by Ufrieda Ho
awaited small teaspoons of seasoned minced meat with water chestnuts
and slivers of wood ear fungus.
The trick, my mother said, was not to make flabby wontons that
would burst when they were dropped into the rapidly boiling water. But
I struggled to mimic the consecutively neat parcels that were my mom’s
wonton origami. She allowed us to keep trying though.
Yolanda and Kelvin, as the older children, had the daily chore of rinsing
out the raw rice grains and setting them to boil slowly in our hard-working
rice cooker with its dim orange indicator light and convex viewing window
on the lid. Rice was on our menu every night without fail. As the rice
boiled, the lid rattled softly against the metal sides of the pot. Sometimes
small bubbles escaped to the edges, then disappeared into a hissing haze
of steam.
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
‘Once you have rinsed out the rice two or three times you have to level
it out in the pot before you add the water. You know you have put in
enough water when the water touches just above your knuckles,’ my mom
said as it became my turn to take on more of the cooking responsibilities.
I have kept to the formula all these years, only now my rice cooker
is a fancy upgrade with a multi-programme electronic brain and comes
complete with coloured lights and warning chimes. There is no clinking lid
to bounce against the sides of the pot and there is no little window to view
the watery bubbles being absorbed by the rice grains. I only remember
now and again that my hand is not the child’s hand any more and the
water level that my mom talked about should drop closer to below where
my knuckles are.
Ours was not a home of breakfasts of yoghurts and Weet-bix or fry-ups
of hash browns, eggs and grilled tomatoes. I only realised as a grown-up
how little dairy there was in traditional Chinese foods or the fact that
cornflakes and bran were not the universal breakfasts like they were
portrayed with smiling, ‘regular’ people in advertisements. My parents
raised us in a time before low GI, probiotics, live cultures and pariah status
for trans-fats and tartrazine.
Mostly we ate the foods that tested the stomachs of many. We loved
steamed fish, like Red Roman, with ginger and spring onion finished off
with oil and soya sauce. But it was the eyeballs that my father liked to
share with us as children. The big eye peered out from the plate and my
dad offered the eye, plunging his chopsticks into the socket and dropping
the squishy mess of eye on top of my scoop of rice. The gelatinous glob
melted until just the hard little bead rolled over my tongue. My dad loved
that I loved it just as he did.
Years later I watched an episode of Fear Factor, the reality TV show
that in part challenges contestants’ potential to hold down ‘gross’ foods.
Next to hissing cockroaches and pigs’ testes, they set out the good old
100-year-old egg. The egg is preserved with straw and a soy mix, which
turns the egg pitch black and into a firm jelly consistency. Its yolk becomes
ash-grey goo. I laughed so much at the retching faces and the absolute
refusals to try the egg and I remember thinking how good the eggs would
taste with a thin slice of preserved ginger and a tiny sprinkling of sugar.
Most days before school we had a quick breakfast of a steaming cup
of tea and a slice of bread with some butter and jam or a stack of Marie
biscuits that we dunked into the sweet tea, carefully counting the seconds
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UFRIEDA HO
to get a perfect tea-infused biscuit – not so soggy that the biscuits broke
off and descended to the bottom of the cup as squishy pulp, but not so dry
that you could still crunch through the biscuits. School lunchboxes were
not simply sandwiches of peanut butter and cold meats. We also packed in
thermoses of savoury rice and noodles.
On weekends we sometimes enjoyed breakfasts of congee, the delicious
slow-cooked rice soups simmered for hours with any variation of beans,
dried scallop, dried sheets of doufu, shiitake mushrooms, spinach or meat.
And just as the heat is turned off, a few lightly beaten eggs are stirred in to
become floating wisps of suspended protein. I loved to watch my mother’s
gentle stirring as the translucence turned into opaque morsels. Without
fail, each time she reminded me how important it was to have the heat
turned off and not to over-stir, but not to let the egg clump either. I could
not wait until I was old enough to give it a try.
Food and eating in the Ho household was a hybrid of chopsticks and
woks alongside braai tongs and toasters. It was two worlds rolled into one
in our Bertrams home and all spiced up with our own Ho family brand,
too. I think of it a bit like the common sweet sesame cake that is served
up at so many Chinese gatherings, especially over Chinese new years.
These jeeng dui balls are multi-dimensions of taste and texture, all crisply
fried and studded with sesame seeds on the outside before giving way to a
chewy, glutinous layer and a surprise ball of dark, sweet lotus paste in the
centre. That is us, layers, unusual textures and the surprise in the middle,
all in one tiny package.
