Ever heard about my old man?

Probably not. Not the kind of story you crack open with a beer.

He wasn’t a hero. Didn’t fight Franco. Didn’t get arrested in some stupid protest he barely understood. He wasn’t even that kind of wrong. He just… drifted.

My wife says if I just drop dead tomorrow, the memories of him probably go with me. Like those ancient batteries they dig up in deserts—OOPArts, objects that shouldn’t exist but somehow do.

So I’d better write this down before it disappears.

Problem is, I don’t know many Aussies. Nobody’s lining up to record the life of a man who drifted sideways his whole life—not Monash, not the Cultural Fund, not anyone.

Just me, this stupid iPad, and a ghost no one asked for. Been meaning to do it for years. Never got beyond messy notes. Trying to pin down a life that mostly slipped sideways isn’t easy. It hurts, too. You’d understand.

Two days ago, the doctor told me my blood sugar’s a trainwreck. Cholesterol’s worse. I’m slipping downhill, faster than I thought.

So, black coffee. Open the file. Get it all out. I know my words will never match the epoch-making power of Neal Cassady’s letters to Kerouac—letters that sent Levi’s 501 flying off store shelves—or the raw punch of Bukowski’s lines that echoed in Bono’s songs. Still, there’s more than one way to be “good” in this world. But hell, there are all kinds of “good” in this world.

Anyway. My father.

If life had a reset button, I wish he had beat the hell out of me.

Don’t get me wrong—he slapped me a few times. Usual kid fights, dumb pranks. Small stuff. I mean real beatings. Movie-type beatings. Truck-driver-dad-drunk-out-his-mind, metal-belt-whipping, teeth-flying beatings.

Because if he’d done that, I could just tug down my shirt collar on some couch at 2 a.m., show the scar to some girl, and she’d give in. They always do.

That’s what scars are for, right? Sympathy and surrender.

But my father didn’t. So I have to work harder. Talk more. Lie better.

Some girls were even surprised when they heard he never really hit me.

One of them—a year after we broke up—sent me an email:

“How could anyone live with you and NOT hit you?”

I told her:

“If my old man had beat some sense into me, maybe I wouldn’t have dated a girl like you.”

You see? Talking about my father always sends me off track.

That girl deserves a story too, maybe. But not today. Today’s for my dad.

Where do we even start?

A friend once told me: Everything can be broken down into a three-act play.

So here goes. Three acts. Three small wrecks he left behind.

 

FIRST ACT

TIME: Saturday afternoon, 1980

PLACE: Unit B, 8th Floor, Sun Lung Building, Tung Yan Street, Yue Man Square, Kwun Tong

The year my brother was born, my father was working as a conveyancing clerk—a guy who helped real estate lawyers chase business and push papers. Becoming a real lawyer was too much pressure. He never even tried.

He was happy being a middleman, taking commissions off every deal. But once he had a kid, he knew he needed another paycheck.

Hong Kong in the sixties was soaked in corruption. Every agency, from hawker patrols to firefighters, took bribes. The cops were the worst.

Watching it all as a kid, my father figured out early: One day, he’d join the police.

At twenty, he rushed down to Wong Chuk Hang to apply. But he thought it over.

Being a full cop meant real danger. There was a safer route—Auxiliary Police: part-time, regular training, but with the freedom to vanish when riots hit.

You got your salary. You still got your cuts under the table.

“Advance if you can. Retreat if you must.” That was how he saw it.

In ’73, the year I was born, he joined. One year later, the ICAC was founded. His dream of easy money blew away like smoke.

I remember small perks from the uniform.

At the Kwun Tong Jockey Club clinic, he whispered into the nurse’s window, and suddenly, our wait was over.

At dim sum places, if there was a fight for tables, the cops would show up—and somehow, we always got the seat.

Two or three days a week, he’d come home in his green uniform, just as I was getting back from school.

He’d unbuckle his belt, lay down the revolver, the cuffs, the baton, one by one on the coffee table. Hang the uniform on a bent wire hanger hooked to the top bunk. Then he’d hand me his radio and crash onto the bed.

“Listen carefully,” he’d say. “If you hear my number, wake me.”

I was seven years old.

There was no way I could tell—in all that scrambled static—what was Chinese, what was English, what was code, what was just noise.

The voices were fast and sharp, the signals blurry.

Every afternoon, I’d sit there tight as a wire, staring at the revolver, praying I wouldn’t miss his call and get him in trouble.

Usually he slept an hour. Sometimes an hour and a half.

And every time, I prayed hard: Please, nobody call his number today. Let it just be static.

That messy white noise became the sweetest sound of my childhood.

And that side-sleeping auxiliary cop, arms slack, radio humming—that’s the clearest picture I have of my father.

 

SECOND ACT

TIME: Thursday night, 1984

PLACE: Unit 604, Staff Quarters, Ma Tau Wai Girls’ Home, 17 Sheung Shing Street, Ho Man Tin

By the time I was in fifth grade, my father was already halfway gone.

He still lived in the flat. Still ate at the table. Still sat in front of the television every night.

But he wasn’t really there.

Even at that age, I noticed: he wasn’t really watching anything. He stared at the flickering screen like a man gazing into a black hole.

