Paper Sons and Daughters
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just reappeared in new wicked guises to add up to more pain.
I never got to meet my paternal grandfather or grandmother. I will
never know if I have my granny’s eyes, feet like grandad’s, if something
passed through that gene code to me. They were people who contributed
to my DNA but were phantoms. For my father, though, those phantoms
were like hauntings of love lost.
My father became the village orphan. Even though he had some extended
family members who did not desert him, he was alone. He was not a small
child any more but a teenager who could be every bit a frightened child.
My Aunty Peng remembered spending time with my father in the small
homestead almost every day. She was younger but he would plead with her
sometimes to stay longer even when her own chores waited and her own
parents called her home at sunset.
‘I was much younger than your father, but I knew he was frightened to
be there all by himself after your Ah Mah died. Of course he was scared,
who would not be?’ she told me years later, standing inside her provisions
store in Brixton, shaking her head, remembering those grim days in the
village. She helped my father to light a fire in the homestead, sometimes
got some food cooking, or brought some from her family’s own dinner
and then ran off home before she was missed by her parents.
The misery of village life rolled on from baking summers to unforgiving
winters for my father those first years after my Ah Mah’s death. And it
would lead to my dad’s death. At least, that was what the villagers thought
when they found my father’s lifeless body one day. Maybe he had passed
out, exhausted and hungry, maybe he had become unconscious from
illness, I am not sure and neither was my father. But unable to revive
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him in the number of unsophisticated ways of the village, the family and
the villagers declared my father dead. Without his own family present,
his body was prepared for a simple, quick burial with hardly any of the
important rituals of final rites and the small assurances that are meant to
ease that passage into the afterlife. His limp body was laid on a makeshift
stretcher and carried to the outskirts of the village, where it would be
buried in a shallow ditch. But as they laid down the stretcher, ready to roll
him into the dug-out trench that would make do for a grave, my father
spluttered to life in an astonished gasp.
This strange resurrection earned him the lifelong nickname Gwei Kee
(Ghost Kee) because he had literally come back to life from the realm of
the dead.
Indeed, my father floated through those days like a ghost, not really
present, with no rest and nowhere to feel grounded either. As he reached
his late teens, it was decided by his uncles and other village elders that it
would be best if my dad was sent to Africa. People from all over Southern
China had for some time been leaving for destinations that had boomed
out of gold rushes across the world. The village uncles knew that two of
my dad’s brothers had gone in the direction of the place called Naam Fey;
that place south of Canton and across the Indian Ocean where there were
rumours of prosperity and opportunity.
The villagers and extended family raised enough money for only one
person to make the journey so my father travelled on his own. It required
connections, organising papers and then paying for the passage across
the ocean. Initially the elders thought that my father’s older relative,
a cousin, my See Buk (fourth uncle), would make the voyage first. But
during the weeks that the decisions were being made he had shorn his
hair unexpectedly. According to my mom and dad’s stories it was because
he had lost a wager and had shaved off his hair. The elders could not risk
this shaven head. They figured that my See Buk would stand out like a
sore thumb when he slipped into South African society. He would surely
be caught and deported, which would be a waste of their resources and
efforts to get someone from the village out to a possibly better life. So that
Indian Ocean crossing would be made by my father.
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Two battered suitcases with scuffed metal studs and thick leather buckles
were all that my father arrived with in South Africa. I imagine that there
were a few changes of clothes with something warm and something a little
more ‘decent’, some basics of soap and a comb to tame an unruly strand
of hair. That was all. There were no little mementos, no photographs and
no extra bits of money hidden inside a sock.
‘Somebody distracted me when we were smuggled off the docks and
when I turned to look one of my suitcases was stolen.’ It was my father’s
mocking welcome to South Africa. Sometimes he told us the story when
he had reason to haul down the surviving suitcase from atop the wardrobe
in my parents’ bedroom.
It was used to store other things, like winter coats, by the time we were
growing up. I would finger the thick straps on that leather case, soft on the
underside where so long ago it had joined with a buckle to hold together
all that my father brought from his old life. Occasionally then my father
would talk a little about those first days after he arrived and when he had
made the journey up to the old Transvaal.
