Paper Sons and Daughters

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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  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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  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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  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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  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