by Ufrieda Ho
of mythical dragons for Johannesburg’s streets of gold.
By the late 1940s, China was a tragic farce: it faced civil war, famine,
the aftermath of the Second World War and the invasion by the Japanese
that had started in 1931, the so-called September Eighteen incident. Mao
Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, his Cultural Revolution in the subsequent
years to overturn the old orders, translated into more difficulties for villagers,
people like my grandparents and my father’s family. There would have been
the risk of being shot or publicly denounced and shamed for being counter-
revolutionary or being capitalist pigs. It was more paranoia than policy
that guided the ideologies filtering down from Peking. For villagers and
peasants across China, it translated into starvation and grinding poverty.
Life was about survival only, struggling under harsh living conditions and
subsisting on rations, food coupons and even a dismantling of many of the
elaborate religious customs, rites and ceremonies that would have been a
social glue and comfort.
Authors and researchers Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong Man, who
write about the Chinese in South Africa, contextualise the exodus. In
Colour, Confusion and Concessions, they write that by the mid-19th
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century the decline of the Chinese empire was in full swing. Natural
disaster, famine, corruption and a general breakdown in social order were
all made manifest in the wake of the two Opium Wars of 1839, and later
between 1856 and 1860, and also with the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted
fourteen years from 1850 to 1864. China was crippled economically and
socially and more than 20 million people died.
When I read author and journalist Xinran Xue’s China Witness I was
simultaneously fascinated, saddened and buoyed by the oral histories and
first-person accounts of the elderly ‘forgotten generation’ of Chinese – men
and women who were a few years younger than my grandparents at the time
they were interviewed in the mid-2000s. This book is filled with anecdotes
and memories of a generation that lived under communist madness and
also the euphoria of buying in to the propaganda while it was still good.
But when things got bad, they went horribly wrong. One minute you were
a party loyal, and the next you were being incriminated for the slightest
thing that was suddenly deemed anti-party.
It turned neighbours into informants and it made friends turn a blind
eye, just in case they were made guilty by association. Mistrust had an iron
grip on the people living under Mao and toeing the party line was gospel,
whether you truly believed or not.
They also worked hard on communal fields and even accepted that they
had to be part of the government’s hard-labour projects that needed the
muscle of good men and women from the party.
Above all, I picked up the thread of a sense of pride. People were
not defeated, even by the worst conditions. One woman separated from
her children and family for ten years, whose husband had been labelled
counter-revolutionary under the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, said:
‘I never cried. We had a mission as part of the national plan and not
completing the mission was like committing a crime.’
I have often thought that this hardness, this rigidity was just about
‘saving face’, that obsession with not showing weakness or failure, even
turning it into boastful conceit. After reading some of the accounts in
Xinran’s book, though, I saw something different. I saw that some of
what swelled the pomposity was not just hubris but about holding on, a
desperate grasp on to small hopes shadowed by bleak lives.
With so few choices available to them, it was to a place called Gum
Saan, the Golden Mountain, that some Chinese turned. Most people
who fled China from the late 1940s onwards came from the Cantonese-
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UFRIEDA HO
speaking southern regions. They would become the West’s ‘coolies’, that
offensive term that downgraded the people (mostly men) from China and
India into a working class of illiterate, uneducated cheap labour as the
world went into rebuilding mode after the Second World War. There was
also the lure of being free men who could maybe strike it rich in the cities
that had lapped up the gold rushes of the previous century.
Years later I found out that many early migrants to Johannesburg left
the mainland not exactly certain of their final destinations. That is because
the golden mountains of the world referred not only to Johannesburg but
also to places such as Melbourne and San Francisco that for decades also
had their own lure of the yellow metal.
I liked to ask migrants why they came to South Africa in the first place.
Their answers were always about prosperity and pipe dreams of fortune,
the belief that something better lay across the wide seas. There were also
all the variables of chance and fate and an impossibly muddled view of a
big wide world they could not know. They were cut off from the reality of
geography and global politics. They were poor, unsophisticated villagers
who did not have access to such information.
My grandfather knew, though, that he was heading to the supposed
gilded mound in South Africa, not to one of the other golden mountains
spread across the globe. My grandmother’s older sister and her husband
had left for South Africa some years earlier and had started a life that would
bring them seven children, including a prosperous brood of six sons, and
a small but sustainable spaza shop in Kliptown, Soweto. Over decades,
it would grow into a provisions store that traded until recently when it
was eventually sold. Competition had grown, markets had changed and
the attrition of violent criminal fury against the comparatively wealthy,
like this uncle with his business, meant a day of final trade had to come.
