by Ufrieda Ho
shifts.
Even as we put the delicious eats before my gran she would say: ‘Have
you put some of this aside for your mother?’ or ‘Take these home to your
mother instead.’ Even though the restaurant’s food was delicious, my gran
wanted my mother to have the treats. She put my mother first and she
expected us to show respect towards our parents above all else.
No matter what my granny did, my mom’s imagination, infected by
her anger, became a virus of accusations. When my grandparents finally
lived under separate roofs some years later, she accused my grandmother
of being too friendly with another old man, a long-time widower, who
was a mutual friend to both my Ah Goung and my Ah Por. ‘She fixes his
trousers but she would not even touch your grandfather’s when they lived
together,’ my mother would rage.
I only knew this old man as a helpful Ah Buk, an old uncle, whose
reasonable English proficiency meant he was the person many of the old
people who lived in the same flats turned to for help, my grandparents
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among them. My grandfather, like us, never faulted this man’s actions or
intentions, but my mom persisted. She inflated my grandmother’s small
gestures of reciprocal kindness into betrayal of her place as my grandfather’s
wife, even though they were now living in two separate flats – ironically
side by side, because they were the only units that were available for rent.
I remained friendly with this old man even after both my grandparents
died. Sometimes I would take him canned foods – those tins of curried
rice, stained yellow with too much turmeric or fake colouring, and chicken
and vegetable curry, almost desiccated from the over-processing. But this
Ah Buk loved them because he said he had not cooked properly for nearly
30 years since becoming a widower and the all-in-one meals were among
his favourites.
He told me he liked to warm up a can of food, spread a bit of margarine
on a few slices of bread and that would be dinner. When he did cook rice
occasionally, he would freeze the leftovers so that he would not have to
turn on the stove again for days. And yes, he did have fruit quite often, he
would reassure me when I asked, concerned that there was a lack of fresh
ingredients in his diet.
By then he had moved from the block of Lorentzville flats where he first
met my grandparents to a small pensioner’s cottage inside a retirement
village, still in the east of Johannesburg. It was government subsidised and
tiny but with a scrap of garden. It was much nicer than the unforgiving
dark stairs and rentals of the Lorentzville flat.
It was this Ah Buk who was instrumental in helping my grandparents
apply for and secure a cottage each in the same retirement village. I was
always grateful for his efforts because even though the cottages were
cramped, the retirement village life was more suited to old people and it
gave both my grandparents comfort and enjoyment in the last few years
of their lives.
In this Ah Buk’s cottage there was large black and white photo of a
smiling woman with a 1960s hairdo, fixed into perfection with hairspray.
It was his wife. They had not had any children, but he never seemed short
of friends or company or activities that kept him busy and he missed his
wife dearly, that was clear.
He would tell me all of this as he served up a can of Chinese cooldrink,
one of those drinks that are tea-coloured with jellied bits in it. I did not
really like the hard chewy jellies but I knew he saved these cans of drinks
for special occasions, like one of my visits. So I would munch on the jellies
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UFRIEDA HO
that never fully dissolved and let them slide down the back of my throat
as I listened to some of his stories and we passed a few more minutes
together.
Sometimes he would talk about my grandparents. Often he would say
that it was a pity they never worked things out; often I would say I wished
the same; then we would agree that it was simply never meant to be.
62
6
In the City of Gold
My father, Ah Kee, had already clocked up a few years in another part of
the province by the time my gran and mom made their trip south to this
mountain of gold, this Gum Saan. For my father there would be no gold,
no promise of grand opportunity and also no turning back.
I never asked my father how he felt about coming out to South Africa. I
wonder what went through his mind when the decision to leave Shun Tak
for South Africa was made for him. How alone he must have felt, hiding
on the ship, as the giant vessel separated from the dock and the only home
he had known.
My Ah Ba had to make the journey to South Africa on his own. He had
never even left his village before. He had no guardian, no parent. There
was nobody to reassure him, to distract him from his fears with a joke or
a story.
It might have been a small consolation to know that he was heading
to a part of the world where two of his older brothers had moved in the
last few years. He would have hoped for a reunion; maybe he daydreamt
a little about what it might feel like to be the baby brother, to know the
security and protection of having two big brothers when he landed.