Sometimes I thought, if I switched the channel while he blinked, he wouldn’t even notice.

One night, he sat in front of the TV and pulled out two sheets of thick cardboard.

I watched from the corner. Carefully, he cut them into two perfect circles, then pinned them together with a flat-head screw.

He punched two holes in the top disk.

When he spun it, two little windows opened onto the layer beneath—one showed the date, the other showed who was free to play mahjong that night.

He spent the whole evening working on it, quietly and with care.

It was the first time I ever saw him focus on anything.

It was like, as long as the wheel could keep turning, the world still made some kind of sense.

At that time, the divorce was still a year away.

A year later, he moved out of the quarters.

He didn’t take his oil paintings. He took the homemade calendar.

Back then, I didn’t get it. Why take the cheap paper wheel, and not the paintings?

But growing up, I guess I started to understand.

 

THIRD ACT

TIME: Tuesday night, 2004

PLACE: South China Restaurant, Parkes Street, Causeway Bay

In 2004, Dad was already living in Perth.

Whenever he came back to Hong Kong, my wife and I would take him for Hainan chicken rice in Causeway Bay.

He’d talk a lot at dinner.

About how dumb Australians were—dumb enough that hospitals had to pay triple overtime on weekends and still couldn’t find anyone willing to work.

So he took weekend jobs. Two days’ work, six days’ pay.

The rest of the week, he spent at the blackjack tables.

He was proud of his greatest achievement: Winning a Ford Focus 2.0s at the casino.

“It wasn’t luck,” he said. “It was skill.”

At Crown Perth, they ran a daily draw to keep gamblers hanging around.

You hit a pair on the blackjack table, they handed you a ticket. You scribbled your name on it, dropped it in a giant transparent drum.

The drum spun, the dealer pulled a winner.

The catch was, you had to be physically there when they called your name, or they’d toss your ticket and pick someone else.

Most gamblers figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. Tourists tossed their tickets into trash cans or handed them to strangers.

Dad collected them. He got chummy with casino managers who sometimes slipped him whole stacks of blank tickets.

He even asked me to order him a custom ink stamp from Hong Kong, printed with his Perth address—so he could slam his contact info down in one clean motion instead of handwriting it over and over.

He spent hours thinking about how to beat the drum.

Tickets tended to clump together. So he folded his tickets into waves—creased and curved—to make them puff up and separate from the heavy mass.

When the host reached in, the airy ones floated closer to their fingers.

Problem was, the weight of a hundred thousand tickets pressed them flat again after a few days.

So Dad started throwing them in at different times, different angles.

A handful in the morning. A handful at midnight. Different spots in the drum.

Trying to keep the odds loose and breathing.

He told us, grinning over his chicken rice, that he even varied the folds: sharp creases, tubular rolls, random wrinkles.

Anything to stay invisible.

He picked up a napkin at the table and showed us, folding and mumbling like he was planning a campaign.

Only the voters were casino staff, and the ballots were paper tricks.

He wasn’t a politician.

Just an old ex-cop who didn’t want to lose.

He folded napkins like paper cranes—except these cranes didn’t fly.

They just lay there, stuck in a giant plastic drum, like trash waiting for a hand.

He won all kinds of prizes.

Vouchers. Groceries. Travel packages. Plane tickets.

But the Ford? That was his glory.

He laughed like the world had finally paid him back.

Like those turkeys and sausages could fill the hollow places inside.

And the car could roll over whatever was left.

Word got around Perth’s Chinese community fast.

Dad started giving away duplicate prizes—turkey coupons, sausage coupons—to friends.

Told them: “Don’t waste your few tickets. Give them to me. I’ll handle it.”

And they did.

Soon he had whole networks passing their tickets to him.

Friends of friends.

Downlines and second-level downlines.

He became the kingpin.

At his peak, he had over eighty thousand tickets stacked on a table in his apartment.

Maybe it was the first time he ever felt rich.

So he learned: don’t throw everything at once. Save some.

Wait for bigger jackpots—holiday specials—and go all in like George Soros shorting the market.

But it didn’t last.

In 2006, the casino changed the rules.

One prize per person per month.

Tickets had expiry dates now.

No more building a paper empire out of creased corners and empty air.

Like when Prohibition ended in Chicago—Dad’s underground empire of paper cranes crumbled overnight.

 

People say a man looks most beautiful when he’s working.

Watching him babble and fold napkins in that restaurant, I sort of understood what that meant.

I once read an interview with George Clooney.

He said, when he was young, he watched his father—a newsman—stand up to presidents, ask questions nobody dared to ask.

He said it taught him what real responsibility looked like.

That’s why Clooney made Good Night, and Good Luck.

Me?

I just grew up watching a part-time cop nap on a bunk bed.

And learned to fake scars when I needed warmth at 2 a.m.

Like most people, Dad spent his life wanting something for nothing.

The difference was, for him, money was only second.

What he wanted most was respect.

Or maybe that’s not such a difference after all.

This is a piece of history no schoolbook will bother with.

Whether the casino’s new rules were a step toward justice—or just another trap like Ronald Wright warned about—I don’t know.

But I do know this: Somewhere out there, there was once a Paper Crane Empire in Perth. And it deserves to be remembered.