by Ufrieda Ho
tradition that they confuse as some kind of purity.
I remember a girl at school once, a new migrant from China, shaking
her head and laughing when she heard me refer to my brother and sister
in the old-fashioned way.
‘You do not really call your brother Kaa Heng, right?’ she giggled. I was
confused and a little embarrassed. I thought maybe I was using a wrong
term. After all, she was the first-language Chinese speaker, I was not.
‘It is so formal, I call my brother Ah Gor or I call him by his name.
Gosh, no one says “Kaa Heng”,’ she said.
It was a bit like that with divorce among Chinese South Africans.
Divorce was unheard of, too bold, too un-Chinese. But eventually Ah
Goung and Ah Por separated many years later and in a most bizarre way.
They still lived in close physical proximity to each other, being next door,
but never bothered to make the end of their married life official with court
papers and lawyers.
I know as an adult that my grandparents were captives of the times and
customs that they lived in and lived by. Sometimes I dreamt of different
outcomes for my grandparents’ story, hoping for other variables that
would have made for an altered end result. But the story unfolded as it
did the minute my Por Por and my mom stepped on the ship headed for
South Africa. As they left the watery passage behind them, the machinery
of illegal immigration fired into life for my family and turned the pages of
my grandparents’ doomed love story.
On their arrival in the old Transvaal, Por Por and my mom were given
fake papers and new identities to claim; now they were paper daughters.
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
It meant more paper and incorrect dates and information that have left me
confused about my mother’s (and my father’s) actual birth dates and their
true ages.
Years later I heard the incredulity in a dentist receptionist’s voice when
she asked me for my mother’s birthday so that she could retrieve her file. I
said ‘um’ and then I asked her to hold the line while I looked for my mom’s
ID number. She held. I thought about trying to explain the confusion of
paper sons and daughters and lunar calendar fickleness next to the steady
Gregorian one. I imagined her tapping a pencil, twirling her hair and being
sceptical of a daughter who did not know her own mother’s birthday. I
shut up and owned up to some of the shame with my silence. I could not
explain myself out of that situation in two or three sentences.
My mother and gran took their new identities without question. For a
long time my mother loved that the identity made her a few years younger
than she actually was. Today it means more confusion for me and I am
always doing mental sums when there is an official document that goes by
the numbers in an ID book and not what we know as more accurate.
My mother’s birth name was Fok Jouw Yee. Ah Yee is still what
everyone calls her in Chinese, but her new identity in South Africa gave
her the name Low Yee Wan, and eventually an anglicised version in later
years meant my mother simply told people who did not speak Chinese that
her name was Yvonne. It was an easy phonetic cousin to Yee Wan or now
You Wan, as it is printed in her current ID book.
Along with new names and identities, they were given specific instructions
for hiding, for staying out of the public eye and for being on the look out.
For the first few months they lived like fugitives, shunted from location
to location in a bid to evade authorities who might be looking for them;
they could not be too careful. In reality, few people would have bothered
to tell the authorities. On the outskirts of white suburbia, the authorities
were despised with shared disdain and mostly the cops had bigger fish to
fry. Still, my grandfather’s arrest all those years ago was an ever-present
reminder that one slip-up could be one too many.
‘Those were really scary days; you would be afraid of every knock on
the door or any stranger who arrived. I did not expect that it would be like
that and I really did not know why we had to be in this horrible place in
the first place,’ my mother recalled.
Eventually, as the months worked themselves into a humdrum routine,
with no cops coming around and no one asking any questions, my Por
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UFRIEDA HO
Por and mom settled a bit more into life in landlocked Pretoria on my
grandfather’s small piece of land. Living here on the edge of the city
and flanking the doleful townships must have felt so strange. Gone was
the humidity of Hong Kong with its buzzing city streets congested with
Chinese signage, even in the 1960s, vying for attention at every turn. Their
room in the cramped flatlet in the heart of emerging Hong Kong high-rises
was replaced with an old farmhouse without a single tall building nearby.
My granny started working behind the butchery counter, encountering
black people for the first time, not understanding any of the languages the
customers tried out on her, making mistakes and chiding herself for her
errors. Then she cooked the evening meal for her husband and daughter as
the sunset gave way to stars she did not recognise. And finally, she shared
a bed with a man she called her husband but who was a stranger.
