by Ufrieda Ho
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OHIO
Paper Sons and Daughters
MODERN
African
Writing
from Ohio University Press
This series brings the best African writing to an international audience. These ground-
breaking novels, memoirs, and other literary works showcase the most talented writers
of the African continent. The series also features works of significant historical and
literary value translated into English for the first time. Moderately priced, the books
chosen for the series are well crafted, original, and ideally suited for African studies
classes, world literature classes, or any reader looking for compelling voices of diverse
African perspectives.
Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa
by Phaswane Mpe
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1962-5
Dog Eat Dog: A Novel
by Niq Mhlongo
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1994-6
After Tears: A Novel
by Niq Mhlongo
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1984-7
From Sleep Unbound
Andrée Chedid
ISBN: 978-0-8040-0837-2
On Black Sisters Street: A Novel
Chika Unigwe
ISBN: 978-0-8214-1992-2
Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa
Ufrieda Ho
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2020-1
The Conscript: A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War
Gebreyesus Hailu
ISBN: 978-0-8214-2023-2
Paper Sons
and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
Ufrieda Ho
O H I O U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
A T H E N S
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
www.ohioswallow.com
All rights reserved
© 2011 Ufrieda Ho
First published in 2011 by Picador Africa
An imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19, Northlands
Johannesburg, 2116
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute
material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights
and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
First published in North America in 2012 by Ohio University Press
Printed in the United States of America
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Ho, Ufrieda.
Paper sons and daughters : growing up Chinese in South Africa / Ufrieda
Ho.
p. cm. — (Modern African writing)
Originally published: Johannesburg, South Africa : Picador Africa, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-8214-2020-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-
4444-3 (electronic)
1. Ho, Ufrieda. 2. Ho, Ufrieda—Family. 3. Chinese—South Africa—
Biography. 4. Chinese—South Africa—Ethnic identity. 5. Chinese—South
Africa—History. 6. South Africa—Race relations. 7. South Africa—
Biography. I. Title.
DT1768.C55H6 2012
305.895’1068092—dc23
[B]
2012020804
Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
1. Pinky
1
2. Here be Dragons
3
3. A Long Way from Here
21
4. A Strange New Home
38
5. Another Journey across the Indian Ocean
46
6. In the City of Gold
63
7. Of Phoenixes and Dragons
81
8. Growing up with Mr and Mrs Ho
91
9. Johnny Depp, Segregation and Sequins
107
10. My Father, the Fahfee Man
125
11. Weekend Dad
137
12. Another Day, Another Dollar
148
13. Mah Jong and Ponies
158
14. The Outside Toilet
167
15. The Hand that History Deals
175
16. The Dark Night
195
17. A New Day
208
18. The Under-catered Party
214
Dear Ah Ba
226
For my mother and my father
Acknowledgements
There’s an exquisite alchemy in how this book became real. My deepest
gratitude goes to the people and mysterious synchronicities that offered up
their magic to the process.
I have been privileged to be a custodian of the stories that have been
passed to me from my grandparents, parents and my relatives. I am grateful
to the many people in my community, the Ah Buks and Ah Mous and
others, who have shared their anecdotes, narratives, reflections and insights
through the years. I acknowledge with respect the academics, authors and
researchers whose work has given voice to the Chinese community and
has given me the courage to free my voice for this story.
Thanks and love to my friends (you are too numerous to mention by
name but you know who you are) and those who have taken an authentic
interest; you are my blessing and have held this book with gentle hands.
Maureen Isaacson was a champion of this book when it was only a few
thousand words on newsprint as my journalism project for the Anthony
Sampson Foundation Award. A thousand thank-yous for believing and for
not letting me get away from penning a formal book proposal.
vii
To the Pan Macmillan team, thank you for keeping me going and getting
the nuts and bolts in place with such good humour. Sally Hines, thanks
for being a kind wizard of an editor. To Andrea Nattrass, who survived
my multi-coloured versions and drafts, you’ve pushed at the right times
and have been a pillar to lean on at other times; always you’ve encouraged
me and shown sensitivity to this story. You are a true professional, thank
you.
My thanks to Anfasa for their generous author’s grant and support for
a book about a minority community in South Africa.