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UFRIEDA HO
But by the time my mother and father’s separate worlds started to collide
with my mom’s arrival in South Africa, my father had already grown up
very quickly. Gone was the timid teenager; gone, too, were his daydreams
and holding on to old hopes. His China, like the fickle mists that wrap the
verdant mountains of the mighty middle kingdom, was becoming more
and more of an unsure memory.
When my dad left China, he was the village orphan and he was only
a teenager, maybe seventeen, eighteen or nineteen. As with my mother, I
cannot be sure of the exact dates or ages involved. Much was lost in the
illiteracy of my dad’s village life and it was only when I grew up that I
understood how the superstitions and customs of a very different social
structure could distort things like someone’s age or birth date.
To begin with, there were very few written records from the villages
that my family came from. There was that confusion between the lunar
calendar and its Western counterpart. It meant important dates on the lunar
calendar fell on a different day each year. Even oral histories conflicted and
it just left more questions unanswered. In the villages people used to have
many children because they knew several would die, and sometimes the
young dead were ignored because there was no luxury in remembering
for too long. Because of the high infant mortality in the rural villages,
children were sometimes given nicknames such as ‘dog’ or ‘pig’; it was a
way to ward off evil spirits, my mother would tell us, when I laughed as a
child about an Uncle Dog, as his nickname stuck even years later. Calling
a child ‘dog’ would confuse the evil spirits that came in the shad
ows to
claim infant souls. Another practice that was equally baffling for me to
understand was the tradition of adding extra years to the age of someone
once they died. It was an extra year for the death, then one for the heavens
and one for the earth.
I was bewildered by these practices while growing up and even
sometimes as an adult, but I have come to realise that superstition and
seemingly bizarre practices are all completely logical, practical even.
They make sense of life’s cruelties by transcending the realm of plausible
reasoning; here they cannot be questioned. They comfort bruised hearts
when no healing will come.
For me, straddling two worlds of such difference makes me learn to lay
down differences, side by side, letting them be separated but joined like
a scar that knits together split flesh but leaves behind a dividing line that
does not fade.
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Still, it was like a sting to my heart that I had so many puzzle pieces of
my dad’s life and that so much was lost to the obscurity of superstition.
I was frustrated with my father, too, for not having answers for me, even
when I asked him. But my disappointment and sadness that the picture
refused to take shape fully was nothing compared to the actual life my
father lived in his village of Daai Dun in Shun Tak. Maybe much of it he
did not want to remember, or more likely he did not want me to inherit the
sadness by telling me too much.
My father was born the youngest of seven brothers, only three of whom
survived into adulthood. There are stories of a younger sister who was
sold to a rich family when my paternal grandparents could not afford to
feed another mouth, especially as it was a girl child. My father had a few
patchy memories of this sister he would have shared his first few years
with. If she did exist, she could possibly still be alive today.
I wondered about this aunt sometimes. Was she real or was she a
corruption of stories and memories grown murky over time? My father
spoke of this sister occasionally and my mom also relayed the stories to
us. But my father’s cousin, my Aunty Peng, who was born about six years
after my father, did not remember this girl child. I spoke to her at times
about my dad, about her memories of the village she shared with my
father. Sometimes, though, I was not sure if she was only trying to spare
me the hurt of a sad reality for our family by telling me not to worry or to
wonder about this aunt because she did not exist. I realised the economy
of emotions among many older people in my community. Sadness and
emotion were indulgent.
But if there was an aunt and she was sold off, it would have happened
before my Aunty Peng was born or when she was only a baby. It was
unlikely something so painful would have been discussed openly with her
as she was growing up.
If this aunt is alive somewhere I hope her life turned out well and that
her fate and destiny lived up to what her parents would have wished for
her. It is not easy to think about a child being sold or given away but love
in a time of survival does not look like anything I know now. Selling this
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UFRIEDA HO
child looked like a transaction, an exchange for a few sacks of rice maybe,
but I think it was an act of mercy, desperation and of love. I know by the
love my dad had for his parents, for his mom especially, that they could
not have been parents who would have given up their child easily.
As I grew up, I realised that it was also not uncommon for villagers in
China’s rural villages to have many children – seven, eight or ten would
not be unusual. Boys were favoured. A girl was a child you fed and clothed
but who left your home; a son married, you gained a daughter-in-law and
children followed.
