She says she is filled with regrets about their missed reunion. Photo: Sharon Au/Instagram
After more than two decades of not seeing her dad, Singaporean actress-host Sharon Au thought 2024 would mark their grand reunion.
The 48-year-old Paris-based star, who fell out of contact with her father, Jeffrey Au, as a teenager and reconnected with him over text only in recent years, had plans to finally meet him in person this year.
She intended to visit him over Chinese New Year and invite him to watch her act in a play to be staged at Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts in mid-February.
But on Christmas Day 2023, a week before she returned to Singapore for rehearsals, she received news of his death. He was 74.
“My last message to him was ‘Merry Christmas, dad’,” Au tells The Straits Times at a sit-down interview in January. She has been rehearsing almost every day at the centre.
“I sent it on Christmas Eve, but he didn’t reply. I felt like something was wrong because he usually replies to all my texts within 20 minutes. I thought maybe he was asleep.
“I tried to go to sleep and waited for him to reply in the morning. He didn’t. The whole day, I couldn’t celebrate. Then I got a text from my aunt that said, ‘Sorry, your dad has passed.’”
He had been suffering from significant gastric reflux issues in his final years.
His death was devastating for Au, who reconnected with him only five years ago. Her parents divorced when she was two and she was shuttled between relatives.
She lost regular contact with her father – a former Criminal Investigation Department police sergeant in the Secret Societies Branch – in her last year of primary school. But he reached out to her at the height of France’s Yellow Vests Protests in 2018, which caused fatalities.
“I don’t know how he found my number, but he texted me out of the blue to say hi and that he saw the news and ask how I was doing. I was shocked, because we had been leading separate lives, but I told him it was good to hear from him.”
Since then, the two kept in touch over text, sending greetings on occasions like birthdays and festive holidays.
“I was very guarded,” Au admits. “But he was very affectionate. He would tell me to dress warm, send me little poems addressed to his dear daughter. It was the beginning of what I foresaw to be a grand reunion.”
Despite returning to Singapore several times in the past five years, Au never set up a meeting with her father, who remarried when she was a child.
She says: “I had qualms about visiting him because I didn’t want to intrude on his family. We hadn’t seen each other in so long that I didn’t know what his situation was like. He also never asked to meet, so I thought perhaps it wasn’t convenient for him.
“But I was going to put all that aside this year and ask to see him.”
She is filled with regrets about their missed reunion.
“I never got to tell him, ‘I love you’. He told me ‘I love you’ every time we texted, but I didn’t. It’s not easy. I wanted to say it to him in person. But I did too much waiting and lost my chance.
“I’m very angry with myself because I should’ve known better. I’ve been preaching about living your life and seizing the day, but I didn’t practise what I preached.
"I didn’t do this most important thing in my life. It’s a huge wake-up call.” – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
