Goh Ling Yong : Auditing My Father's Joy - Goh Ling Yong
The USB drive felt impossibly small in my palm, a smooth, black plastic pebble holding the entirety of my father’s digital estate. The lawyer had handed it to me with a rehearsed sympathy, a folder of land deeds and insurance policies in his other hand. “Everything is in order,” he’d said. “Your father was a very… methodical man.”
Back in his study, the air thick with the scent of old paper and Tiger Balm, I plugged the drive into his hulking desktop computer. It was a machine from another era, beige and humming, a reflection of the man who used it. A single folder appeared on the screen: GOH_FINAL. Inside, among PDFs of bank statements and a scanned copy of his will, was one file that didn't belong. Life_Ledger_Final.xlsx.
My father, Goh Ling Yong, was an accountant for forty-three years. His language was one of numbers, of balanced sheets and audited accounts. A spreadsheet wasn't a surprise. But when I double-clicked, it wasn't columns of assets and liabilities that loaded. It was a meticulous, seemingly infinite log of his life. 4,287 rows, to be exact. Each row was a day, or a moment within a day, stretching back fifteen years.
The columns were labeled: Date, Activity, Category, Cost (SGD), Joy_Rating (1-10), and Notes.
My first reaction wasn't grief, but a kind of clinical curiosity. I scrolled, my finger gliding over the mouse wheel, the screen a blur of his tidy, systematic existence. It felt like an invasion. This was the raw data of a man I had only known through his heavily-filtered public interface: Father. Provider. Stoic.
The First Audit
I started where any analyst would: I sorted by Joy_Rating, descending. I expected to find the big things at the top. The family trip to Hokkaido. My university graduation. The down payment on his HDB flat being fully paid off.
Instead, the first 10/10 entry I saw was dated August 7th, 2012.
Activity: Tasted a 'Golden Phoenix' durian for the first time.
Category: Food.
Cost (SGD): 48.00.
Notes: Bitter, sweet, creamy. Perfect. Worth the price.
I laughed, a short, sharp sound in the quiet room. A forty-eight-dollar durian. That was it. That was a perfect day. I scrolled further.
Date: 2016-03-22. Joy_Rating: 9/10.
Activity: Watched a mynah bird steal a curry puff from a tourist at Lau Pa Sat.
Notes: The man's face. Hilarious. Bird was very brave.
Date: 2019-11-05. Joy_Rating: 9/10.
Activity: Successfully propagated an orchid from a cutting.
Notes: New life. Very satisfying to see the small roots.
This was not the man I knew. The father I remembered was a creature of routine. He left for his accounting firm at 7:15 a.m., returned at 6:45 p.m., read the Straits Times while my mother prepared dinner, and watched the Channel 8 news before bed. His emotional range, as I had perceived it, was a narrow band between neutral and vaguely disappointed. Joy was a foreign currency he did not seem to trade in.
Yet here was the proof. A hidden ledger of happiness, meticulously recorded. The man who lectured me for twenty minutes about wasting money on a movie ticket had logged a $48 durian as a peak life experience. The father who never came to my school plays had spent hours watching a bird, his joy so profound he had to document it.
The spreadsheet was his diary, written in the only language he was truly fluent in. He wasn’t noting expenses; he was cataloging dividends of joy.
Cross-Referencing Memories
My hands trembled slightly as I used the search function. Ctrl+F. I typed my name, Ling Yong.
Thirty-four entries appeared. My heart hammered against my ribs. I was a recurring data point in my father’s emotional landscape.
The first one I clicked on was from 2015. I was twenty-one, home from university for the holidays.
Date: 2015-06-12. Joy_Rating: 8/10.
Activity: Family dinner at East Coast Lagoon Food Village.
Notes: Ling Yong ate two chili crabs. Good appetite. He seems healthy.
I remembered that dinner. I remembered it as a cauldron of unspoken tension. I’d just told him I wanted to major in literature instead of economics. The entire meal, I’d felt the weight of his disapproval pressing down on me, as heavy and humid as the seaside air. He’d barely said ten words, focusing his entire attention on methodically dismantling his own crab.