Shaun, thank you for loving me through this book, listening to confused
thinking out loud, my long ramblings, my rages, even the tears, and always
urging me on because you know this is a project of my heart.
To Ma, Yolanda, Kelvin, Unisda, Jo-Anne, Alexandra and Jordan, you
have shared so much of this journey. We walk on, joined by our bond of
blood, kin and love.
viii
1
Pinky
I l
ie on the lap of a giant pink teddy bear and stare up at a galaxy of full
stops in the perforated canopy of my dad’s old Cortina.
My nine-year-old self starts to count the dots but my stop-start
conversation with my dad in the driver’s seat keeps bringing me back to
number one. We lurch towards another traffi c light and my counting is
distracted again as I grip on to the Cortina’s fake leather seats with their
exhausted stitching that has long ago surrendered to outbursts of foam.
I work through the dots again. I do not mind because my father is in
a good mood, so I am in a good mood. Dad is happy and Pinky is the
trophy to prove it. We have bought her at a roadside stall along with two
smaller teddies holding their breath inside puffed-up plastic bags. Among
the gifts there is a round leather ottoman, dubiously shaped by a rustling
straw inner. My mom is going to be delighted with her gift and so will my
brother and two sisters.
But these are more than just gifts – Pinky, with her curly blue bow and
large fl at eyes, is a triumph of dad’s success at the fahfee banks today.
My father, my Ah Ba, is a fahfee man, the mm-china or ma-china of the
townships, a so-called ju fah goung, as we say in Cantonese. Fahfee is an
1
UFRIEDA HO
illegal betting game with 36 numbers and wonderfully curious connections
to dreams, to superstitions and to luck and chance; the dirty gambling of
the townships.
In South Africa fahfee has evolved from its recreational gambling
roots and has been transformed into an economic survival strategy. It can
endure in South Africa’s socio-political space where segregation is so well
worn it is like an involuntary impulse to separate, to categorise, to divide.
It is South Africa in the 1980s and there is no place for a yellow man,
especially not one like my dad who is uneducated, who is not savvy to the
social rules that make up polite white society and who is prohibited from
even trying to fit in.
It is to fahfee that he turns and the townships far from the mainstream
of middle class. And it is what my father does for the biggest chunk of
my memory. Fahfee, when the gambling gods will it, brings fortune, good
times and even the likes of Pinky. It pays for my school fees, treats at a
roadhouse and eventually an assortment of second-hand cars as we climb
the ladder to middle class.
All the time, what turns up in the numbers makes real the superstitions
of the old country: the mysterious what-ifs that connect the realm of the
explained with what cannot be known. And in the dreamtime, the fahfee
man’s beliefs and impressions thread together a place far, far east to the
golden mountain of Johannesburg, glorious with the nostalgia of when the
yellow metal did line the streets.
Fahfee is about sweat and drudgery. It is about toil on the periphery of
society where it stays hidden, out of sight and secret. It is about what luck
brings and what risks you are prepared to take when you stand to lose
everything.
In my family, fahfee means we stand to lose a lot.
2
2
Here be Dragons
I grew up in Bertrams, in the east of Johannesburg, in the 1970s and 80s.
I am the third of four children. We lived in a semi-detached house along a
wide road that pulled apart the suburb for the cars advancing towards the
shopping centre and highway exchange that over the next three decades
would become the massive mall of Eastgate and the throbbing clot of the
N3 interchange.
This was a so-called grey area, where Chinese people were mostly
ignored for living in these spaces that were still legally reserved for whites
in apartheid South Africa. No one cared really that a few Chinese lived
here because these were not the fancy suburbs where people worried about
backwashing swimming pools or keeping appointments at the doggie
parlour. Like dragons in fairytales, we were left to become the demons of
people’s theories, mysteries and loathing. As long as we stayed in our lairs
and did not breathe out fi re, we were pretty much left alone.
Of course, I did not know then that things like pool maintenance
separated and defi ned people. I did not know that being Chinese made
me different, like I did not know what fahfee would come to mean for my
family, and especially for my father.
