father.

sometimes i wonder if my dad really loves us.

it's a strange sense of doubt, when the person to doubt is your own father. you look at him, and you sometimes seriously consider the fact if you're adopted, or he simply doesn't care. you look at other fathers, and you see serious, tense, respectable men. you see cooks, lovers, jokers. your dad--well, he's a joker, but you no longer laugh to his jokes. his sense of humour is at times sick and twisted, but mostly old-fashioned. you are as weird as your father is, and you too, at times, dislike that. 

when i was a younger child, not more than twelve, i thought my dad was the most knowledgeable man in the entire universe. there was a time when i worshiped my father too. that was the only time. as i stepped into my teens and gained knowledge of my own, i realized he was knowledgeable, but he often used that knowledge to somehow show what an awesome person he was. consciously or unconsciously. and i know it's important for him because it's the only thing he has to hold on to. he would not stop talking. he would interrupt with sarcasm. he would drench himself in self-pity. and i grew weary of seeing the same things my dad did with himself every time we met up with relatives. almost every word comes from his heart, that heart of his, full of contempt, regret, jealousy. 

i thank God that my dad quit smoking for me when i was only eight. however, his other hobby continued to triumph. he spent a good amount of money every month on gambling, in which if he decided to save up all that money and not gamble, we would definitely be living a richer life. not that i hate him for using up all that money on senseless gambling, but it would've been put to better use, such as to my brother's education or mine, or even just buying ourselves nicer food. 

my father loves China. he loves everything Chinese, and despises everything otherwise. Japanese especially. because they killed a large number of people(women and children included) during World War II. i'm not going to argue much on this, because if i do, i might end up writing a full-length research paper on human personalities, genocides of the history and perhaps Christianity simply to fail to convince my father that the Japanese are perhaps the most civilized people of the world today. he speaks Mandarin forcibly in public to waiters who are obviously foreigners(but sometimes know how to speak Mandarin, thank God) and sometimes speak very loudly to them to show his superiority in mastering the Chinese language. he despises most Chinese dialects, except Hokkien, because he is a born and raised pure Hokkien man.

i do not understand my father. 

he loves expensive food, he thinks being rich is equivalent of having power, he often speaks of how poor he is in an extremely sarcastic tone, he sighs and moans about his lack of money at home, he doesn't ever really pay for anything(unless it involves his family, and by his family i mean his brothers and parents, not us), he likes ice-cream and sometimes still behaves like a child, he is loved by cousins and nephews and nieces because they think he is a funny old man, he's more talk than actions, Bruce Willis is his hero, and it feels like although i've known him all my life, i still don't know him.

i do not understand him.

my love for him is an obligation. i love him because he is responsible for giving me life, for raising me up, for giving me all i need. i don't know though, if i love him as a person, a friend. we hardly ever talk, because every time we do, he infuriates me. conversations between us usually ends in silence on my part. 

it's bad enough that a man doesn't know how to express his feelings through words, when a man doesn't even want to express his feelings through any form of medium, how are you supposed to know what's on his mind other than the obvious?