And today their children have moved on from Africa, seeking their own
prosperity and fortunes across new oceans.
Before all this would come to pass, the plan was for my grandfather
to work for my grandmother’s sister and her husband until he could set
himself up, until he could send for my gran and mom. He left China in the
late 1940s, when my mother was a small girl.
There is a black and white photo that I found in an old album that
belonged to my Por Por. It is a family photo that was taken shortly
before my grandfather set off on his journey south. My Ah Goung was
in Western-style dress. He wore a pair of long shorts topped by a short-
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sleeved, collared shirt. His thick, ample hair was oiled and combed back
neatly. It was a posed studio picture and my grandfather was propped up
against the armrest of the sofa.
My Por Por was fresh-faced and beautiful. Her hair was pulled back
and clipped on the side, showing her fine features. She was in a traditional
Chinese outfit. It had a typical Mandarin-style collar and she was wearing
a matching pair of trousers. Next to her was my mom, aged
maybe two or
three. She was in a little Western-style dress and her hair was neatly tied
back; she looked like a shy cutie.
Por Por and Ah Goung looked impossibly young. When I gazed at
the photo my heart went straight to this young family that had to make
decisions that would put thousands of kilometres between them and
shatter their innocence with it.
It would be eighteen years until they were reunited. I have no doubt
about the years of separation, even though so many other timeframes and
dates that I have about my family’s history are estimates deduced from the
overlap of stories. There was also the confusion of intersecting Chinese
lunar calendars and Western calendars, illiteracy and foggy memories. The
number of years here, though, are accurate because that number eighteen
was the fulfilment of a terrible prophecy.
Around the time my grandfather set out, my Por Por approached a temple
priest hoping for a prophecy of a prompt reunion with my grandfather.
My grandmother was religious her whole life and had a connection with
the spiritual realm that was like a completely innate sixth sense and was
something I never questioned. She must have been emotionally torn by my
grandfather’s trip, but she would have had to hold on to some belief that
it was the right move and that it would change their tough circumstances.
Her unsettled heart would have sent her to the temple.
But that day the temple priest revealed a prophecy that would prove to
be devastatingly accurate. This prophecy came in the form of kau cim. To
kau cim is a traditional way to seek the wisdom and revelations from an
ancient Chinese oracle. One hundred small flat sticks, each individually
numbered and each with a corresponding parable, are shaken in a bamboo
cup at a temple. Each stick has a symbolic meaning represented and can be
interpreted by a priest.
As my granny held this container in both hands, she would have shaken
the container gently, asking her one question over and over again in
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UFRIEDA HO
whispered prayer. As a single stick tumbled to the ground, she would have
retrieved it and hurried off to consult with the temple priest.
‘He said we would be separated for eight years or eighteen years and that
is exactly what happened,’ my granny told us years later. As she got older,
my gran developed an agitated quiver in her head when she was worked
up or when her nerves set her off. And though she had put emotional
distance between her present and the many hurts that she had experienced
as a young woman, that slight side-to-side quiver of her head betrayed her
every time. It hinted at the eighteen years of not having a husband to speak
to, a husband to take her side, no division of labour and no one to share
a home with as a married woman. Eighteen years that would make her
husband a stranger just like when they were first married.
I never fully appreciated my granny’s strength, independence and the
tenacity that was wrapped up in her tiny frame and her subtle, proper
ways. She would survive, though, even if the prophecy must have come
like a dark storm over her heart. She would survive to give her daughter
a better life.
With the ghost of a boy child and an absent husband who had stowed
away for Africa, my gran decided to find a life away from the Guangdong
mainland. Many from her village had already left for the island of Hong
Kong by the 1950s. They hoped this fragrant harbour, literally Heung
Gong as it is called in Cantonese, would yield some of its perfume to
them.