20
3
A Long Way
from Here
Long before Marmite and pap and wors collided with my mom and dad’s
world, their lives were very different. Home in China was a place of steamed
rice, pungent fermented doufu and dried salted fi sh in viscous puddles of
rich oil. Their countrymen and women looked exactly like they did, their
houses were similarly smoky, with small altars that burnt with incense for
the ancestors and deities to protect and bless their home and families. The
codes of being and being accepted were known, like birthrights.
I have never made it back to the villages where my mother and father
were born. Even on the few trips I have taken to Hong Kong and China,
I have never been so deep into the interior that I have been able to get to
what remains of these villages. Some relatives, though, have journeyed to
the old country and returned with a bit of these rural outposts caught in
megapixels of today’s digital photographic genius. From these images, I
see that even the passage of time does not cover up the simplicity of lives
that are still spare even in an era of growing capitalist consumption. The
pictures match up with some of the images I have held in my mind for the
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UFRIEDA HO
longest time and confirm so many of the stories that my parents used to
share with us.
The mod cons are there now, even in the villages. But modernity must
still yield to old habits sometimes. TV sets and DVD players may blink
digital numbers in standby mode but they are covered under thick, flower-
patterned plastic coverings. The formal family photos of ancestors, some
with the distinct studio touches of oval framing or sepia tones, share
wall space with calendars sponsored by electronic stores and sellotaped
blessings and prayers in the tradition
of fai cheun, the Chinese calligraphy
poems of only four characters written on sheets of lucky red paper.
The young people may wear jeans and branded sportswear, but the old
women in the villages still get dressed each day in the traditional pantsuit
made almost always from highly patterned cheap fabric and sometimes
still with that skew ‘y’ closing typical of a mandarin collar cut. There is
no dyed hair and shaped eyebrows for these women whose accelerated
ageing is witness to harsh lives working fields in endless piercing winds
and scorching days. In the biting winters, villagers wear the puffy coats
and waistcoats that have not changed for decades. They are the garments
of insulated padding dressed up in a reversible silk cover. Summers are
characterised by men with shirt buttons undone and sweat-soaked vests.
Woven grass fans shaped like fat leaves are put to work constantly.
My mom and dad were both born in Guangdong in China. They came from
this southern tip of the mighty landmass of Asia where its inhabitants are
mostly Cantonese speakers. Many Chinese early emigrants left from places
such as Guangdong and Fujian, forming the first waves of emigration and
planting the seeds of diaspora. It was probably because they were closer
to ports and exit points compared to places farther north or deeper in the
interior.
My mother, Fok Jouw Yee, called the county of Li Geou her birthplace
and for my father, Ho Sing Kee, his birthplace was the small county called
Shun Tak.
When we were growing up, we were reminded often that it was a
disgrace not to know your father’s village. It did not matter that we had
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
never visited it, or that there was not a single photograph of that place on
which to hang a mental picture.
‘Where is your head? Have you lost your mind? You probably cannot
even remember where your father’s village is.’
It was one of my mother’s favourite scolds when she thought we had
done something foolish, frivolously indulgent or a stupid deed that she
deemed we should be embarrassed about. We skulked off, too shamed to
defend ourselves.
I only learnt years later that stating your forefathers’ village is a way for
older people, in particular, to focus immediately on ‘whose people you are’.
It is like the place of origin is a parent. It centres on kinship and trusted
allegiances and also pronounces on sure hatred and well-worn grudges.
It matters little in a changed world far from the old country. Stating your
place of clan origin still allows people’s memories to race back along a
known path of order and unbreakable bonds. They can insert you where
you belong like it is determined by what runs through your veins, that
fusion of blood and kin.
And as a Ho, Shun Tak took on a mystical importance for me. It was
a place I envisioned only in my imagination, pieced together by stories,
anecdotes and memory. It was where my father’s story began and so also
where my own narrative finds its roots.
My mother was an only child, born to Fok Yat Gou and Low Wan Yuk. My
maternal grandparents were joined as teenagers through a hastily arranged
marriage. The Japanese were invading China and the young virgins were
at risk of being raped or turned into concubines for the bastards, my
grandmother would say in stories she would share in years to come.
Meeting Chinese nationals many years later, I understood how the
old wounds of the invasion throbbed for the Chinese well into the 21st
century. They waited for apologies that did not come, so in the long delay
they held on to the stories of great aunties raped and killed, babies ripped
from their mothers’ wombs and those who were not saved by death but
were forced to be ‘comfort women’ for the loathed gaa jay, a pejorative
snipe for a Japanese person that is supposed to mimic the sound of the
Japanese language as heard by Chinese ears.
