by Ufrieda Ho
from more established families who agreed to give their family names to
the newcomers to avoid detection by the authorities.
I thought the term jee jay was very Chinese South African, a bastardised
word that no one other than a Chinese South African would understand,
a bit like how ‘larney’ for smart or ‘robot’ for traffic lights or ‘now now’
for soon confuses an English speaker who is not South African. Chinese
South Africans say mah dah for police but the correct term is actually geng
tjuk. But one day I did a quick Internet search and found the story of how
paper sons came into being. It is a term believed to have originated in San
Francisco when Chinese immigrants took advantage of a records building
there being devastated in a fire in 1906. When the authorities were left
with a gap in their records, the Chinese who re-registered themselves took
advantage of the confusion and claimed to have sons who had migrated
with them. No one could prove otherwise and so the paper sons were
born. With these ‘slots’ or unfilled spaces, other new Chinese arriving in
San Francisco could buy or borrow the slot and thereby become the paper
son. It was a similar principle of borrowing and buying identities in South
Africa.
My grandfather would also have had to take on an anglicised version
of his name and he became Leon Hing Low. So many Chinese people have
family names that do not match up with their brothers’ or sisters’ names.
Apart from the confusion of the paper sons and paper daughters, there is
also the fact that apartheid officials had no patience when trying to spell a
name uniformly for a single family or to make corrections when they had
erred, which clearly was often.
Now my Ah Goung did not have his birth name any more. He was alone
and the streets were not paved with fortune as he may have been lulled
into believing when he had made the long sea journey weeks before.
His new life journey started with helping his sister-in-law and her
husband in their small Kliptown shop – selling mealie meal and half loaves
of bread to the people of Soweto. Here, as Chinese traders, they were
allowed to operate in the 1950s because they were not in a white suburb
serving white people.
40
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
I thought this summed up the difficult but straightforward path of toil
of my Ah Goung’s early years in South Africa until he eventually managed
to start up his own small butchery on the outskirts of Pretoria. But as a
teenager I discover that this was not the case. I was shocked to learn that
my grandfather was once in jail. It seemed so criminal, so wrong and bad
to have a grandfather who had been a prisoner. I had grown up with a
strict sense of following even the tiniest decree of government gospel.
Hearing that my ordinary, law-abiding grandfather, whom I loved so
much, was once thrown in prison was one of the first realisations I had
that things were not black and white and that authorities’ laws and rules
were not the same thing as justice.
How could Ah Goung be a criminal? Laws, I realised, were for people
who fell into the tight inner circle of society. It became elastic at the edges
and it was this edge that people like the Chinese and other non-whites
bounced up against.
But the early Chinese in South Africa did not rock the boat, because
they did not have rights like other citizens. The authorities’ ‘mighty word’
kept them on a short leash. They may have gnawed at this leash but still
it chafed around their necks. These migrants did not stray far from the
law. You kept yourself safe by not drawing attention to yourself. You flew
under the radar and hoped that you would be left alone, but this meant
that you stayed on the periphery and remained outsiders.
How could these laws be universally accepted when there was no
consensus in the experience of the law in the way it was applied? I still
see this compliance in the fear my mother has sometimes; it was like the
fear my granny had about getting into trouble because our dogs came
along on our visits to her, this even though other pensioners kept dogs in
the complex against official policy. My mom’s TV licence is paid up; she
panics if a parking meter may run out. Even though I am a grown-up now,
she nagged me about a traffic cop’s warning to replace a cracked number
plate on my car. It took me weeks to get round to the plate makers, and
every time my mother saw me she asked about the number plate.
By attracting little attention to themselves, the community closed in on
itself but simultaneously left the door wide open for all the assumptions and
stereotypes that go with the ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’. Our ‘Chineseness’
meant we remained shifty and uncontained for some people. We were tied
to rites and rituals that seemed weird and were therefore often perceived
as frightening. We carry umbrellas over a bride’s head as she leaves her
41
UFRIEDA HO
parents’ home to join her groom. We bring home the spirit of the dead
with smoking incense sticks and coaxed words spoken as if the spirit is a
tangible entity that needs to be reminded of the path back home.
When I heard Ah Goung’s story, I felt like he was busted and arrested
because of this perceived strangeness. He was not a criminal but he was
different and for that he was not wanted on these shores.