One of the things my grandparents always fought about was the way
my Por Por cooked rice. She liked the grains softer, cooked for longer with
more water in the pot. My Ah Goung preferred his rice firmer. They battled
constantly over the difference made by a few splashes of water. These rice
wars became daily skirmishes, a constant reminder of the distance between
them, until eventually they stopped eating together.
There is a saying in Chinese about a man who eats ‘soft rice’, sek yeun
faan or tau hai faan; it is meant to refer to a man who has to rely on his
wife for a living. Maybe after my Ah Goung had to rely on his wife’s family
for work when he first arrived in South Africa he resented the reminder at
every meal.
But my granny could also not give up what she wanted. It was almost as
if she yearned for another body of water, the Indian Ocean, which would
put a sure watery gulf between her and this life she had never wanted.
Another wedge that started to push into their relationship was the fact
that my grandfather became a Christian. The story of his conversion sounds
like the start to the Noah’s Ark story, and it was close enough to make my
grandfather a believer. The great flood in Pretoria happened when I was
a small child, in the late 1970s. I remember only the aftermath of the
natural disaster because I recall returning to Ah Goung’s Silverton plot
after the days of flooding and my parents measuring off the watermarks
against the heights of us children. I remember the big rescue of things that
could be salvaged, all limp with the imprint of having being soaked in
water – and warped and wrinkled for life thereafter.
At the time of the flood, my gran lived with and worked for relatives
of ours who had two sh
ops in Denver. With the recent opening of their
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new shop they needed someone to help behind the counter. My gran took
the job, grateful to escape the war between her and my grandfather, but
also not having to separate officially and thereby keeping the peace in the
family. My uncles’ shops sold fish and chips, two-cent toffees and all the
other odds and ends of corner cafés. Their house was adjoined to the one
shop and my gran had a little room where she stayed – and thus missed the
flood that hit the capital city.
Ah Goung, though, did not. The rains kept coming until it was clear
that there was nowhere else for the water to go. On the day the flooding
climaxed, my grandfather had started moving everything on to higher
surfaces around the house and sandbagging the doors to keep the water
from gushing in. Then he panicked about his old green station wagon, the
Passat that took him everywhere. The car was in the most vulnerable spot
on the open plot where the torrents were gaining momentum with every
drop of rain that fell. Ah Goung could not simply watch his beloved car
get washed away and his intention was to get to the car and drive it to
higher ground until the water eventually subsided.
As he stepped over the sandbags, the polished veranda had vanished and
the water had risen sharply in the few minutes since he had last checked.
Still, he thought he could get to the Passat; he just had to be quick about
it.
But he never made it to the car. The waters snared his feet and toppled
him over, dragging him along with the current. No one was there to help
my grandfather. His neighbours were also riding out the storm and they
had no idea what was happening to Ah Goung.
He bobbed along in the water as it rushed towards an overflowing storm-
water channel some distance from his property. Then he bumped against
an old tree that had withstood the force of the water and he managed to
clutch on to the branches. He felt his body come to a halt and when he
opened his eyes the water was still moving but he was no longer being
dragged with it. Ah Goung clung on and waited for help.
Night fell and still no one came. It was then that Ah Goung made a
pact with God, the Western deity he had heard of but who did not fit
in with the way he knew the world. His pact was to honour God as a
Christian if he made it out alive. He held on to that tree the whole night,
occasionally nodding off from exhaustion, but too cold and scared to fall
asleep properly. At daybreak a rescue team found him. And when the rains
gave way my grandad was a Christian.
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UFRIEDA HO
Even though he kept many of the traditional Chinese observations that
he said were his way to honour and remember his mother, he kept his pact
with God until his very last breath.
My grandad did not have a church to belong to. He was a Chinaman
who was not welcome in white churches. Instead, he worshipped with
black people, with those whose churches were under trees, in quiet Sunday
parking lots and anywhere else that suited their singing and dancing
purposes.
My grandfather made the knitted plaits in red and green that he wore
around his waist and around his wrists. He would make the same plaits
to decorate a cross with Jesus Christ on it that he put up in his house.
He stayed with these churches for years, not understanding the language
much, but being welcomed anyway to say his prayers and to keep his
promise from the time of the flood.
Years later, a Chinese Baptist church started up in the south of
Johannesburg. It offered sermons in Chinese and Bibles and hymn books
printed in Chinese. It became the religious home for my Ah Goung for
many, many years.