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UFRIEDA HO
Once, on an overseas training workshop with foreign journalists, I
wore a skirt that had a huge print of a striking Japanese woman on it, all
kimono-clad with clay-white skin and dark, expressive eyes. I liked the skirt
and I liked the contrast of being a Chinese person wearing a skirt with a
Japanese icon on it. On the course were two journalists from China. Each
commented on the skirt. ‘Nice skirt,’ they started in our mix of Cantonese,
English and Mandarin, remarking on its patterning that was unusual and
bold, I suppose. Then the piece of cotton wrapped around my legs became
political and historical all of a sudden. Both these colleagues, who looked
like me, but were also so different from me, being Chinese nationals, started
talking about the Japanese as old enemies with old cruelties and never-to-
be forgotten barbarisms. I understood then that a nation’s memory stays
with its people. Even this becomes a kind of birthright.
To them, my being born Chinese, even though I was born in South
Africa, linked me instantly to that memory and that historical allegiance. I
liked that skirt, but I did not wear it again during the course.
Had it not been wartime, my grandmother’s family possibly would have
been able to marry my grandmother to someone who was a more equal
match in social standing. But there was no time for such an indulgence,
and wealth and even class snobbery were levelled out when everyone was
left with less than they started with before the Japanese invasion.
My grandparents never got along with each other – at least not by the
time I knew them. They never fought outwardly; instead, they fell into
a life of silent rage and deliberate separateness even though they shared
the same roof until they were well into the winter of their lives. Although
they did split up and lived separately, they still ended up in the same
government retirement complex until they died – my grandfather in 1998
and my grandmother in 2000.
When I was a child I wished every day that they would make up,
reconcile and be a happy couple. My childish hope always was that the
big love that each of them showered on us would be enough to reunite
them. I longed not to hear them speak badly about each other and wished
that we children did not have to split up our time with each of them on the
occasions when we visited them in Pretoria and then later Johannesburg.
During our weekly visits, my grandad, my Ah Goung, Fok Yat Gou,
would take up his position in the single bedroom in their flat in Lorentzville,
a tatty little suburb made up of ugly flats and light industrial factories in
Johannesburg East. My grandmother, my Por Por, who was born Low
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Wan Yuk, would be staked out on her sofa bed in the living room. They
hardly spoke to each other, leaving biting notes sometimes when a grunt
or sarcastic retort was not enough. The notes were a triumph for my
grandmother, who had the privilege of being better educated and had a
better vocabulary in her arsenal. My grandfather’s defence was the sa
ving
grace of not always knowing the full extent of what she had written.
A visit saw the four of us children split up in pairs and spend time
separately with each of them and then swop over as the afternoon
progressed. We sat and talked nonsense with them about school, about
family or some or other thing that we had been doing or had seen that
week. Then we repeated some of our stories as we swopped over. They
shared their stash of goodies with us but hid them from each other. ‘Pour
yourself some cooldrink, from my bottle, which is at the back of the fridge,’
one of them would say, careful that we did not drink some of the other’s
provisions. Eventually my grandmother got her own small fridge that she
plugged in near her sofa bed in the already crammed flat.
When they visited us in our home they tried never to be in the same
room together and even when we sat down for meals as a family they
perfected the art of making the other invisible, even around a small dinner
table.
My father loved his in-laws; he was the son they had never had. And I
think he wished as hard as I did that his in-laws could love each other or
at least have that spousal devotion and caring that would have made their
lives so much happier.
One of the biggest thorns in my parents’ relationship was the fact that
my father could not take sides when my mother did. Once, when my
grandparents had obviously reached a breaking point in their relationship,
my father suggested that my grandmother move in with us. We could
squeeze her in somehow because it was the right thing to do, my father
said. My mother hit the roof with shouting and screaming and sulking.
She did not speak to my father for days and I remember my dad saying:
‘I cannot believe your mom has this attitude. It is her own mother, for
goodness sakes.’
My mother’s affection was for her father, and in her stubborn,
intractable way she made little excuses for her bias. She often said it was
about making up for lost time. Sometimes she would say it was because
my granny was not a good wife to my grandfather. But it was not about
favouritism skewed by making up for the years she missed out on having
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UFRIEDA HO
a dad close by. And I know she knew my granny never did anything that