But in his private ledger, the event wasn’t coded as Disappointment or Argument. The primary data point he chose to record was my appetite. My well-being. His joy wasn't in my career choice, but in the simple, paternal fact that his son was eating well. The silence I had interpreted as anger was, perhaps, just his way of processing, of observing, of loving. He couldn't say the words, so he entered the data.
I scrolled to another entry, a few years later.
Date: 2018-09-03. Joy_Rating: 3/10.
Activity: Argument with Ling Yong about his job.
Notes: He doesn't understand stability. Worried for him.
I remembered that fight vividly. I had just quit a stable marketing job to try my hand at freelance writing. He had called it “a fool’s dream.” I had screamed at him, called him a passionless drone, a man who only understood spreadsheets. The irony was a punch to the gut. I had thrown his own secret language at him as an insult, never knowing how richly he used it.
The low rating, the 3/10, wasn't anger. It was fear. He wasn’t angry at me; he was worried for me. The note was a quiet confession of a love that was so deep, it manifested as a constant, low-level anxiety. It was the background radiation of his fatherhood.
The Final Entries
I navigated to the end of the spreadsheet, to the last few dozen rows. The dates were from the past year, after his diagnosis. The Activity column, once filled with trips to the market and walks in the Botanic Gardens, became smaller, the geography of his world shrinking to the confines of the flat, and then his bedroom.
The joy ratings, however, did not plummet. They recalibrated.
Date: 2023-01-14. Joy_Rating: 7/10.
Activity: Ate mother's fish porridge.
Notes: Still the best.
Date: 2023-02-02. Joy_Rating: 8/10.
Activity: Felt the morning sun on my face from the window.
Notes: Warm. Lasted for ten minutes.
Date: 2023-02-25. Joy_Rating: 7/10.
Activity: Ling Yong read the newspaper to me.
Notes: His voice is deep now. A man's voice.
I had to stop. I remembered that day. I’d been impatient, reading the stock market figures too quickly, eager to get it over with. I had seen it as a chore. He had seen it as a gift. He was auditing the final, fleeting moments of his life and still finding value, still logging a profit of joy.
The final entry was two weeks before he passed away. There was no Joy_Rating. The cell was empty.
Date: 2023-03-08.
Activity: Holding hands.
Category:
Cost (SGD):
Joy_Rating (1-10):
Notes:
Just those two words. Holding hands. I didn't know whose. My mother’s, probably. Or maybe mine. I pictured his gnarled fingers, the deliberate way he would have reached out. In the end, there was no number that could quantify the experience. The data field was left blank. The accountant had finally found a value that was immeasurable.
The Balance Sheet
I sat in the glow of the monitor for a long time, the hum of the old computer a steady companion. I had spent my life thinking my father was a man who couldn't express himself, a man who saw the world in black and white. But I was wrong. I was the one with the limited view. I was looking for poetry when he was writing in calculus.
His final gift to me wasn't a deathbed letter filled with eloquent sentiment. It was this spreadsheet. It was an instruction manual for how to see him. It was a 4,287-row-long love letter, meticulously formatted and saved as an .xlsx file.
He taught me that love and joy aren’t always loud. Sometimes they are quiet, consistent, cumulative. Sometimes, happiness is a well-maintained ledger. It’s found in the taste of a perfect piece of fruit, the courage of a small bird, the feeling of sun on your skin, the healthy appetite of your son. It's in the daily, disciplined act of paying attention.
I closed the file. I wouldn't be starting my own spreadsheet; that was his language, not mine. But I knew, with a certainty that settled deep in my bones, that I would spend the rest of my life trying to notice the things he would have entered into his. I would learn to audit my own joy, to find the small, unacknowledged assets that, when summed up, constitute a life of profound and incalculable worth. The final balance sheet was clear. He was a very, very rich man.
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