3
UFRIEDA HO
This gambling game practised in hidden places was never spoken about
openly to outsiders. Fahfee was always sullied, polluted somehow. It was
associated with the working class, with transacting with the poorest of
the poor. And so fahfee was something people skirted around even to
community insiders and completely so to outsiders. It remained a practice
of humiliation and secrecy, which turned into a practice of shame and
stigma.
I did not know these things in the 1980s when I was growing up as
we were a part of living these shadows and scars. We were a society full
of cleavages; we shared a country, but we were not a nation. Separated in
delineated living spaces, we stayed in our boxes of stereotypes, convenient
prejudices and simmering tensions.
I was blissfully unaware of all this as a child, a bit like the small fertile
patch in our garden that showed happy oblivion or maybe it was quiet
rebellion, growing with abandon against expectation and convention.
Where there should have been hydrangeas and pansies, the small patch
of soil became a vegetable haven of downy winter melons, smooth green
Chinese spinach and eruptions of spring onion – the vegetables you could
not find in a local greengrocer in South Africa in the 1980s, but which
were the staples on a Chinese family’s daily menu.
Most Chinese we knew used whatever land was around them to grow
food. No one really moaned about the fluttering strips of plastic bags that
stood in for scarecrows because this was a crumbling bit of suburbia.
Further down the road lived a Chinese woman and her adult son. She
raised chickens on the small property and sometimes we walked down to
her corner house to buy a freshly slain bird.
The old aunty disappeared behind the backyard door, closed it and told
us to wait. There was a muffled squawking, the sound of someone moving
quickly. We sat in the kitchen in silence, imagining the poor chickens darting
across their small pen hoping not to be the unlucky one. She reappeared
some minutes later with a limp bird, some of its white feathers wet where
the first blood of its death had been rinsed off. The chicken was placed
into a double-bagged, blue-grey plastic bag and we walked home with its
still-warm body knocking against our legs, ready to be paired with our
winter melons on the dinner table.
Outside the stout walls of our house an oak tree’s trunk burst out of
the grey pavement. It was the pavement where the old brown Cortina was
parked, because there was no garage or driveway. There was no grass
4
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
around the old giant, just a scattering of its leaves and acorns;
the rest
was tarred. I liked to collect the little nuts, pop off their hats and peel off
their hard casings until my fingernails were split and sore. The pain was
worth it to treat the squirrels that I believed lived in our neighbour’s tree.
My older sister Yolanda (I called her Kaa Jeh or Kaatch) convinced me
that my furry friends did appreciate my efforts, so I happily peeled away
in pain, but there were no squirrels in suburban Joburg. Yolanda kept up
her poker face and I believed her, thinking that the more I peeled, the more
grateful the squirrels would be and then I would surely see them.
I did my growing up with Yolanda, who is the eldest. She was short,
cheeky and always hatching a plan to get her way and to get us to be at
her side when it happened, just in case things went pear-shaped. My older
brother Kelvin was the only boy, all stringy and weedy when we were
growing up. He tempted us to join in his invented games and we could
not help being his participating audience for his card stunts and magic
tricks, begging him to show us how to do them, but of course he revealed
nothing. He was the brother who offered to ‘operate’ on a pair of talking
teddies. He said he would open their voice boxes, tweak their wires and
electric chips and they would greet us again with ‘Hello, I am Teddy the
bear, the one who is always there’. We believed him but once their little
voice boxes landed in his surgeon hands, our bears never greeted us again.
Perhaps they just needed a fresh set of batteries. The baby was Unisda.
She was quiet and mostly went with the flow, scooped off her feet by the
waves of her older siblings. Unisda and I were so close in age we became
like twins relegated to the bottom of the pecking order.
Together we made up the generation of Hos born on South African soil,
here in the eastern suburbs of Johannesburg. We have Chinese names, too.
Mine is Chiu Ngaan, which means colour. In Chinese your surname comes
first. My sisters are Chiu Yeng and Chiu Saan. Chui is the common name
for us girls and it means jade. My brother is Beng Leung; it means bright,
and Beng is a common name he shares with all the other second cousins in
the extended family. My parents realised that in South Africa we needed to
have English names, too. I thought I had a strange English name; for years
until I was well into my teens I resented the unusualness of my name. Not
only did I almost always have to repeat myself, but I also had to think up
