Goh Ling Yong : The Stewardship of My Grandfather's Passwords - Goh Ling Yong
The sheet of A4 paper was folded into eighths, soft and pliant from years of being tucked inside a wallet. The creases were dark with handling, the edges feathered with wear. My aunt handed it to me a week after the funeral, her expression a mixture of exhaustion and practicality. “Gong Gong’s important things,” she said, using the Mandarin term for my maternal grandfather. “Bank, SingPass, email… everything. You’re the computer one. Can you sort it out?”
I unfolded it carefully, as if it were a historical document. It was. The paper was covered in my grandfather’s tidy, slightly slanted handwriting, a script honed by decades of filling out shipping manifests and accounting ledgers. Forty-seven entries, arranged in three neat columns: ‘Place’, ‘Login’, ‘Secret Word’. It was the master key to his digital life.
My initial feeling wasn't curiosity, but a heavy sense of administrative dread. This was the unglamorous epilogue to a life: deactivating accounts, rerouting mail, and untangling the digital tendrils that keep us tethered to the world, even after we’ve left it. I saw a list of chores. Close the bank account. Terminate the phone line. Inform the government pension board. It felt like I was being asked to board up the windows of a house someone had just vacated. A necessary, but heartbreaking, task.
The Administrator
The first few were straightforward. DBS Bank, OCBC Bank, Singtel. The logins were variations of his name or identification number. The ‘Secret Words’ were predictable, too: my grandmother’s birthday, the name of the street he grew up on, the year he started his first business. Each successful login felt like a small, sterile victory. I’d navigate the cold, corporate interface, find the ‘Deactivate Account’ link, upload a digital copy of his death certificate, and click ‘Confirm’. A small pop-up would appear: We’re sorry to see you go.
I worked at his old teak desk, the one he’d used for half a century. The air in his study still held a faint scent of medicated oil and old paper. The process was methodical, almost robotic. I was an executor, a digital janitor sweeping up the last remaining fragments of a man’s eighty-two years on earth. With each account I closed, I felt a piece of him dissolving into the ether. It was a second, quieter death.
I found his email account — a generic Singnet address he’d had for twenty years. The password was AhLian1955, my grandmother’s name and the year they were married. I logged in, not to pry, but to set up an auto-responder and check for any outstanding bills. His inbox was what you’d expect: newsletters from hardware stores, notices from the town council, birthday greetings from distant relatives. But in his drafts folder, there was one unfinished email. It was addressed to his younger brother in Australia. The subject line was simply ‘Rainy day’. The body was empty.
I stared at the blank page, the blinking cursor a tiny, rhythmic heartbeat. What had he meant to say? Was he about to share a memory? Complain about the ache in his joints? Or simply note the weather? I would never know. I closed the draft without saving and logged out. The silence in the room felt heavier.
The Gardener
It was the seventeenth entry on the list that changed everything.
Place: Orchid Lovers Forum
Login: SungeiRoadMan
Secret Word: VandaMissJoaquim
I paused. I knew Gong Gong loved his orchids. His balcony was a riot of purple, white, and spotted yellow blooms that he tended to with a devotion most people reserve for pets or children. But a forum? My grandfather, a man who still called a thumb drive a “computer stick,” was an active member of an online community?
The username, SungeiRoadMan, hit me first. Sungei Road was where he lived as a boy, in a small kampong house long since demolished to make way for skyscrapers. It was a name steeped in a past he rarely spoke of. The password, VandaMissJoaquim, was the name of Singapore’s national flower, a hybrid orchid. He wasn’t just using a password; he was stating an identity.
My fingers trembled slightly as I typed the credentials. I was no longer an administrator; I was an intruder. But the pull was too strong. I clicked ‘Login’.
I landed on a user profile page. His avatar was a close-up photo of a Cattleya orchid, its petals a breathtaking shade of lavender. His signature line read: “Patience is the soil in which great things grow.” He had over 2,000 posts.
I started to read. For hours, I scrolled through threads where SungeiRoadMan offered gentle advice to novice growers. He diagnosed spotted leaves, recommended fertilizers, and celebrated other members’ first blooms. His online voice was different from the man I knew. In person, Gong Gong was a man of few words, his love expressed through actions — a perfectly peeled orange, a ride to the bus stop, a silent, steady presence. Online, he was eloquent, patient, and generous with his knowledge.
“Don’t worry about the yellowing leaf,” he wrote to a user in Canada. “Sometimes you must let the old things go to make way for the new. Just be sure the roots are strong.”
