by Ufrieda Ho
I imagined the ants were his friends; they were his most potent connection
to all things alive in a world where living was a stutter.
I quickly stopped being frightened of this uncle. We took him stacks
of paper and crayons so he could draw. He clutched the crayons that we
brought to him with his distorted fingers and he drew the ants that were
his only friends. He also sketched them on the walls of the stark room that
was more like a prison cell than a home.
My father asked him questions as we spent a few more minutes in his
room. He mumbled responses but they did not prompt any meaningful
exchange. He always seemed happy to see us but I wished he could share
more. In his muteness he faded into the space of phantom uncle for me,
another person I shared DNA with but did not have a full picture of.
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The staff were kind mostly, or at least when we visited. They left him to
draw the ants on his wall. But it was clear that their care, like the facilities,
was basic. There was a metal frame bed, a metal cupboard and a wooden
table and desk.
My mom always set out food for him while we were there because she
said she did not want staff to take the treats from him once we had left.
Yee Buk was a good eater. He enjoyed the cakes or the baos and siu mais
my father would have made sure to pick up from Chinatown before our
trip to Pretoria. We watched quietly as he ate, the crumbs falling on his
pyjamas. He was always in pyjamas even though we had bought ordinary
clothes for him through the years. I guess it was too difficult for Yee Buk
to work through buttons and zips with his weakened hands and staff were
not too concerned about spending extra energy to get the residents dressed
each day.
I remember my mother always being concerned that items we left for
our uncle would be stolen. But there was nothing really valuable. The
crayons, pens and sheets of papers held a treasure that was important only
to my uncle.
One of my favourite artists today is Dumile Feni. Before I even realised
he was famous I was drawn to the intensity of his works the very first time
I saw his drawings as a student in Pretoria. There was a struggle in the
images that he made on bedsheets and on walls. I understood the need to
draw away from the convention of a piece of paper, a kind of impatience
and urgency like a desperate way to break out. My Yee Buk’s drawings were
perhaps a way to break out of the imprisonment of a broken body and the
imprisonment of long isolation from normal, loving human contact.
My real sadness was for my father. I remember driving back after one
of those infrequent visits to the leper colony. We four children were packed
into the back of the Cortina. As the journey home dragged on in the late
afternoon, we would nod off. But I leaned forward to speak to my dad.
Good Fridays were one of the public holidays on which we visited my
uncle. I know because it was one of the few days a year that my fahfee
dad did not work and therefore one of the few times we could make the
trip out to see my uncle. I also remember that my father thought a trip
to the Voortrekker monument, planted on the capital’s horizon, was a
good place to visit as a family, but because it was a Christian holy day the
monument would always be closed.
My father talked about his brother as he drove and I inhaled all of my
father’s sadness, a heavy breath of melancholy that he could not do more
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for this brother and that their destinies had not turned out to be happier.
By the time my father arrived in South Africa, the imagined reunion with
his older brother had been dashed by fate. The leprosy ate at my father’s
heart, too, because it put up a wall between him and his brother, shutting
them out from each other forever.
Years later, when it was estimated that my uncle was around 60 or
65, or old enough, some people in the Chinese community allowed him
to be admitted into the Chinese old-age home in Malvern, recognising
that contagion was no longer a concern. The home was not far from our
house, also in the east of Johannesburg, and we were eager that he could
be moved closer to us.
Payments and paperwork were needed, which were not things that my
parents had readily for my Yee Buk. Because he had been state-managed
for so many years, my father and mother had little to do with the official
details of my Yee Buk’s life.
A man from the old-age home arrived late one evening at our house. He
pushed through our squeaky, short pedestrian gate. He was one of those
talking heads in the community and one of the old-age home’s trustees.
We made him tea and he and my dad worked out the costs of admitting
my uncle. We did not sit in on those discussions, of course, and at the time
it was not anything we would really have wanted to understand anyway.
We did know that it was serious adult talk and that it was a situation that
father, too, did not wish he was in.
I imagine my father during the meeting, running his thumb over the
tips of his fingers, tapping his foot. I know my father could not bear much
more financial pressure and here was this man reminding my father about
what he could not pay.
My father cut his fingernails close to the quick and he also bit them;
they were always pink and raw as a result of his worrying. Eventually,
when the man was convinced that he had flexed enough muscle, without
being rude beyond the bounds of what Chinese custom allowed, he left.
