Patrick Tse Is Gone. A City Has His Voice. Does Your Family Have Your Father's?

Patrick Tse's voice was Hong Kong's voice. And a great many voices like his are going quiet.

Patrick Tse died in July at the age of 89. His children announced it on 20 July.

He acted for more than seventy years, from the Cantonese films of the fifties through to recent work, and at 85 he won Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Time. To a great many people he was simply Fourth Brother, for decades.

He is gone and not one second of his voice is

People have spent this week going back through his films. That is a privilege particular to actors: after you die, your voice, your timing, the way you looked at people, all of it stays intact and can be summoned at will.

If his grandchildren want to know what he was like as a young man, they do not need it described to them. They can watch.

Most of our parents have nothing of the sort

Hong Kongers of exactly the same generation, also in their eighties, who went through exactly the same decades. One difference: one of them was filmed and the others were not.

Your parents are that generation too. They also fled, lived in squatter huts, worked in the factories, paid off a flat, raised you. The difference is only that nobody photographed them, nobody asked them, nobody recorded them.

So on the day they go, there is no body of work to revisit. There is a phone with thousands of pictures and a few voice notes asking whether you have eaten.

And that is not because you love them any less. It is that nobody ever built something an ordinary family could use to do the same thing.

"The one thing I did best in this life wasn't surviving all that hardship. It was becoming your mother."

Not said by anyone famous. Said by an ordinary mother. Whether a voice survives has nothing to do with fame and everything to do with whether someone asked and pressed record.

The famous have studios. Your family has you.

Patrick Tse's voice survives because an entire film industry spent seventy years recording it.

Whether your father's voice survives is a decision exactly one person gets to make. No studio, no crew, no second copy.

Every time a public figure dies, a lot of people suddenly think about their own elderly parents, and then forget again within the week. If that has been on your mind these last few days: it does not need to be a project. Ask him one question tonight and record the answer.