Despite his age, my dad still has black hair so full that it looks like he should be in a shampoo commercial. He is a retired engineer but he spends most of his time in the laboratory as he has recently found an atom that is faster than light, which could lead to the possibility of time travel. He is like any other father, and has high hopes for his son and daughter, hoping that one of us could finish his project of turning lightning into electricity.
If you think my dad was disappointed that his son and daughter became writers, you are wrong. When my family members asked him why he didn’t make me go to law school, or become a businesswoman, he said, “Prisca started writing when she was eight. It is not like if I told her to become a doctor, she would know how to do it immediately.” Then he turned to me and told me that he gave up his interest in astronomy and became an engineer, so his son and daughter can live a life that they could choose what they wanted to become. Then he added, “she started failing maths since she was in Grade 2, I don’t think you would trust her with numbers.”
My dad is like many other fathers – stubborn, alpha and traditional. He sometimes forgets that I am 23, going on 24, and still sets a curfew when I go out at night. He still gets shocked over the fact that I know how to boil and pan-fry dumplings, even though I left home when I was 13. He still checks on me in the middle of the night to ensure that I haven’t kicked my blanket to the floor. He reminds me that no matter how old I get our age difference never changes.
In Chinese, there is a saying that a man’s daughter is his lover from the previous life. Even though many Chinese fathers deny this statement, their actions prove otherwise. When I was crying on my dad’s lap because of how badly I was treated in my previous relationship, he would tell me, with a slight tone of anguish in his voice, that all his life he tried to treat me like a princess, and that is the only way his daughter deserves to be treated.
Even so, my dad still can’t recognise his daughter outside the house. Sometimes when I call out his name across the street, he would recognise my voice and look around, but still, he cannot see me standing less than 10 metres away from him. Often people measure affection from how they notice the smallest changes in the other person’s appearance. But my father didn’t notice anything when I dyed my hair pink, at least not until my mother started nagging me about how I should stop dying my hair because it would make me go bald. My dad also had a celebration when the credit card he gave me expired, because it meant that he could finally stop getting heart attacks from the balance of my credit card bill.
My dad has three dreams: to be able to convert lightning into electricity, to find an atom faster than light so we can go back in time, and to invent a medicine to regrow his lost hair. I am nowhere remotely close to making his dreams come true but I have the ability to create a fictional image of him with my gift in writing (just like I did in the first paragraph, which is the closest he would ever get from fulfilling his dreams). Even though, in reality, he is now a retired civil engineer, who spends his day and night in the kitchen taking care of his daughter, and he is neither inventing ground-breaking technologies, nor has a head-full of thick black hair, my dad is still the first man who has ever loved me and the first man whom I have ever loved.
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