by Ufrieda Ho
explanations that I had no answers for.
Even Ho is strange. People always wait for more, like surely I mean to
say Hough or Home or maybe at least the addition of an ‘e’ and I have to
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UFRIEDA HO
say: ‘That is it, just H.O.’ There is not even an ordinary animal I know
that starts with U, as in Betty the Bear, David the Donkey or Helen the
Horse.
My mother’s uncle was entrusted with the role of giving us English
names, because my parents did not trust their own English proficiency.
My theory is that this grand-uncle, whose English was also a little dodgy,
managed fine with Yolanda and Kelvin – both being reasonably ordinary
names. But by the time I came along I think he believed some creative
licence had been earned. My younger sister also got a ‘U’ tagged on to the
start of her name and she became Unisda. At least we both had Us and that
horseshoe letter looped us together as we grew up. I always laugh when
I imagine what would have happened if my parents had had a fifth child
who would probably have been subjected to a concocted ‘U’ name, too.
In my family we call each other by our Chinese names. I respond to Ah
Ngaan and we used an old-fashioned address of calling older siblings not
by their names but by something that translates as ‘my family sister’ or
‘my family brother’. With only a year or so between me and my younger
sister, Unisda took to calling me Ah Ngaan when we were children. I was
too little to think that it was not proper but my parents kept trying to
drum into Unisda’s head that I was Yee Kaa Jeh (second family sister) not
Ah Ngaan to her. It did not work – I am still Ah Ngaan or Ngaanie to her
today.
We were squashed into a less-than-six-year age gap from youngest to
oldest so it made for a riotous growing up in our household.
We three girls shared a bedroom painted in a peachy pink. It was topped
with a naked light bulb in the centre – there were no extras like fancy
light fittings – that cast gently swaying shadows over the walls and floor at
night when there was a bit of a breeze.
Unisda and I shared a bunk bed in the room, while Yolanda was pushed
up against the opposite wall. For years we switched between taking up the
bottom and the top bunk. We liked to push our feet up against the soft
steel frame and irritate the person who was on the top bunk.
‘Hey, stop it man,’ the top-bunker whined as the bottom-bunker
pushed harder against the diamond mesh of the bed frame, bouncing the
top bunker a bit.
But the top bunk was also a refuge. With every few feet from ground
level the lucky top-bunker got to escape the general madness of the
congested shared space that was our bedroom.
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
The assortment of furniture in our room collided with patterned
homemade curtains, dark, practical carpets and rugs and the rainbow
frenzy of smiling teddies and toys that shared our beds.
We also made a mess, a lot of it. Clothes we never folded and never
put away made ever-growing, crumpled mountains. And mom and dad’s
moans and threats could not keep up with the neglected dust balls we were
supposed to clean up.
Across the passage my brother fought off the dolls and girly saturation
with train sets and Lego. As the only boy he did not have to share a room
but he did have to give up some of his domain for storage space in the
form of locked wardrobes, canned food and toilet paper bought in bargain
bulk.
Sometimes my parents opened up the wardrobes to air out a winter
coat, lined and heavy, or to retrieve a satin-finished, heavily encrusted
evening bag replete with sparkling beads and tassels. These were the
outfits and accessories reserved for weddings, an 80th birthday or some
other dress-up event. When my parents did open up the wardrobes, the
strangely comforting smells of mothballs, old wood and dark places filled
my nostrils. It was the release of these otherwise intangible treasures, the
moment that these items of whimsy and wonder were temporarily let loose
to interrupt the ordinariness of a normal day.
Normal days for us children were made up of the bliss of turning the
passage that dominated the small semi into our playground. It was full of
potential for hide-and-seek, which we played often, and games of fantastic
make-believe.
An old record player had its home in the passage, wedged into a corner
behind the front door that had a frosted glass panel in a design resembling
a flower and was complete with an ankle-high letter flap that said ‘Letters/
Briewe’. My father had won the record player in a community raffle years
before he met my mother. For a long time it was the only fancy thing he
owned that was not handed down, loaned or bought second-hand.
Even as it stood in our passage, it belonged to a different world, not
the world of a fahfee man who worked long hours every day dodging
authorities, arguing with grumpy gamblers or becoming grumpy himself
on days when the gambling gods turned the tables on the ma-china. He did
not have the luxury of turning to a music box for pleasure.
I do not remember my father ever pursuing a proper hobby all his life,
just the distractions of his own gambling, or on the odd occasion being the
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UFRIEDA HO
master chef of a cook-up of a special dish like crispy deep-fried pigeon or
garlic and ginger crab, all creepily alive, scratching in the boxes punched
with small holes or in shallow buckets of water, waiting for my father to
come home for the big slaughter.
