In Continuum.

I am thinking of my father right now, standing at the counter inside the minimart at the petrol station, with his collars folded upwards to cover his neck and his neck stuck into the pockets of his hands, as if to toss out a pistol at any given time now. His thick bushy eyebrows stuck into the air like frozen black flame, the ends of his mouth always in a slight droop, giving strangers a sense of intimidation. His hair is always carefully trimmed on both sides, smoothened out to give an almost uncanny resemblance to an army crew cut, though his army days thirty years ago were dominated mostly by driving officers and generals around in an army jeep, and he has never fired a single round of bullet before. My sister is sitting in the backseat, talking about how much my father looks like a gangster extorting money from the poor girl behind the counter, without brandishing any weapons or saying a single word. My father just has that natural way of intimidating someone even without trying very hard - but he really isn't half as unfriendly, really. To those that might have caught him off guard, he really is a fifty-year-old man on a constant state of sugar high most of the time, a man who has yet to let go of his inner child, roaming around the complex business of the adult world. He doesn't exactly fit into the picture, but you can't exactly rule him out either. Especially there, standing in the petrol station with the smell of gasoline all around, he was exactly where he was supposed to be - in his element.

He claims to be protecting his neck from the sun when he flips his collars up, but in truth he just thinks it to be uber-cool to have your collars flipped up like that. It is difficult to tell that this is the same man responsible for starting a established lubricating oil company up from scratch eighteen years ago in Singapore, just a family be brought along and a bank account book with just enough money to get back. Right now, the same man travels to and fro between Singapore and Taiwan, and sometimes even China just to have a talk to his clients. My father is a busy man, and he loves to be in that state of mind. Always thinking about ways to earn more money, always thinking about how to put more and better food on our plates. He has been in the oil business for a very long time, the same thing can be said about the rest of his family. That is not to say that my father's side of the family is ruled by oil tycoons, but they are definitely the typical kind of rich people who hasn't a clue on how to control their wealth. A random landed property in the mountains, a three million dollar car bought because somebody had nothing better to do, and a bunch of sons who cannot care less about their father's business legacy. My father has come a long way to keep himself sane from the lure of the riches, by keeping himself back in the days when he was still carrying oil barrels off trucks like a bull-headed teenager. 

Stripped from the business suit and the stifling tie, my father sits in the living room in nothing but his underwear, all the while sucking on a toothpick and making strange noises. The same man, who once fried fish in the kitchen and screamed because the oil splashed onto his stomach, and nobody told him not to go into the kitchen naked. The same man, who also has a scar the size of the tip of your pinky because he once jabbed a burned chopstick into his stomach by accident as well. This same man, who brags about his temporal stay in America, and yet confuses the words "Puppies" and "Popeye". It is not difficult to see why strangers may find it difficult to imagine this man being the person behind a multi-million dollar lubricating oil company. But that's the man, that's my father, though it is quite a stretch to imagine that as a fact. At the exactly minute after midnight a few days ago, he ran around the house half naked and wished everybody a happy new year, something which I still find to be terribly amusing until this day.

I can't say that he approves of my ambition to write in the future, but I can't say that I blame him either. Here is a man that grew up with a single goal in life: to make a hell lot of money. He has certainly come a long way from the teenager who dreamed about making a lot of money, to an old man who has indeed earned a lot of money. He'd try to convince me that my ambition isn't the kind of job that'd yield a lot of money, not exactly a metal rice bowl. Still, I don't suppose I'd get into his line of work at all, I don't see myself running about a continent to close a deal, drink myself silly to convince a client that I am serious about a business, or running into homosexual clients that claim an interest in you. Oh yes, that happened to my father one time in China, when his palm was scratched by the index finger of his clients while shaking hands with him. I think that one gave a lasting impression in him, and certainly not something I imagine myself doing anytime soon. I appreciate his efforts though, not so much about the money he provides but rather the favor he is doing for himself. He loves his job, and he loves money. To be where he is now is a man being right up his alley, and I suppose he owes this to himself, in every sense of the word. 

That is not to say that the oil business is a boring job, though. Even for a job that primarily deals with oil, big wads of cash and a lot of traveling in airplanes, this job is not without its hazards. This isn't crab fishing in the Arctics, but then my father's family has had various run-ins with life-threatening situations that could have claimed the lives of many more, if the stupidity involved in the accident had been greater than it already was. It is a job that toys with fire, lives on the very edge of your life at times, and literally for some of my relatives. Like I said, my uncle lives right above one of his petrol stations, and he owns a few dozen of those all around Taiwan, which means that he earns a percentage of every liter of gas pumped into every passing car, all while he sits at home and does nothing. At over sixty years of age, this man has created an empire greater than my father's, but hardly the kind of character and style to keep it. His sons from the first marriage gambles and drinks their days away without a care about the business, and his second wife is the classmate of his daughter from the first marriage - how fucked up is that. All I am saying is that with the same kind of wealth, we have my uncle and we have my father. Humble, contented, and half-naked.

He told me once about a little something that happened at a petrol station my uncle owned. At that time, the whole family was still working together to get the family business going, and they were all station in the same office at the same petrol station, it was sort of like the headquarters back then. If you are wondering where the oil from the gas pump comes from, they come from the oil tanks that are below the petrol stations themselves. So imagine yourself seeing the cross section of a petrol station now. You have the offices at the very top, the drive-ins with all the pumps, a layer of cement and steel bars, then you get the oil tanks down below which can be accessed by a secret stairwell somewhere. There was a short circuit of some sort at the petrol station at one time, so the meters weren't actually working when somebody enquired about the oil levels beneath the station. So one of the employees volunteered to go down and check things out in the darkness - with a lighter. She went too close to the oil, the fire touched those black liquid, there was a big bang and everything was blown apart because of that. 

So you see, it isn't the safest job in the world, and my father is behind a job like that somehow. Lubricating oil takes a much higher temperature and a much longer time to ignite a spark, but I still think it is a dangerous job. My father was involved in a car accident a year or two ago. He was on the highway and a truck swerve into the way of his friend's BMW. The car crashed into the back of the cargo, the hood was smashed, and my father broke a nose. Why? Because he was so scared that he covered his eyes with his forearm, breaking his own nose along the way. That's my father, the man behind the same multi-million lubricating oil business. There has been a lot of talk in this entry about how far and how great a person my father is, but at the same time it is still very hard, even for me, to see that sometimes simply because of how goofy and humble he really is. But I guess, that is the beauty of it all. To stand at the very top and seeming to be at the bottom of it all. I think, not a lot of people can claim that to themselves at all. To be wealthy but never rich, there's something admirable about that. 

So my father is coming out of the minimart right now, walking through the glass sliding doors and coming back to the parked car next to the gas pump. He still has his collar flipped upwards, but he emerged out of the minimart with his knee-length shorts and leather shoes without socks. He looked like a man who grabbed any available wardrobe he had and dashed out of his burning house, or how he looked like eighteen years ago when we first landed in Singapore. Still, I like how grounded he is in everything, always going back to his roots and never trying to show that he is above anybody, or better than everybody. He's still the guy that started a legacy with nothing, still the man that walks around the house half-naked with a scar on his stomach. That's my Dad, the oil man.