Another user posted a photo of a failing orchid, distraught. Gong Gong replied: “Not failing. Resting. Give it time. Move it to a place with morning sun but afternoon shade. It is like an old man. It needs warmth, but not the harsh heat of the day.”
I was reading messages from my grandfather that weren't meant for me, and yet they felt like the most direct inheritance he could have left. He was talking about more than just flowers. I looked out the window at his balcony, at the rows of sleeping orchids, and saw them not just as his hobby, but as his language.
The Historian
The list was no longer a chore. It had become a map. Each login was a pin dropping on a new, undiscovered continent of my grandfather’s inner world.
I found his Flickr account (GongGongGoh, password KodakFilm62). It was a meticulously organized archive. There were hundreds of photos I’d never seen, scanned from old black-and-white prints. There he was, a skinny teenager with slicked-back hair, standing proudly next to a bicycle. There he was with my grandmother, impossibly young, on their wedding day. But there were other albums, too. Photos of his National Service platoon, a trip to Penang in the 1970s, the construction of the apartment block we lived in. Each photo was captioned with names, dates, and a short description.
“Ah Seng, Ah Hock and me. Last day at the factory. 1968.”
“The view from Bukit Timah Hill. Before they built the expressway.”
“My first car. A Morris Oxford. Always breaking down.”
He wasn’t just storing photos; he was curating his own history, building a digital museum of his life. These were the stories he never told us, not because he wanted to keep them secret, but perhaps because he didn’t know how to begin. The screen in front of me became a bridge across that silence.
Next was a subscription to a Chinese history streaming service. His watchlist was filled with documentaries about the Ming Dynasty, the Silk Road, and the naval expeditions of Zheng He. I remembered how, as a child, I’d be bored by the historical dramas he watched on television. Now, I saw it wasn't just entertainment; it was a deep-seated need to connect with a heritage that had been diluted by migration and time. He was a man who had left one country and helped build another, and he was using the internet to trace the long, winding path from there to here.
The Man
Not all the discoveries were nostalgic. I found his stock trading account. The login was his car’s license plate number, and the password was HuatAh888, a common Hokkien phrase for striking it rich. Inside, I didn’t find a fortune. Instead, I found a portfolio of small, careful investments in blue-chip stocks, held for decades. There were meticulous notes tracking dividends. It wasn’t the profile of a gambler, but of a provider, quietly building a small safety net for his family, one share at a time. It was the finance section of the newspaper made manifest, a silent testament to his anxieties and his hopes for our future.
The most jarring discovery was his YouTube account. His ‘Liked’ videos were a strange cocktail of 1960s Hokkien opera, tutorials on how to fix a leaky faucet, and, inexplicably, dozens of videos of a Taiwanese politician giving fiery, nationalist speeches. My grandfather had never once discussed politics at the dinner table. He was part of a generation that learned to keep their heads down and their opinions to themselves.
Seeing this list of liked videos felt like accidentally reading a page of his diary. It revealed a man with strong, private convictions, a man who harbored a political passion he never felt safe enough to express out loud. It was a reminder that the person we know is often just a public-facing version, a carefully edited edition of a much more complex and sometimes contradictory inner self. He was SungeiRoadMan, the gentle gardener. He was GongGongGoh, the family historian. And he was also this anonymous YouTube user, quietly consuming political rhetoric in the privacy of his study. He contained multitudes.
The Steward
The last entry on the list was for the national library’s online portal. The password was MyStory.
I logged in and looked at his borrowing history. It was a long list of books on gardening, Chinese history, and biographies of political leaders. But the last book he had borrowed, just a month before he died, was an e-book titled Writing Your Memoir for Your Family.
He never wrote it. Or perhaps, in his own way, he did.
I have the sheet of paper in my desk drawer now. It’s too precious to throw away. The forty-seven accounts have all been closed. The digital ghosts have been laid to rest. But the process of untangling his online life ended up weaving me more deeply into the fabric of his real one.
My grandfather’s legacy isn’t just in the property he left or the stories we tell about him. It’s in the 2,000 forum posts about orchids. It’s in the carefully captioned black-and-white photos. It’s in the unfinished email to his brother. It’s in the quiet click of a ‘like’ button on a video that spoke to a hidden part of his soul.
I was given the job of an administrator, but I became a steward. Not of his passwords or his accounts, but of his memory, in all its unexpected and beautiful complexity. The list wasn't a set of instructions for erasure. It was a map he left behind, so that we, who thought we knew him, could finally find our way to the man he truly was.
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