It's another Chinese New Year; time for a family story.

I'm not sure how long I can keep this ritual up. I'm starting to forget why this matters. And I'm not even feeling that twisted grieving-joy from telling their stories anymore.

If I don't tell my folks' stories, nobody would. But that's not even the point.

In many ways your parents stories are your stories too, even in the event that your parents had never been part of your life. It's almost as if what they did is a reflection on you, however remotely.

I would speculate that it's why the resentment of abandoned children run so deep. They know their parents failed big time, but the abandonment is not a failure confined only to the parents. The children instinctually feel that eventually they will be cursed to fail in equal measure in some way, shape or form.

Regardless, I still think this ritual of mine is vastly superior to burning jossticks and meaningless food consumption.

---

I should start from 1997. Ringgit crashed hard, the economy was clusterfucked. The property developer dad was working for can't even finish building what they've sold.

That business folded, every working adult was staring at each other wondering what to do. Some time in the next few years dad was somehow involved with an associate, who ended up teaching him, of all things, waterproofing.

This is a left turn equivalent to me going into the business of making cookies. Nothing in my professional history qualifies me for that.

I guess maybe what qualified dad was his propensity with handiwork. His generation was just that much better with hacking hardware.

What I heard from dad was that preventing water leaks were awfully tricky. Leaks happen only during rainy days, which means problems are difficult to reproduce.

Once the problem is found, fixing it isn't that hard. Apparently the chemical he used for patching were top of the line (take it with a pinch of salt).

It's finding the problem that's tricky. In my trade, it's the debugging process that's a bitch. Unlike code, you don't get to insert print-statements and break points everywhere and see what shows up.

Maybe he and associates did employ a state of the art debugging process, but I have no idea. Dad also promised clients money-back guarantee. It's probably a gutsy move; and I do remember one instance where water kept leaking that he had to honor the guarantee.

By about 1999, he got good enough to set up his own business and took up some serious clients. There were occasional jobs that would have him travel out of state. I was glad to see him not being around.

One day in year ~2000, I called home from campus on a pay phone (pre-Nokia time). Mom picked up, in an exceedingly calm voice without context: "I want to tell you something, don't freak out ok."

As if I ever do. We clearly did not suffer enough crisis for her to know how I'm likely to react.

Mom: "Dad got injured at the job. He has fallen down from two storeys high and punctured his lung. He is in hospital now, he is doing ok."

Eventually we ended up visiting him in hospital. That was the first and only time I found him on a hospital bed. All things considered, that's an impressive lifetime record.

Indeed he was doing fine, the worst pain has passed by then. Over the years, recovery was straightforward. There was no after effect as a result of this injury.

In the subsequent years, there was a project involving a sizeable crew that took place in a Genting hotel. It probably felt good for him to be associated with a named brand.

Business got good enough that he felt safe enough to spend cash for house renovation, made an office out of a container, and a brand new car at the business's expense.

That was the height of it. Slowly over the years the business winded down, for reasons unknown to me. I want to believe it's as simple as him being too old to climb roofs.

I want to say he found his calling in waterproofing but I can't tell. I'm not sure he ever did, and imposing the Maslow's hierarchy on his pursuits may not even be fair to him.

Dad's recurring theme has been career changes. That's the way I tell it, he may think differently. In fact he may not even think in career terms, that's something I project onto people.

Perhaps for his time, to survive is itself a victory.