The record player flanked a wardrobe filled with sheets and homemade
curtains. My mother never threw anything out; a worn sheet was cut down
the middle and sewn together again where the fabric still endured. Even
when its life as a sheet was finally over, it was reincarnated as a patterned
floor rag that found itself useful again on the kitchen floor.
The record player was the princess in this sea of sensible practicalities.
It looked like an old-fashioned letter-writing bureau with its wooden legs
and its curious flip-up lid. It had a revolving rubberised disc and a slow-
moving mechanical arm. My mother kept a few records that were loaned
from friends and family. They were mostly Chinese opera records or high-
pitched sweetly sung folksongs, all dusty and housed in crumbling paper
sleeves. When my mother plugged in the record player and set it into life,
it never failed to fascinate us as its mechanical arm shifted across with
fluid precision and dropped exactly as a vinyl flopped gently on to the
revolving disc. It broke into the squeaky opera songs and we mimicked
the singers and then put our hands over our ears as the records squealed
on. My mother, though, loved it. She did not have a singing voice but it
did not stop her from testing out the tunes and the lyrics. We laughed and
laughed, making faces at what sounded like pained cries and howling. The
singing was mostly in old-fashioned Chinese and with the added high-
pitched
squeaks we caught very little of the storyline, even though mom
tried to tell us what was going on as the characters wailed to each other.
The record player also doubled up as a counter top when we played
shop. We lifted its lid, took in the smell of its wood, pushed the arm and
turned the dials like it was a cash machine. If I was the shopkeeper, I got
to stand by the record player. Unisda was my customer most of the time,
picking up her ‘purchases’ of bits of tea set, teddies, pencils and crayons
before coming to the ‘pay-point’. I pretended to ring up her goodies,
pushed the buttons and the dials, then packed her purchases into a plastic
bag and said ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye and see you again’.
Later on I learnt the dials were for record speeds and we drew out the
comedy in the records by making them yelp at chipmunk-speak speed.
Sometimes the record player was simply a place to sit and swing our legs
when our mom and dad were not looking.
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
The old semi had pressed ceilings and old-fashioned chair rails. The
chair rails created a split wall effect that convinced my ever-practical
mother to paint the walls in an odd contrast of midnight-blue and creamy
white in a paint that had a shiny finish. It was shiny because the oil paint
finishes were easier to wash, my mom said. She chose midnight-blue on the
bottom half of the wall, so the dark paint disguised our grubby handprints
and our wax crayon art that proved to be stubbornly permanent – a little
like the lingering sting of a whack on the bum for making the drawings in
the first place.
We were punished quite harshly if we were naughty, misbehaved or
were disrespectful. There was no thinking-step, time-out or negotiations;
that is all the stuff of 21st-century parenting. In our household you could
count on a tongue-lashing and a hiding. We might also be banished to
our rooms or locked out of the house for a few hours, threatened with no
dinner and told to ponder our actions on the stoep (veranda) – or rather to
wait for my mother’s seething finally to evaporate. If my mother was really
mad she would wait until my dad came home. If he thought what we had
done called for a second round of punishment then we would see a replay
of my mother’s rage, acted out by my dad and maybe even a whip or two
from one of his belts.
One day, though, when I was about nine or ten, my dad said he would
never hit me again because if I had not learnt my lessons by then no amount
of hidings would teach me to be the wiser. It scared me more, thinking I
would have to live up to the expectations of my parents rather than deal
with a stinging bum.
But we did not fight with our parents much; we dared not. Chinese
children, at least as far as my parents were concerned, did not negotiate, did
not backchat. Filial respect was not an option for Chinese children. There
was a Confucian thread that ran through our childhood of honouring
your parents, of trusting their word even if you disagreed. I believed my
parents were harsher than other parents. As I grew up, I thought them old
fashioned, conservative; now I know that they were exactly as they had
to be.
The old ways were ever-present in our house. Sometimes we were
scared into good habits with old wives’ tales and the superstitions, myths
and rituals that were bred in a closeted place in China but were never far
away. If we left grains of rice in our bowls, we were told that children
were starving, that each grain could grow into a plant and we had wasted
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UFRIEDA HO
its potential. Other times my mom said it meant we would find an ugly
spouse. If you sneaked food from a chopping board, she said it would
mean we would be cursed to be damned for things that were not our
fault.