‘I wonder who the bastard was who told on me,’ he would say, still
trying to screen the faces from decades before for the one who could have
snitched on him. It could have been a customer at my great-aunt’s store;
maybe it was someone who held a grudge against him or the family. He
did not close in on the suspect but he was still bitter about the time he had
to spend in prison.
He was taken from my great-aunt’s store and the magistrate sentenced
him to prison and to be deported eventually. At the time Ah Goung was
arrested, he had only been working for a few months at the store.
‘Jail was a hell hole. The blankets were full of fleas and you would
wake up scratching every night, but if you did not use the blankets you
would sleep on the cold floor.
‘The food was worse,’ he would say. ‘Tasteless slop with weevils that
was not fit for feeding a stray dog.’
I wanted to know why no one had tried to get him out in the year he
spent in prison; why did someone not help him? But there was not that
luxury and the system of the time was not made for men like my grandfather
to look for leniency or justice based on the context of his crime. My great-
aunt and her husband would have tried to help, I am sure – they remained
close and friendly until the end of their days – but they would also not
have wanted to draw too much attention to themselves. It was part of the
risk my grandfather took coming to South Africa and they all knew it.
The community was way too small, too yellow, too hidden to have any
real power to ask for better treatment or to demand better represen-
tation.
I have ofte
n reined in my imagination about that year of prison in my
grandfather’s life. I did not really want to think of him suffering during
that period. Now I do allow myself to see his isolation, his desperation
and the futility of his longings and empty wishing. This yellow man was
not able to speak any of the African languages with the men he was
incarcerated with or with the warders who slapped the weevil-ridden food
on to his plate. This ‘Chinaman’s’ fitful sleep must have been filled with
the anxious remembering of a daughter in a faraway place, a child he had
42
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
made promises to. The days must have passed mostly in silence as he was
so desperately isolated.
But then there was an astonishing twist of fate for my grandfather.
He received a presidential pardon. A man he did not know, a man who
represented a government he did not know, and a system that had landed
him in prison in the first place, now gave him a get-out-of-jail-free card.
It was one more chance for Ah Goung to make this African destiny
work, to not have to give more bad news to my grandmother in one of
those letters penned by a community scribe. Maybe he could prove that he
was not the loser he was sure she privately believed him to be.
I have one of my grandfather’s first identity cards. It is dated 1959.
This was years after he finally got out of jail and could stop hiding from
the authorities. He was given the green laminated identity card issued by
the Unie van Suid Afrika. It said ‘vreemdeling’ and ‘alien’. My grandfather
looked stern in the photo. His hair, which he was fussy about well into his
old age, was brushed back Western-style. He looked the part maybe, but
he was also strange, the alien, the unknown and the unusual, just like it
said on the card.
It took many years for my grandfather to build up his own small
butcher business, which he set up on a plot of land outside Silverton in
Pretoria. There were a few other Chinese families in the area and his
butchery serviced them and all the other non-whites in the surrounds. His
home was a simple building, an old farmhouse with an outside, long-drop
toilet and a shed containing a tin bath. My grandfather had made it as
comfortable as possible, building up a wooden platform to support the
bath and placing an old mirror on the wall, even though its edges seemed
to give way to more rust each time you looked into it.
The shop adjoined the house, separated only by the fly-screen door
of the butchery. The inside of the butchery was a pale turquoise colour
with fading posters of cuts of meats and twisted curls of honey-coloured
flypaper always spotted with dead insects. The L-shaped counters had old-
fashioned fridges with slanting pieces of glass that sheltered slabs of meat,
off-cuts, as well as blocks of butter and lard for sale. There were scales,
weights and a humming fan endlessly fluttering the neat stack of brown
paper that was always ready to receive slabs of meat to be wrapped up for
a homebound journey.
Ah Goung merged his passion for carpentry and for farm living in this
home of his. His garden became an Eden of Chinese vegetables that he
43
UFRIEDA HO
would tend to before he opened up shop in the morning and maybe during
a quiet dip in the day.
Inside his house he made wooden wardrobes, chairs and little steps
on which to rest his feet or use to reach something stashed away above a
wardrobe. He would later make little table and chair sets for us children
and some of these survive to this day. He adjusted counters and put up
simple shelves of planed and varnished planks of wood to make this space
home. He spent much of his time in his own company, not being the kind
of man who sought out drinking or gambling. Even if he had any romantic
interests during those years on his own, they were never something he
pursued, never something that reached my ears even long after his death
and even in a community that feeds off gossip like fish need water.
