StillFine: Born of a Dragon Boat Festival Phone Call That Could Never Be Answered
From the Author
Are you, like me, living far from your parents — caught between work and the family you're building, day after day — only to feel an inexplicable ache the moment you hang up a call home?
I carry a memory I cannot lay down. In June 2023, on Dragon Boat Festival, my 86-year-old mother spent the holiday alone in China. We had spoken just before. She was murmuring to me on the phone — 「父母在，不远游」, "while one's parents are alive, do not travel far" — regretting that she had once encouraged me to leave home to build a life abroad. The day after the festival, my older brother called her again and again. No one answered. When he reached her apartment, he found her lying quietly in bed. She had already gone.
In that moment, the deepest grief of middle age was no longer code, no longer a busy life. It was the bone-deep ache of 「子欲养而亲不待」 — the child finally ready to care for the parent, who is no longer there. Our generation, busy guarding the futures of our small families, has, almost without noticing, turned our slowly aging parents into solitary watchers.
I did not want to build another cold monitoring device. I wanted something quieter — a gentle guardian. That is what StillFine became.
Not to spy on their lives — to read their well-being. Each time the phone is picked up, each step taken, each charger plugged in, becomes a quiet pulse — a heartbeat — that whispers across the distance: "I am still here. Don't worry."
Worry, distilled into a signal. It strips away the elaborate machinery of medical monitoring and returns to the most ordinary trace of life: the morning habit of reaching for a phone. Even that, alone, is enough to reassure a child who is far away.
Anxiety, reshaped into connection. It does not wait for emergency to sound an alarm. When an unusual silence stretches too long, it gently nudges you: "It's time to call home."
In the end, building StillFine was a way to mend an absence I cannot undo — and a way to spare anyone who, like me, is living far from home or running too hard, the pain of finding out too late.
Its earliest shape took form through conversations with the children of many seniors who live alone. It is not just lines of code. It is what we carry for our parents, and for each other — the gentlest vigil for one another.
StillFine cannot replace being there in person. But it carries my simplest wish: that no solitary watch should go unanswered, and that every wanderer far from home might find, in those two characters — 安好 (well) — a little more peace.
— Richard, founder of StillFine