Goh Ling Yong : The Half-Life of My Father's Anger - Goh Ling Yong
The Half-Life of My Father's Anger
It took 28.7 years for his rage to decay into something I could finally understand.
The rice cooker hit the terrazzo floor with a sound that was both a clang and a thud. A puff of steam, smelling of jasmine rice and ozone, hissed from the crumpled metal. My mother flinched, a tiny, bird-like movement. My sister and I froze, spoons halfway to our mouths. On the floor, a constellation of white grains spread across the cool, speckled tiles. My father stood over the wreckage, his chest heaving, the vein on his forehead a taut blue wire. He didn’t shout. He never needed to. His silence was a collapsed star, a gravity so immense it pulled all the sound and air out of a room.
This was the anger in its pure, elemental form. Unstable. Fissile. It had a heat you could feel across the dining table, a radioactive hum that vibrated in your teeth. I was seven. I didn’t understand the chemistry of his rage — the catalyst of a bad day at the factory, the pressure of bills, the slow corrosion of a dream he never spoke of. I only understood its fallout. For days, the house would be coated in a fine, invisible dust of tension. We spoke in whispers. We made ourselves small. My mother, the chief engineer of our domestic tranquility, would quietly sweep up the broken pieces, her face a mask of placid endurance.
That was the anger I grew up with. It was a weather system, a geological feature of our home. We learned to navigate it, to read the barometric pressure in the set of his jaw, to seek shelter when the storm clouds gathered in his eyes. He never laid a hand on us. His violence was reserved for objects that failed him: a faulty television, a car that wouldn’t start, a rice cooker that had, for some unknowable reason, betrayed him. He was a man who believed the world should work. It should be logical, solid, and responsive to effort. When it wasn't, the force of his disappointment was terrifying.
The First Decay: Criticism
By the time I was a teenager, the anger had undergone its first half-life. The explosive outbursts grew rarer, decaying into a more stable, but pervasive, form of radiation: criticism. The heat was less intense, but the exposure was constant. It settled into my bones.
His anger was no longer directed at inanimate objects, but at the flawed, human machinery of his family. It was in the way he’d look at my report card, his finger tracing a line to a B+, and ask, “Why not an A?” It was in his silence when I told him I wanted to join the drama club instead of the math olympiad team. “Acting?” he’d said, the word hanging in the air like a bad smell. “What can you build with that?”
He came from a world of tangibles. He was a master technician who could coax life back into dead engines with his calloused hands. He understood schematics, tolerances, the satisfying logic of a well-oiled machine. My world of words, of emotions, of stories, was an alien landscape to him. His anger was the frustration of a man trying to read a map in a language he couldn’t understand.
I built my own shielding. Sarcasm. Disaffection. I learned to let his words skim off me, to find my validation in classrooms and on stages where his influence couldn’t reach. We orbited each other at a safe distance, two celestial bodies held in a tense, predictable pattern by a force we both misunderstood. I saw his anger as a personal failing, a flaw in his character. He saw my life choices as a personal affront, a rejection of the solid, practical world he had worked so hard to build for me.
The distance between us was measured in unspoken things. I never told him about my first broken heart. He never told me about the day they laid him off from the factory, replacing his decades of experience with a new computerized system. I found the letter in a drawer years later. He had been 52. He spent the next year "consulting," a euphemism for unemployment that preserved his pride like a pressed flower. He would leave the house every morning at 7 a.m. with his briefcase and come back at 6 p.m., his tie perfectly knotted. I don’t know where he went. I never asked.
The Second Decay: Concern
The next half-life occurred after I left for university. With thousands of miles between us, the radiation weakened, its signal intermittent. The anger, transmitted through weekly phone calls, decayed further. It lost its sharp edges and began to sound suspiciously like concern.
“Are you eating enough? You sound thin.”
“Don’t stay out too late. The city is not safe.”
“You are studying hard? Your mother worries.”
The questions were his old tools, repurposed. The criticism was still there, but it was a ghost, a faint echo. He was trying to fix things, to maintain the machine of my life from a distance, but he no longer had the right wrenches. His world had shrunk to the four walls of his house; mine was expanding at an exponential rate.
During one visit home, I found him struggling with the new smart TV. His hands, which I had only ever known as impossibly strong and capable, fumbled with the sleek, buttonless remote. He jabbed at the screen with a thick finger, his face a mask of confusion and simmering frustration.
“This stupid thing,” he muttered, the old thunder rumbling deep in his chest. “Nothing just… works anymore.”
For the first time, I didn't see a tyrant. I saw a man stranded in a foreign country. A man whose language of levers and gears was obsolete. I took the remote from his hand and, with a few swipes, navigated to the channel he wanted. He grunted, a sound that was equal parts gratitude and defeat. He didn't look at me. He just stared at the screen, and in his reflection, I saw a flicker of something I had never seen before: fear.
The Final Isotope: Love
The journey from that moment to the final, stable element took another decade. It happened on a Tuesday. I was 35, visiting for the Lunar New Year. My mother had bought a new, multi-function, voice-activated rice cooker. It was a marvel of technology that could also bake cakes and make yogurt. And it was, of course, not working.
My father was circling it like a wary animal. He poked it. He unplugged it and plugged it back in. He read the manual, his brow furrowed, holding the glossy paper at arm’s length.
“It’s broken,” he declared, with a hint of his old, damning finality.
I came and stood beside him. I wasn’t the seven-year-old boy cowering at the dinner table. I wasn’t the fifteen-year-old bristling with resentment. I was a man who now understood something about the weight of a mortgage, the quiet panic of a looming deadline, the fear of becoming irrelevant.
“Let me see, Pa,” I said.
I scanned the QR code with my phone, downloaded the app, and paired the device. Within minutes, the little screen lit up, and a pleasant female voice announced it was ready for cooking.
My father stood beside me, watching. He wasn't looking at the rice cooker; he was looking at me. His hands were resting on the kitchen counter, and I noticed the swollen knuckles, the roadmap of veins, the faint tremor he couldn't control. These were the hands that had fixed my bicycle, built my bookshelves, and thrown a rice cooker across the floor.
He cleared his throat. “Ah,” he said. It was a small sound, barely audible. He looked down at his hands, then back at me. “You are good with these things.”
And then, I understood.
The half-life of his anger wasn’t just a measure of time; it was a measure of his own power decaying. His rage was never about the thing that broke. It was about his inability to fix it. It was the furious, terrified roar of a man who built his entire identity on being the one who could make things work, who could provide, who could protect. The broken rice cooker, the B+ on a report card, the son who chose poetry over engineering — they were all symptoms of a world slipping from his grasp, a world whose machinery was becoming too complex for his tools.
His anger was a shield. It was the only way he knew how to express his fear, his disappointment in himself, his deep and abiding love. The force with which he threw that rice cooker all those years ago was directly proportional to the force of his desire for us to have a life better and easier than his. He was raging against the entropy of the universe, and we, his family, were just caught in the blast radius.
I looked at my father, this man of 80 pounds and thinning hair, and the last atom of my own resentment decayed. What was left was something stable, something that radiated not heat, but a quiet warmth. It was pity, yes, but it was also a profound and aching tenderness.
He reached out and patted my arm. It was a clumsy, unpracticed gesture. “Good,” he said again. “The rice will be good.”
We stood there for a moment in the kitchen, the silence no longer a vacuum but a comfortable space. The hum of the new rice cooker was the only sound, and for the first time, it sounded like peace.
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