My gran never understood this conversion to Christianity. A Christian
God fell outside of her world view. Her spirituality was commanded by the
deities and spirits of another realm, the patterns of the stars and seasonal
dictates, the rhythm of prosperity and catastrophe and the merits that
come with the loyalties to the ancestors and the gods that the ancients had
worshipped along the continuum of Chinese custom.
My gran did have a kind of sixth sense for things of the heavens. It
was a quiet piety and she never passed herself off as a devout person or
dropped hints about ‘supernatural powers’ or mysterious and dramatic
abilities.
It was not unusual for people to seek her out to ask for her interpretation
of the Chinese calendars, the tong seng. The tong seng is an almanac not
only of events and dates and the movement of the constellations of each
new year, but also a book for clarity of all things in life. People trusted
my grandmother to choose the best dates for marriages and funerals.
She talked about feng shui: where to hang a curtain for a certain flow of
energy, turning around the beds for a better night’s rest. She also looked
at hands and would make a comment about wearing a ring on a finger to
stop money flowing away. She read the stories in the structure of a face
and never dismissed a dream or the arrival of an omen that looked like
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coincidence. It was an inherent part of who she was and much of her
simple ways and wisdom slipped into our everyday lives, too. Even my
mother believed what Ah Por said about things of this other dimension.
But the gods and the ancestors gave Por Por no peace and no answers
when it came to healing and mending her relationships with her husband
and her daughter.
For my mother, her girlhood dream of being reunited with her father
had come true, and she quickly fell in love with the idea of having a dad.
‘I have not had my father around for so many years, why should I not
stand up for him now?’ was typical of what she would say, when one of
us challenged her about her unfair siding with her father. My grandfather
was always the hero and my grandmother was always in the wrong, as my
mother saw it.
Details of the many arguments between my grandparents have become
blurry over time. I know my mother grasped on to the discord, though,
holding on to it hard enough to retell the stories often, as if constant
retelling would make them real. I learnt to take the stories with a pinch
of salt and to look for the context of the arguments because things were
never as they first seemed.
My mother went from being in my grandfather’s camp and having him
as her favourite parent to waging all-out war with my grandmother. It was
a war of snippy remarks, disparaging comments and of being dismissive of
what was important to my grandmother, particularly of being reassured of
requited love from her only child.
My mother would say my grandmother was plotting against her and
was using us grandchildren as her devices of revenge. Whenever we stood
up for our granny my mother would say: ‘Yes, go ahead and plot against
me, that is what your grandmother wants, yes, this is her revenge.’
We n
ever knew what she meant about conspiring against her so my
granny could score points of retribution.
My gran, though, forgave her daughter time and again. She even told
us to tame our anger and she would chastise us for being disobedient to
my mother as we became teenagers. When we moaned about my mother
to her, she would simply say: ‘Pretend what she says is just a bird singing.’
Only very occasionally would she allow herself to agree with us and have
a short rage at my mom. Then she would gather herself and make another
excuse for her little girl’s behaviour.
All of us Ho children had weekend and holiday jobs as we became
teenagers. For a few days one holiday I was an extra for an American movie
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UFRIEDA HO
filmed in South Africa. They needed Chinese children to play Vietnamese
villagers, chasing chickens and pushing bicycles before bombs went off to
raze the props of thatch houses to the ground. They put cocoa powder on
my face and we were given clothes to wear to make us look like poor, dirty
village kids. In another job I got dressed up in a Chinese gown over my
tracksuit and was issued a Chinese straw hat along with a group of other
girls cooking up Chinese-themed dishes in a shopping centre. I was about
fourteen and cooked badly, but fortunately I was paid to be part of the
in-store promotion and not for any chef skills. I was Chinese, I looked the
part and that was enough. But mostly we worked as waitrons at Chinese
restaurants. Kelvin, Yolanda and I worked in Hillbrow’s Litchee Inn, a
restaurant that pioneered yum cha (literally, ‘to drink tea’), a Sunday
brunch menu of small portions of delicacies they called dim sum (literally,
‘to touch your heart’), in the Transvaal of the late 1980s. We would serve
up parcels of beautifully seasoned prawns inside rice-flour skins, so thinly
rolled out they would steam up almost transparent, next to crispy fried
taro-potato cakes filled with savoury fillings and delicate char siu, the
sweet pork filling wrapped in flaky pastry. Sometimes we would buy some
of the leftovers to take home and the owners would be kind enough to let
us take a little extra because the restaurant only served its yum cha menu
once a week and nothing was going to keep that long. We would take
the treats to our grandparents whom we usually visited after our Sunday