They had worked out a sum and agreed that the home’s charity funds,
collected from the community, would make up the shortfall along with a
pension that they could now apply for on behalf of my Yee Buk.
The home was a better space for my uncle. There were other Chinese
people there, all living under crocheted blankets in rooms that never quite
got enough fresh air. Still, they gave him a sense of kinship and maybe a
better level of attention than the perfunctory care at the leper home. We
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visited more often and it was comforting to see him surrounded by the
ordinariness of homely things like pictures on the wall and plastic flowers
gathering dust, and even the odd staff member or resident trying to engage
with him as a human being. But it was clear that too many years had
passed for him ever to be able to be integrated in a meaningful way.
Though I am sure he could understand a lot of what was going on around
him, it was as if the gates of that place of quarantine had imprisoned his
mind forever even after his body had been freed from that small cell-like
space. My Yee Buk died in 1988 but I think his life had been shattered
many, many years earlier.
The day that the news arrived about my uncle’s death my father came
home earlier than usual. The fahfee banks generally kept him away for
many hours each day. His long work days were the norm we were used to.
An unexpected early arrival was either on the rare occasion
my father felt
so ill he would head straight to bed, or because something horrible had
happened. On this day it was sad news that brought him home.
We had already heard the news about our uncle’s death from my mother
who had taken the call from the old-age home’s matron. My father arrived
home already knowing the news, or knowing that something tragic had
happened, even if my mother had not given him all the details over the
phone. I remember him gripping the back of the sofa as he retreated behind
a faraway gaze with the knowledge that his brother had died. He stood
there, just holding on, not saying a word.
The same day my uncle died was also the night of Yolanda’s graduation
from a course at hotel school. My father’s firstborn child had reached
a milestone and was entering that portal where childhood dependence
is set down and a child must pick up the mantle of adult responsibility.
She would go on to study some more after that, but this was her first
graduation and it was a night for parents to share in the achievement.
This night was my father and mother’s success, too; it marked the fruits
of their hard work and sacrifice. My broken-hearted father smiled for his
daughter, truly proud as she took her steps on to the graduation stage,
as her name was read out and she received her diploma rolled up in the
dollied-up toilet-roll inner. Yet his heart must have been aching for his
brother who had died that same day.
Yolanda remembered: ‘Dad was so excited that I was graduating but at
the same time his brother had died. I remember that evening when we had
the celebratory dinner at Litchee Inn. He tried to be happy, and I think he
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UFRIEDA HO
was. I also remember that dad wore white shoes with his blue suit that he
had bought especially for my debutantes’ ball when I was in matric, but
the reason he wore those shoes was he had come back late from sorting
out Yee Buk’s things and he could not find his dark shoes and we were
in a hurry to get to the graduation ceremony. I remember it like it was
yesterday.’
I loved how my father looked in that suit my sister remembered. It was his
only good suit – dark blue-grey with a slight shimmer to it. We children
liked to match it up with a silky greyish-coloured tie that had a feather
motif on it; my dad always obliged our childish fashion sense. There is
even a photograph where he deliberately wore the tie on the outside of a
V-neck jersey he had on under his jacket. He kept the tie we had chosen
on display. I also still have a tie we bought our dad one Father’s Day. It
had three shades, offset with a goldish-coloured thread running through it
along a diagonal. He loved it anyway even if it was probably impossible
to match with anything.
The suit was posh; it was almost like a costume to me. It was so far
from my everyday dad of casual rolled-up shirt sleeves and buttoned-
down collars. The shirts he preferred were worn until the collars started to
fray and fine ink trails from ballpoint pen marks congregated around the
pockets. And they always had a breast pocket so that he could stab in a
pen or two alongside his glasses case that clipped on securely.
He had bought that suit for Yolanda’s debutantes’ ball when she was a
matric student a few years earlier. Yolanda always loved community events
and activities and would throw herself into the commotion of things like
cake sales and selling raffle tickets. By contrast, I was not interested and
Unisda loathed the idea. Each year the young debutantes raised funds for
charity and the primary beneficiary was the Hong Ning Old Age Home,
the same home where my Yee Buk saw out his last days, so my parents had
agreed to let her get involved.