My grandfather stayed close to a few friends, his neighbour and his
sister-in-law and her family. One of my great-aunt’s sons, my grandfather’s
nephew, was sent to Pretoria as a teenager to live with my Ah Goung
during school holidays. My grandfather was a tough man at the time,
it seemed; maybe he needed to be to make it on the plot and to make
the small butchery work. He was impatient with weakness or prissiness
and his sister-in-law felt that a school holiday or two on the plot would
toughen up her fourth son, my Uncle Tommy, or as I call him my See Kou
Foo.
See Kou Foo remembers that he did not look forward to those school
holidays, even if they brought reprieve from the torment of his brothers
who teased him for being a sissy-boy.
‘There was that outside long-drop toilet that I had to use and I was
sometimes scared to use it by myself at night. Your grandfather did not
care that I was scared to walk out there alone. He was very strict back
then,’ my uncle told me years later. See Kou Foo was expected to work in
the vegetable garden, serve customers in the butchery and help around the
house, cooking the meals and cleaning up afterwards.
And my grandfather saw to it that there was no shirking or backing
down from the daily chores that had to be completed. They were far from
holidays.
As the years passed, their relationship mellowed into something more
sensitive and understanding as the holiday routine became familiar
schedules for both of them. The respect and affection they had for each
other lasted until the end of my Ah Goung’s days and my uncle laughs
about those times now.
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Meanwhile, those years in the butchery were part of the eighteen
that my grandfather worked to meet his obligation to reunite his family.
Sometimes I wonder whether it maybe did not take quite as long as eighteen
full orbits of the earth moving around the sun. As each calendar month of
struggle and saving passed with ordinary routine, it became more difficult
to imagine reuniting with a woman who had become unfamiliar to him
and a child who was a young woman and not the little girl of four or five
he had left behind. But in the end, my grandad did what was expected of
him and he sent for his wife and child.
45
5
Another Journey
across the
Indian Ocean
When my grandmother received the letter signalling that it was time for
her to head for Africa, she must have realised that it was the fi nal chapter
of life in China and Hong Kong for her.
More than ten years of living in the bustling port city of Hong Kong
had come to an end. From this place where she was making her own
living, existing as a single mother against all odds and where her literacy
was prized, she had to head to this Naam Fey, this ‘Southern Darkness’ as
the direct translation goes, of her husband’s letters and the few stories that
had reached her ears.
She knew that the seasons would change differently.
There would be no snow like she knew with China’s winters, and no
typhoons like those that whipped the Hong Kong coastline, closed shops
and sent people scurrying for cover. Even the sun would set at different
times and the night skies would be unfamiliar, a random scatter of heavenly
46
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
lights and not the constellations that she recognised. Her husband would
be a part of this foreignness, too.
In Naam Fey she would be totally dependent on her husband and her
prized literacy meant little because she could not speak the languages of
this new place. She would be reduced to a mute – not able to speak her
mind, not understood and without comprehension of what was being said
by those around her.
When my grandmother gave my mother the news, my mother was
elated. She would be reunited with her father finally. She could shrug off
the moniker of ‘abandoned’ child. Her phantom father did exist and she
was going to be rejoined with him in this exotic-sounding place of Africa,
where some people had pale skins and others had pitch-black skins; some
had hair that grew in tight small curls and others had a tumble of blonde
locks, all unlike her dead-straight black shafts and the same dead-straight
black shafts of everyone around her.
By then my mother was in her early twenties. She had finished middle
school and had joined her mother in the textile factory among the steady
buzz of sewing machines. She was a young working woman but she was
finally going to have her daddy close by for the first time she could really
remember.
In Hong Kong my mother had access to education that she would not
have had in China. Even though it was quite basic, her schooling included
English lessons in middle school. The teacher gave the girls English
names – my mother’s was ‘Lima’. I am not sure how the teacher came
up with the name; because my immediate association with Lima is Peru’s
capital I always imagine the names being given out to the girls as a teacher
ran her finger across a spinning globe in a classroom.
The girls giggled and joked their way through English class as they
tripped over the strange sounds and phonetic mystery of vowels and
conversational phrases: ‘Good Morning, Sir’; ‘Good Morning, Madam’.