Children in big numbers were an insurance policy, a hedging of bets that
one or two of them would live to become adults, would have a measure of
simple success in life and, in the Confucian tradition of filial piety, would
be prepared to see their parents safely into their old age and ensure them
a proper send-off into the afterlife. For my paternal grandparents, though,
when their time came, the send-off was spare, like the lean, pared-down,
hard lives they lived. Even simple final rituals should include funerary
clothes, the incense and the paper money that secures prosperity and
comfort in the afterlife, but I am not sure if my Ah Hea and Ah Mah got
to tick off the whole checklist.
It was when my father was about eight or nine that my paternal grandad
died. I do not know how the news would have arrived to the village and to
my Ah Mah’s ears. The day would have been ordinary enough as he and
his two fishermen friends from the village took their small fishing boat out
for the day, like every other day.
It was hard work and the men’s efforts were more to feed their families
than to build a business. They reserved rations for their families and then
tried to sell and barter the rest of their catches of the day to the villagers.
China was starving and it was also strangled by robbers and thugs who by
the 1930s and 1940s had overrun the country.
That morning a group of bandits chose my Ah Hea and his friends
as their target. I imagine that they had started back to shore with their
boat. It was there that the criminals, like pirates, rushed aboard and
ransacked their meagre possessions. There must have been a scuffle and
my grandfather was thrown overboard. My Ah Hea was probably already
injured as he fell into the water. He drowned in the briny depths.
His already poor widow was left even poorer and with a crushed heart
as her husband and companion died. This country of hers, ravaged by
famine, flooding, poverty and even the crime and violence of bandits, had
now claimed her husband and left her children without their father.
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The bleakness in Shun Tak county had already forced my father’s
older brothers to flee the village, to look for other opportunities. Leaving,
however, also meant having to abandon their youngest brother and their
mother. The hurt from this period of my father’s life was forever tattooed
into his heart. He did not speak too much about those days and I know
that many specific recollections of his dad he had not taken with him to
adulthood. Maybe it was a conscious choice to leave them in the past; it
is one way to make room for looking ahead. From his few stories I did
realise that what endured was his faithfulness and abundant love for his
mother. Somehow it meant that as his child I would always fall short in my
filial respects. His many sacrifices meant I would never have to be tested
the way he was.
‘We were so poor that sometimes your Ah Mah would boil smooth
stones in a gravy so that we had something to suck on as we mixed the
gravy into the little bit of rice we had,’ my father would remind us as we
tucked into a special meal or when we groaned about a dish on a dinner
dried fish, steamed and cooked up with some vegetables. It was not that
I hated fish but these fish were each no bigger than a pinky finger and
they were eaten whole. They also had huge eyes and a streak of silver that
seemed to take up most of their bodies. All the dish looked like to me was
a plate of eyeballs with flashes of silver. But my father was not trying to
mock our indulgence or ingratitude when he chided us; it was to remind
us of the capriciousness of good fortune.
In the village my father often lied to his mother about the provisions
they still had in the house. My Ah Mah had steadily grown weak and
malnourished in the years after my Ah Hea’s death, and many of the
responsibilities, including cooking the meals, fell on my father, who by
then I imagine was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old.
Even though the community would not have abandoned mother and
son, everyone had their own demons to fight, the devils of hunger at their
own desperate doors. My dad would often tell his mother he had eaten
so that she would eventually agree to take from the small rations that the
pair had. But even my father’s efforts to get his mother to eat could not
save my Ah Mah. Malnourishment and other illnesses of poverty worked
their unhurried evil hand on her, squeezing out the life in her body steadily.
Then, on a freezing night, mother and son made a small fire to try to warm
up their tiny, poorly insulated house. By the morning my grandmother was
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dead. She suffocated in her sleep; her ruined body had no will to wake to
another bleak day.
There were no photos of Ah Hea or my Ah Mah, this woman whom my
dad loved so. With no photos, I conjure up pictures of this granny in my
imagination. I try to see her smiling, a contented smile that wished patiently
on possibilities and better days. Still, I sometimes close my eyes and I see
images of a grey, shack-like homestead and a woman aged beyond her
years inside a crumpled body, a woman with a son by her side whom she
loved but could offer no future to. I wish I could free that image, release it
with a happy ending.
For my father, the severance from his mother took a commanding hold
on his young life. Sometimes it seemed like it never eased up its stranglehold,