Yolanda had also managed to cajole and beg my parents to buy two
tickets to the crowning event of the debutantes’ year, the glitzy ball. For my
parents it was the most swanky thing that had happened since their own
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wedding and that was why the suit was bought and my mom had a dress
made along with Yolanda’s teenage glamorous gown. Yolanda’s gown was
an ice-white creation, an off-the-shoulder satin poof with diamant detail,
topped off with a dubious perm.
My mother’s dress was a long blue gown, simple and satiny with a
little floral beaded detail at the décolleté. I think she loved its all-shiny
frivolity.
I remember, though, that when my father got home early that night to
get ready for the big ball at the Carlton Hotel he was in one of his bad
moods. The fiery dragon’s tail was twitching and we knew the irritability
would burn and then ignite. Yolanda had been picked up by her date
earlier but Kelvin, Unisda and I were trying to dodge the sparks.
I hid under the dark wooden table in the lounge. It was a mighty table
in my child’s mind. It was always covered in a plastic, hard-wearing
tablecloth but its true magic showed when the tablecloth came off and
it was pulled on either side to reveal a centre piece that flipped out to
accommodate extra people. The table still dominates in my mother’s home
today and I am always delighted when it is unfolded to its maximum and
its neat wooden bolts are pushed into place to create a perfect seam for the
joined sections of wood.
Children know the comfort of small dark spaces like climbing on top of
a stack of clothes in a wardrobe, listening to the world grow muffled and
dark behind a closed door. In wardrobes the darkness would be taken over
by the faint smell of mothballs from the small drawstring bags filled with
the ice-white balls that my mom tied to the clothes rails.
The hiding place under the table, with its tucked-in chairs, was a forest
full of forgiving dark places to creep away and not be found. On the night
of the debutantes’ ball, it was a perfect place to wait for my dad to cool off
long enough to leave for their evening.
My parents must have felt a little out of place in that posh Carlton
Hotel ballroom, but they did not care too much about airs and graces,
even other people’s. Once my father’s irritation dissipated, it would have
been a night for enjoying the food – a Chinese menu, of course, outsourced
catering as always to a reputable Chinese restaurant to please the fussy
palates of Chinese guests. Mom and dad would have caught up with a few
friends and acquaintances who would have also been at the glitzy function
and they would have taken some delight in my sister’s moment to shine.
Someone would have commented on my mom’s dress and she would have
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UFRIEDA HO
said: ‘Oh, it is just something simple; Yolanda insisted I have it made.’ But
she would have loved this bespoke creation, all silky and shimmery and
garnering compliments.
Chinese families traditionally are not big on demonstrative shows of
affection. There would be no hugs and kisses for my sister, no outwardly
saying to her: ‘We love you and we are proud of you.’ The love would
be shown by their
presence, in their smiles for her as she showed off her
practised waltz across the ballroom floor.
In some way this was a night for my parents to taste the city of gold
at last. Here in the swish ballroom of one of the city’s top hotels, with its
bow-tied waiters, chandeliers and mirrored everything, they could almost
believe that once there were gold coins scattered in the streets of the city.
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7
Of Phoenixes and
Dragons
Marriage is considered the most auspicious of events for Chinese families.
It is rivalled only by the birth of a fi rst-born boy child or maybe the 80th
birthday of a man who has accumulated wealth, success and a brood of
children and grandchildren he can be proud of.
Every parent’s dream is to see their child succeed and that success is tied
up with marriage and procreation. It was no different for my mother after
she had been in South Africa for a year or two. She was nearing 25 when
my grandparents felt she should fi nd a husband who could take care of her
and make a good life for her.
For my mother, like many women of her generation, the prospect of
marriage came as the natural order of things and the validation of being a
fully fl edged grown-up. Marriage and a family is a guarantee of a new kind
of social capital. It was like her dead brother moving up the rung of the
family altar after joining with his own ghost bride. In my parents’ day, many
marriages were still unions set up by a mooi yan bor. This older woman
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UFRIEDA HO
was an unofficial matchmaker and go-between for families looking to be
joined by marriage. Such busybody aunties would find prospective suitors
and remind mothers that their daughters were not getting younger. This
was how many introductions were made in those days. It was how many
people found their birth charts drawn up by the stars and the seasons and
elements of the Earth being scrutinised along with their family lineages so
that a good match could be guaranteed.
My Ah Goung and Ah Por had heard from the small web of Chinese,
including the odd nosey mooi yan bors, about my father. They would have
heard that he had no family members in South Africa and was a fahfee
man, a gambler, and that he was at least a decade older than my mother,
