, turf, and surf, the smell of BBQ, backyard crickets and clinks of the beer bottles from an Esky — originally an Australian brand portable cooler. We often went out on a picnic in the park or a beach, sitting on the grass, on a picnic mat, overlooking the ocean.

I think that’s it — the towering stackable lunch boxes. I grabbed the phone and rang him. I heard his hello, dry and rough.

‘Dad, I’ll take you out on a picnic this Xmas,’ I said.

Let me write your stories, our stories. I’ll be always here writing to remember the memories of us before your memories fade away like a ghost.