One of the stories he told summed up perhaps the hardest part of my
dad’s early struggle in South Africa: other people’s malice and viciousness
where it was least expected. My father had started a small job somewhere,
I think it was to help in a shop. It was unlikely that my father was expected
to serve customers without an even basic knowledge of English or any
of the local languages. His job was probably to be a general dogsbody,
a coolie, cleaning the premises, doing some heavy lifting, packing and
stacking and whatever else the owner might have needed from him.
Ah Ba remembered that one evening as the sun set he noticed that the
shop became lit in the soft orange glow of an electric light. My dad did
not have the luxury of electric lights back in his village and he was a little
taken aback that even the small shop had the lavishness of electric lights.
He carried on with the rest of his tasks, sweeping up the floors and tidying
up for the next day’s business. There was another employee, also a Chinese
man, and my dad remembered that when he had finished up for the day
he asked the man how to switch off the electric light in a storeroom. My
father did not know that a switch on the wall would turn off the light.
‘That old bastard told me that I would have to find a way to climb up
and unscrew the light bulb and he warned me not to leave the light on
before I left for the day. I spent what seemed like hours trying to stack
up chairs high enough to reach the light fitting. And still it did not work.
It was only after a long time had passed as I was moving things around
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trying to get higher and higher to reach the light bulb that I even thought
and then I realised what a cruel trick that man had played on me.’
It would not end with small cruelties and malice meted out by individuals,
though. I am sure my parents expected hardship and discrimination even
after their individual journeys here, but in Africa their skin colour would
be the marker for their torment carried out by a system that was in statute
books. It was suffering the humiliation of being ushered to the back of
buses, denied entry into cinemas and restaurants, or in the last years of
apartheid being able to work and live in whites-only suburbs but only with
demeaning concessionary approvals, which was maybe the worst insult of
all.
I have a document my father carried with him for years to keep him
from being thrown off trains by the authorities. The A4 document is
stamped by the Chinese consulate and is dated 1966. It declares my father
a ‘gentleman of good standing’. Someone else’s arbitrary signature and a
random stamp were a ruling on my father’s character that was meant to
protect him. My father folded that piece of paper into a neat rectangle and
carried it in his breast pocket every day. The folds on that worn piece of
paper were so deeply set they were like the mark left on a dog’s neck when
its too-tight collar is removed.
Two of my dad’s brothers had headed south in the years before my dad
made the same journey. The second-born brother, whom we called Yee
Buk, Second Uncle, had come to South Africa. The sixth-born brother,
Lok Buk (Sixth Brother), was in the old Lourenço Marques (now Maputo)
in Mozambique. In Chinese you call elders by the place they have in
the family hierarchy rather than by their names. So it is not Uncle Bob,
but Second Uncle, Third Uncle, and so on. There is also no distinction
in the term of address for uncles and aunts who are your parents’ own
brothers and sisters or their cousins. There are, however, different terms
for uncles and aunts on the paternal or maternal sides of the family and
also differences if they are older or younger than one’s parents.
Fortunes for my Lok Buk were better than for Yee Buk. Lok Buk ended
up spending almost a decade of his life in Lourenço Marques, setting up a
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small business. He had left behind a wife, a young son and a daughter back
in China and the aim, as always, was to work and raise enough money to
return to them. But the years wore on and he stayed in Mozambique.
There was a part of my uncle’s life that he kept hidden from his family
back in China. He had set up a second life with a Mozambican woman
and it was believed he had two children, daughters, with this woman. It is
still a part of our family history that is told in whispers.
Some years later my uncle did return to China and he had one more
daughter. The anti-Portuguese and anti-colonial sentiment in the aftermath
of the coup d’état was also the start of a civil war in Mozambique that
would last nearly two decades. As that began my uncle knew that his time
in Africa had run its course and the time to go back to his family in China
had come.
As the story goes, my Lok Buk prepared a substantial amount of money
for his Mozambican family and handed the chunky envelope to someone
with strict instructions only to deliver it once he was well on his way back
to China. He did not want the goodbyes, the tears, the explanations that
would never be enough. He never set foot in Africa again.
My uncle ended up settling in Macau, once a Portuguese colony in
China. He still lives there today, playing mah juk – the gambling game of
marked tiles – on the streets with the other old Chinese men. He visits my
aunt sometimes in a home for the frail and senile, where, since dementia
finally knocked all recognition of the familiar from her, the family decided
to have her admitted. He walks to the market to buy the ingredients for his
evening meal, which can be Chinese sprouts and cabbage with a charred
Portuguese natas egg tart for afters. Then he takes the many flights of
narrow stairs back to the small flat that he has called home for decades.