Over time, the superstitions were infused with my mother’s personal
concoctions, too. We did not wash our hair on the first day of new year or
on our birthdays or each other’s birthdays because the word for prosperity,
faat, sounds like the word for hair and washing your hair on these luckiest
days would rinse away prosperity. My mother also believed that if you
broke something on the last day of the old year, you took the same
clumsiness and misfortune into the new year ... very unlucky. My gawky
child’s co-ordination dribbled food on my clothes and often relieved cups
of their handles so I spent most New Year’s Eves terrified of a slip-up.
Superstitions slipped directly into my beliefs, too, even though I
eventually acquired enough common sense to doubt their actual power to
manifest doom and gloom or to alter destiny. I understood that superstitions
gave people something to hold on to. They helped them to contain the
unexplained and they gave some order and hope when none existed. Still,
I was not immune to these forces.
One day I was playing around in the house with Unisda and I accidentally
bumped a stand where the porcelain statue of Kwun Yum took pride of
place. One year my granny had bought each of us grandchildren a figurine
of the most important deities that rule a Chinese home. Kwun Yum is the
goddess of mercy and goodness, and she was Unisda’s figurine. She rose
out of a lotus flower with a flowing robe, a beatific expression, pure and so
good. I literally decapitated this 30-cm saintly deity as she fell backwards.
It was a clean break right across her slender neck and as I held her head
in my hand I could peer down through the hollow core right to the small
hole at the base of the porcelain goddess’s lotus pedestal.
Terror gripped me as I imagined how angry my mother would be when
she found out. More than this, though, I was also horrified that I had
invoked the anger of this mystical creature and that she would rain bad
luck and evil on me or my family for my insult and my violation.
Unisda could only look on in relief that she was not the one who had
crashed against the stand. I had to enlist her help and her complicity and
we took Pritt, the paper glue stick, from our schoolbags to glue her back
together. I smeared the glue around the clay-like rim and balanced Kwun
Yum’s head back on her neck. I almost breathed a sigh of relief when I saw
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
she was still smiling and looked surprisingly whole, no visible chips or
anything. Still, I clasped my hands together, almost involuntarily, assumed
a prayer position and bowed three times in front of the statue, in that old
respectful Chinese way.
Kwun Yum made it and even survived a house move years later. In fact,
she still stands in my mom’s house today, perfect bar the faint line above
the beads that adorn her throat. What also survived were my sister’s sneers.
She reminded me even when we were grown-ups about my submission to
superstition. It embarrassed my adult wish to snub silly superstitions, but
actually I was happy Kwun Yum was still smiling.
I even once followed a very old Chinese custom of going down on your
knees and offering a cup
of tea as a sincere apology. It was like a dramatic
scene out of a Chinese period film. Imagine the flowing silk robes pushed
to the side as the person with the guilt drops to the ground with head
bowed and two hands raised holding up a teacup. The person who must
grant forgiveness gazes out of a rice-paper-filled window pane and sighs;
and tears maybe then roll down the cheeks of the person on the ground as
the teacup is taken and the contents gulped down.
On one occasion I played out this scene with my mother because I had
made her so angry. I cannot remember now what I had done but it had
been terrible and I was truly sorry. On top of this, my mother suffered
from migraines and on the day I had made her so cross she was struck by
one of these headaches. When the headaches came they scared me because
she would get so ill she would have to take to her bed with the curtains
closed and she would lie there in the darkness.
My mother – who could fix anything of ours that broke, knew instantly
where to find our missing shoes, toys or whatever, even when we said we
had looked everywhere, and was never late with a dinner or for picking us
up after school – was diminished to a groaning patient with no one to take
care of her. We could only watch, occasionally slipping into the darkened
room and calling her softly, only for her not to respond. She would not
feel much better even with the green and white capsules that were in huge
supply in her drawers and even after tying thin slices of potatoes with a
cloth around her forehead and smearing the Chinese bak fa youw, the
menthol-smelling ‘white flower oil’, on her temples and behind her ears.
When a headache coincided with that terrible something I had done, I
was horror-struck and sure that I had brought on the pain. I remembered
the old custom of asking for forgiveness and how my mother had said it
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UFRIEDA HO
was old fashioned but correct. So I brewed a cup of Chinese tea with a
few dried leaves, throwing out the first seep then refreshing it with more
hot water. I put a saucer under the cup and took it to my mother’s room.
I called her and she turned on the bedside lamp in the darkened room. I
said my teary sorry as I dropped to my knees and I offered her the tea. She
drank the tea; mothers always do, I guess.
The semi-detached house at number 62A was a treasure trove – to us
