Goh Ling Yong : The Acoustic Shadow of My Father's Voice - Goh Ling Yong
My thumb still hovers over his name in my phone’s favorites list. It’s a muscle memory tinged with phantom hope, a simple gesture that now feels like a form of prayer. For the first six months, the impulse was ferocious. A funny observation on the street, a question about a leaky faucet, the simple, gnawing need to hear the familiar cadence of his “Wei?” — the brusque, questioning hello he used his entire life. My finger would press the green icon before my brain could stop it, and for a half-second, the world would feel right again.
Then the silence would rush in. Not the silence of a ringing phone, but the deeper, more profound silence of a disconnected number. It’s a void where a voice used to be, a pocket of dead air that holds the precise shape of my father.
Grief is a territory that is mapped differently by everyone, but its language is often visual: an empty chair, a photograph on the mantelpiece, a shirt still hanging in the closet. For me, the landscape of loss has been primarily auditory. After he passed, I started cataloging the silences he left behind, collecting them like rare field recordings. I began to understand that my father’s presence was not just a physical occupation of space, but a constant, low-frequency hum that had underpinned the entire soundtrack of my life. Now that it’s gone, I can hear the hollowness of its absence in everything.
The Dead Air
The most obvious silence is the one on the phone. My father wasn’t a man for long conversations. Our calls were models of efficiency, transactions of information. "Have you eaten?" "The car is making a noise." "Remember to pay the water bill." Yet, within that brevity was a universe of unspoken care. His voice, a low baritone weathered by sixty years of unfiltered cigarettes and Teochew-inflected Mandarin, was a kind of anchor.
I have one voicemail from him, saved from three years ago. It’s nineteen seconds long. He’s telling me he’s outside my apartment to drop off some durians my mother had insisted he deliver. His tone is impatient, almost annoyed. "Okay, I'm downstairs. Call me when you see this." That's it. There’s the sound of traffic, a distant car horn, the slight rustle of the plastic bag.
I listen to it sometimes, not for the words, but for the spaces between them. I listen for the specific timbre of his breath, the subtle, gravelly texture of his voice that no memory can perfectly replicate. I play it and hold the phone to my ear, trying to absorb the physics of the sound waves, to trick my brain into believing he is still just a phone call away. But the recording is a ghost. It’s a finite artifact, a digital echo that will never change, never respond, never ask me if I’ve eaten. The silence that follows those nineteen seconds is louder than any sound I know.
It’s the same at the dinner table. Our family meals were never quiet. They were a cacophony of clanking chopsticks, slurped soup, and my mother’s running commentary on the day’s events. My father’s contribution was less verbal and more sonic. It was the assertive thump of his porcelain teacup on the wooden table, a signal for a refill. It was the particular way he would clear his throat before making a pronouncement, usually about politics or the subpar quality of the roast duck. It was the rhythmic, scraping sound of him getting the last grains of rice from his bowl.
Now, the soundscape is altered. My mother talks more, as if to fill the space he occupied. My brother and I are more deliberate, our chopsticks seeming to make less noise. The silence isn't an absence of noise; it's an absence of his noise. It’s a negative space in the symphony of our family, a missing instrument that makes the rest of the orchestra sound thin and incomplete.
The Missing Frequencies
In audio engineering, there’s a concept of frequency masking, where a loud sound prevents the ear from hearing a softer one. My father’s presence was a constant, low-frequency hum. It was the bassline of our home. The rumble of his beat-up Nissan Sentra pulling into the driveway. The deep, chesty laugh that only came out for slapstick comedies. The sound of his heavy footsteps on the parquet floor in the morning.
I never paid much attention to these sounds. They were the foundation, the sonic wallpaper against which the sharper, higher-frequency sounds of my own life played out. His was the steadying bass that made the melody possible.
Now that the bass is gone, I find the world tinny and sharp. The higher frequencies are all I have left, and they feel brittle, ungrounded. When I face a difficult decision, I can no longer hear the low, rumbling frequency of his implied advice. It wasn't that he always knew the answer, but his presence provided a kind of resonant chamber that made my own thoughts feel more solid. He was the person I mentally rehearsed difficult conversations with. I would imagine his likely response—a skeptical grunt, a simple "Don't be stupid," or a rare, quiet nod of approval.
That internal sounding board is gone. Now, my thoughts just echo in a vacant space. The questions I want to ask him—about fixing a dripping tap, about navigating a career change, about how to be a good man—hang in the air, unanswered. The silence they meet is the sound of my own uncertainty, amplified. I am trying to learn how to generate my own bass frequencies, how to ground myself without his anchor. It is the hardest work I have ever done.
Composing in a New Key
There was a period, about a year after he died, when I tried to fight the silence. I filled the house with music. I bought a better sound system. I played podcasts constantly while I worked, while I cooked, while I drove. I was trying to paper over the holes, to use external noise to mask the internal quiet.
But the acoustic shadow my father cast is not a simple void. It can’t be filled. It is an active, shaped silence, defined by the contours of the person who is no longer there. Trying to fill it is like trying to flatten a shadow with a floodlight; it only makes you more aware of the object casting it.
Slowly, painfully, I am learning to live with it. I am learning that the shadow is not just a mark of absence, but a form of presence. The silence is a reminder of the sound.
Sometimes, I catch an echo of him. It happens when I find myself humming an old Mandarin song he used to play on cassette tapes in the car, a tune I didn't even realize I knew. It happens when my brother lets out a laugh that, for a split second, carries the same deep, rumbling timbre as his. It happens when I give someone advice and hear his pragmatic, no-nonsense tone in my own voice.
These are not ghosts. They are legacies. They are the sound waves he created that continue to reverberate through the people he loved and the world he shaped. He is not in the nineteen-second voicemail. He is in the way I now check my tire pressure before a long drive. He is in the muscle memory of turning off a light switch in an empty room. He is in the sudden, inexplicable craving for Teochew porridge on a rainy day.
The acoustic shadow remains. The silence on the other end of the phone is permanent. The empty space at the dinner table will never be filled. But I no longer see it as an emptiness. It is a space for memory. It is a quiet room where I can go to listen, not for his voice, but for the profound and lasting effect it had on me. Grief, I am learning, is not the end of the song. It is the sound love makes when it has nowhere left to go but inward, where it becomes a part of your own composition, a quiet, foundational bassline that plays on, forever.
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