When I visited Macau some years back, before it was returned to the
Chinese officially, it was a place that had the unusual blend of being part-
Portuguese, part-Chinese. It had European architecture of old cathedrals
and the blue and white tiled mosaics reminiscent of a Portuguese coloniser,
but at the same time it was thoroughly Chinese with the altars for
deities taking prominent positions inside every store, signage in Chinese
throughout the city and the meals cooked up with bok choi and the natas
that have become Chinese-styled and are called simply daan taarts (egg
tarts).
Macau is now my ageing uncle’s life. But he was an African once and
I wonder if he ever thinks back to the humid hot air of Maputo. Does
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he wonder about the children he fathered and the woman whose bed he
shared a long time ago?
I could not read anything in the lined face that welcomed me into his
home the first time I met this uncle. Even though we had photos of him I
had to hold back tears the first time I met this man who looked so much
like my father. We spent a short time together during my visit to Macau.
Although I was immediately welcomed as family with none of the politeness
reserved for outsiders, we never moved beyond the first conversations of
getting to know each other. We never got to leapfrog to details about his
life in Africa and to his memories of Africa, in a time before I was born.
My Yee Buk made a similar journey to Africa years before my father.
Unlike my Lok Buk, he did not stop over in Mozambique but made the
journey further south to reach South Africa. I imagine this was the brother
my father maybe hoped to be reunited with during the long nights on the
ship on which he was a stowaway. My dad would have known that it was
the elder of his two brothers, my Yee Buk, who was in South Africa, while
my Lok Buk was in Mozambique.
My Yee Buk’s journey to South Africa happened close to ten years
before my father’s own journey, probably in the 1940s. But he was denied
a South African dream by cruel fate. He contracted leprosy a few years
after his arrival. Leprosy’s unforgiving bacteria spreads where poor living
conditions force people to live so close to each other that mucous and
spit become weapons of tragedy. Weak immune systems make prime
targets of men like my Yee Buk; his body was not strong enough to resist
the onslaught. My uncle was not treated quickly enough, even though
antibiotics were all it would have taken to cure him. Untreated, the disease
fed on his nerves and his muscles, causing deformity and disfigurement.
My Yee Buk was sent to a leprosy camp for non-whites somewhere outside
Pretoria.
Years later, when I tried to find out more about the facility, I discovered
that there were plans to change this long-abandoned site into a touris
m
destination that would boast a mall and a casino. If the plans ever got off
the ground maybe the emptiness of malls and casinos would be a fitting
epitaph for the leper colony.
I cannot fully make peace with the doomed destiny of Yee Buk’s life.
He arrived here as a poor migrant, with all its attendant difficulties of
struggling to make a living as an outsider, then was afflicted by a disease
that most people survive, and then he had to face being rejected by the
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community. In those days he would have been so scared and so alone.
He was still a young man yet his body as he knew it was vanishing away
painfully and he could no longer connect his mind and his body and he
had no one to turn to for any help, support or comfort.
The authorities realised that he could not be deported in his state, so he
was banished to the leper colony outside the capital city, an exile to a hell
of the living dead.
I did get to meet this uncle when I was a child. I remember the simple
room he was confined to in the leper colony. He was a shadow of a man by
then. Leprosy had eroded his body, though he had not been contagious for
many years. Initially I was afraid of his skeletal body and his hands that
looked like they had been eaten away to only awkward, shaky knuckles.
He could not speak properly any more, only mumble and groan, shaking
his head sometimes and making noises. I supposed it was severe nerve
damage. But I realised, too, that his speech would have been affected as
he had no one to communicate with as the only Chinese leper. Like my
grandfather thrown into prison, my Yee Buk was isolated by his skin colour
and I sensed this even as a child. He was also detached from the community
that should have been his own. The alienation from the community had
destroyed him before the contagion had exhausted itself.
During visits my mother spoke gently to him as my dad stood by,
running his thumb along his fingers, as he always did when he was agitated
or thinking deeply about something, hurting that he could not engage with
his brother. My mother’s tone was empathetic but affected in that way you
speak to someone when you can no longer have a two-way conversation.
Yee Buk loved to draw and he loved to feed the ants in his room. As a child