Me, my dad, and his dad

I inherited a passion for the cinema from my dad.

When I first started making sense of the world around me, my dad and I shared the routine of him sitting 2-year-old me on his athletic lap and doing a meticulous drawing of a cinema seating plan on his law books-lined study desk. He draws beautifully – a quality I didn’t inherit – rows of carefully arranged chairs would materialize before our eyes and the screen would make her grand entrance, half concealed by the curtains.

He would say when you grow up you can step into another world, a very exciting one called the cinema.

I remember wanting to grow up overnight so I can access that realm with tightly shut curtains.

The cartoon both he and I love is Dumbo, I still have the postcard he sent 4-year-old me while he was on job training in England. He and I must have watched the movie countless times because the scene in which Dumbo got drunk and hallucinated is etched into my memory. But like any good parent that’s not the scene he wanted me to recall. He wanted me to be like Dumbo – believing that you can touch the sky even though there is no such thing as a magical feather and all you can summon is sheer force of will. Anything worth doing is worth sweating over.

When he was a carefree youth, he and his dad would go to the cinema together to watch Hollywood movies. That was the 1960s-1970s when Hong Kong hadn’t been swept off her feet by the new wave with films from auteurs like Patrick Tam and Wong Kar Wai. They would watch films like Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man and The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman was huge at the time – he admires the Jewish actor for his astonishing range as much as his dad, a former soldier, marveled at John Wayne for his heroic presence.

His favorite movie of all time is Somewhere in Time, a classic starring the impossibly beautiful Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. He thinks it is poignant that they had to break up when they were at their happiest and the next time they saw each other was in heaven.

He inherited a passion for the cinema from his dad and a heart that opens like the screen’s curtains.

Which explains why I’m such a hopeless romantic.

But I thank all my lucky stars for having a dad who instilled in me a skepticism toward plastics, who is as dashing and charming as Reeve.

And not just on this Father's Day when I am writing this to make him thank all his lucky stars for having a daughter like me.