My grandfather looked up at something in 1910, from a sugarcane field in Fujian. He was a teenager then, hiding from men with weapons, watching it cross the sky while everyone around him called it the end of the world. He saw something else. He crossed an ocean.

In 1986, my father woke me at two in the morning to see the same thing pass over Malaysia. I was eight. I went back to sleep. He told my mother in the kitchen that night that I had no curiosity. Mei you hao qi xin. I have carried that sentence for forty years.

It returns in 2061. I have stage 4 prostate cancer. I am trying to live to see it.

I’m Eddie Lau. I was born in Malaysia and immigrated to the United States in my twenties. I built a career. I bought the things. My son was diagnosed with autism in 2017. My mother died in 2019. My cancer was diagnosed in 2025. Somewhere in those years I started writing, because I didn’t know what else to do with what was happening.

This Substack is where I write essays about the things I’ve spent my life trying to understand. Fatherhood across three generations of men who couldn’t say what they meant. What my son is teaching me about the difference between fixing and witnessing. The specific loneliness of immigration. What a stage 4 diagnosis does to time. What it doesn’t do.

I write in scenes, not arguments. I try to tell the truth even when it’s embarrassing. I am writing my way toward 2061.

If any of that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d be glad to have you here.

New essays every Wednesday.

— Eddie