The British had resumed control of Hong Kong after its occupation by
the Japanese during the Pacific War. As such, Hong Kong was a free port
with greater political and economic autonomy, which offered the hope of
breaking free from the unforgiving life on the mainland. By the 1950s and
the 1960s, it was up to the mainland newcomers, these refugees, to revive
the economy of the trading port. Their cheap labour would spark the era
of manufacturing superiority that characterised Hong Kong. The time of
the ‘fong kong’, as South Africans now say of everything made in the East,
had dawned. It would be the start of fake flowers, knock-off textiles and
plastic everything, and it was the sheer manufacturing output that was the
way out for Hong Kong and a way out for my granny.
Life in Hong Kong meant an end to picking rice and working the fields
in the villages. My gran also wanted my mom to be educated. Por Por
took a job as a seamstress, working uninspired stitches in a hot factory
of whirring sewing machines. The textile and manufacturing industries
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
became the major employers for female labourers like my grandmother.
For the first time my gran had an income and did not have to wait on the
small remittances my grandfather sent along with the letters that someone
helped him to write. But wait she did, for eighteen long years.
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4
A Strange New Home
Ah Goung meanwhile had arrived in South Africa. Like most of the
Chinese who entered the country, it was by illegal means. The National
Party was in power by 1948, probably coinciding with the years of my
grandfather’s arrival. There was a strictly enforced quota system for ‘free’
Chinese, determining who was allowed to enter the country legally. The
impossibly low quota numbers meant many people chose to try their luck
via the unoffi cial route. Segregation and more quota systems at institutions
like universities, schools and even churches would follow as the apartheid
machinery cranked into action.
I have heard many stories of being smuggled into the country from my
family members and other Chinese South Africans. They are stories of fear
and terror of the unknown, dangerous journey; the helplessness of relying
on strangers who were only mildly co-operative. Strangers such as the ship
hands who took away night buckets and brought food and water with the
irregularity and disdain that came with knowing the stowaways were left
with little choice but to take what they got during the miserable long sea
voyage.
My grandad made the trip anyway. After long weeks at sea, the ship
curved around Mozambique. It was the end of the journey for those
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
destined for the old Lourenço Marques. A number of Chinese migrants
chose to be here instead of in South Africa.
Ah Goung went further south, until he reached the Durban docks.
Maybe it was night time when the stowaways were smuggled off the ship.
A contact was waiting for my grandfather so that he could be driven up to
the then-Transvaal to be with his sister-in-law and her family.
Many years later I attended a lecture by a professor researching the
emotional impact of emigration on families. It was the noughties and the
exodus from a democratic South Africa had climbed to over the one-million
mark in around fifteen years. To advertise her talk there was a photo of
a family
newly arrived, still on the deck of the ship that brought them to
South Africa. The children had light-coloured hair. They were smiling,
all neatly dressed and pushed up against the railings. Their parents stood
a few steps behind them, also smiling. It was broad daylight and they
all beamed with the promise of new opportunities that would meet them
when they disembarked a few minutes after the shot was taken.
It was a beautiful photo of beginnings and possibilities for this family.
But it saddened me, too, because I knew a similar ship would have docked
for my family members, but they would not have stood on the deck smiling.
There were no waving relatives anxious to scoop them up in their arms,
no grainy black and white image to remember that moment that signals
the start to a new life. It would only be in the darkness that the stowaways
surfaced, taking in the starlit night briefly along with all the unfamiliar
smells and sounds of the Durban docks, then they would be hurried off
before they were seen, stopped and arrested.
Growing up, I attached TV images to my grandparents’ and parents’
journeys across the oceans. I imagined them hiding in false-bottomed trucks
and disguising themselves with wigs and dark glasses. The reality was less
dramatic, though no less frightening. As it turned out, the contact person
would typically not only be the ride, but would also have arranged papers,
illegal documents, for the stowaways. In South Africa, this transaction
generally went quite smoothly. The community was tiny then, close-knit
and loyal.
I had a conversation once with an old man who is over 90 today. By
coincidence, we share the same surname, but we are not blood relatives.
However, our shared clan name immediately establishes a kinship tie,
binding us by the probable regional origins of our families. Old Uncle
Ho summed up the closeness of the community back when he was a new
arrival, even before the Second World War.
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UFRIEDA HO
‘You did not have to have the same surname, that did not even matter;
everyone was your brother back then.’
So Ah Goung assumed a new identity and became this other person.
Chinese migrants become ‘paper sons’, jee jay, a literal translation of the
phrase used to refer to the people who bought or borrowed new identities
