What Does Your Dad Do?

“What does your dad do?”

Growing up, it was the question that I dreaded answering.

Like most kids, I grew up believing that my dad could do anything but when I started school, I quickly realised that this wasn’t the case. While my friends had dads who were qualified to work in sanitised clinics and air-conditioned offices, my immigrant dad would come home covered in sweat and dirt. While my friends had ‘fun’ dads who could charm the room with eloquent humour, my dad was the joke with his thick accent and broken English. While my friends wore their dad’s achievements and accolades as a badge of honour, ‘what does your dad do?’ was a question that made me wince with shame.

Growing up, I was always comparing my family to the middle-class majority, and I knew that we fell far behind. We looked different, sounded different, and we prioritised different things. I remember during the school term; my friends would count down the days to the summer holidays. For them, it was six weeks’ worth of fun, games and camping trips with their fun dads. I dreaded those holidays. As both of my parents worked full-time, my dad would take my brother and I to his warehouse in Sydney’s west. We would spend our holidays locked up in a stale room with tutoring and math homework. With nothing but numbers to stimulate our young and restless minds, those six weeks felt like death by a thousand formulas.

For my struggling immigrant dad, being a ‘fun’ dad stood very low on his list of priorities. While I compared and complained in an air-conditioned office, my dad was outside sweeping floors and stacking dangerously heavy boxes. While I bemoaned the crushing burden of long division, Dad bore the brunt of hard and heavy labour. He wasn’t concerned about being ‘fun’ because he was shouldering the responsibility of affording us the education that he never had.

Looking back now, my dad was fun in his own way. There were days when he would spontaneously lift me into his packing trolley and wheel me around the warehouse. One minute we would be shopping for groceries; the next we would be making our big escape from fire-breathing dragons! Some days, Dad would disappear into the warehouse recycling room and return with a carload of rubbish. The next morning, I would wake up to a brand-new castle; skilfully carved out of waste paper and cardboard.

As I reflect on my childhood, I wish I cared less about what others thought of me. Instead of wishing for a ‘white dad’, I wish I had the wisdom to appreciate my dad’s circumstances. I wish I understood the immense challenge of immigration into a country that wasn’t always welcoming. I spent so many years envying other people’s ‘fun’ dads that I so often failed to appreciate the rare but tender moments when my dad took the effort to make me smile.

“What does your Dad do?”

In an exhausted world that measures our worth by our performance; I want to learn to ask better questions. After all, what we do is not always an indication of what we’re like. Our output and achievements are not a reflection of our inner heart and character. Outward success does not necessarily equate to generosity, wisdom or courage.

So, instead of telling you what my dad does, let me tell you what he is like. My dad is a fighter who doesn’t give up. He may not be qualified to work in offices, but he is humble and willing to bear the brunt of hard labour. He may be teased for ‘sounding funny’, but he did not give up on learning how to speak, read and write English so that he could assimilate into Australian culture. My dad is generous and hospitable; he treats people of all social classes with dignity and respect.

My dad makes mistakes, but he fights hard to be humble and to learn from his Heavenly Father. He fought against the need to ‘save face’ when he apologised to his wife and children. He fought against pride when he confessed his need for Jesus. He’s learning to say, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’, even when such phrases don’t exist in his cultural vocabulary.

My dad is a man of child-like faith, who in retirement, is still choosing to ‘fight the good fight’ for his eternal crown. In a society that sees the elderly as a burden without worth, my dad makes them feel seen and heard. He intentionally planned interstate trips to Brisbane so that he could evangelise to my father-in-law, who by a miracle of grace was baptised in his seventies after a lifetime of ancestral worship.

In Sydney, my dad volunteers in aged care centres and has equipped himself to teach God’s word to seniors at his local church. He recently won a ‘Volunteer of the Year’ award, but he bashfully turned down the accolade because he didn’t want his photo published in the local paper.

“What is your dad like?”

My dad is a fighter; armed with courage, grit, humility and faith. I’m a proud daughter of an immigrant dad and I wear his fighting spirit as my badge of honour.

Faith, Freedom, Fried Rice (previously Lazy Susan) is my upcoming memoir, showcasing God’s work in the life of my overbearing ‘Tiger Dad’ and his rebellious ‘Dragon Daughter’ (yep, that’s me). Flavoured with humorous and heart-felt stories, each chapter highlights the joys and challenges of immigration, the tension of feeling stuck between cultures, and how faith in Jesus bridged the gap between East and West in my Asian-Australian home. Subscribe to my monthly newsletter to receive your free preview!