by Ufrieda Ho
under stacks of other things I was hoarding. My stash of Christmas cards
grew with letters from the pen pals I picked up in Botswana and the United
Kingdom, a girl in Cape Town and a dear, dear friend who left our school
in Standard Three. Candy was the only white child in our school where
her mom was the English teacher for the seniors. But when her mom left
her teaching post at the Chinese school, Candy left, too. It was the end
of Standard Three, we were nine years old and in our group of four, with
my friends Pamela and Christmas, we gave ourselves code names – Small
Mouse, Medium Mouse, Tall Mouse and Big Mouse. Candy was Big
Mouse, not because she was big, but even with Pamela as Tall Mouse,
Candy still towered over us, her short-by-comparison Chinese friends.
When Candy left the school, she ended up being a pen pal even though she
lived in the same city we did.
In my diary I would write about the one or two boys I thought I was
in love with. I would muse over their passing comments or some other
fantasy I could nurture in my head, and in my diary.
On the lined pages I raged against my mother for not understanding me.
I wished her dead, then I would beg for forgiveness, then wish that I were
dead. My parents were just not cool enough, they did not understand, they
were old-fashioned and so strict about everything.
In our garage there was an array of second-hand cars over the years.
There was a tank of a BMW, so old it still had a speedometer with a
needle that ran from west to east and headlights the size of footballs. I was
embarrassed by the monster, especially when it had to be fired up to chase
down the school bus. On days that we missed the school bus my mom,
and sometimes my dad, would drive from stop to stop to try to catch up
with it as it left the eastern suburbs along Louis Botha Avenue to Bramley
where the Chinese school was. It was teenage humiliation personified for
us. Dad would manoeuvre to cut off the bus, hooting and waving. When
the driver saw him, or maybe his pyjamas with their fleur-de-lys patterns
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or some other repeated logo across the cotton two-piece, he would stop.
Of course, by then everyone would be peering out the window and the old
BMW would be heaving as it came to an exhausted idle and we made our
shuffled exits.
For many years there was also our much-loved blue Mini that my father
bought for my mother a few years after she finally learnt to drive. The
little car had two doors and back windows that only pushed open a few
centimetres. It was the car we would rush to, knowing it meant my mom
had arrived to fetch us from the bus stop when it rained. Highveld storms
saved us from the weekday uphill walk home. From the school bus we
would make a dash for the tiny car, pull its passenger seat up and over and
tumble into the car that is called ‘mini’ for a reason. Unisda, Kelvin and I
took the back seat, Yolanda as the eldest got the front seat. The Mini only
had one windscreen wiper, the windscreen was so small. I loved that little
car that took us everywhere while we were growing up.
The Mini also took us to a roadhouse at the edge of Hillbrow or to the
local Wimpy when we were due a treat, or when my mom decided to splash
out. Mom was a dedicated mother, cooking up noodles on birthdays and
turning slabs of pork into slow-roasted crackling and glories of fat and
flesh. She also simmered clear soups for clarifying some or other ailment
and seeped bitter teas to lower our fire or breath, to har hei, when we
were ill, like those chrysanthemum teas. It was all about tweaking the
balance and equilibrium for a healthy body. But my mom also liked treats
sometimes, even the Western ones.
So every now and again we had the enchantment of something like the
roadhouse’s banana split. A strange little bowl, like a glass nest, would
hold scoops of ice cream wedged between the fruit as chocolate sauce
made marbled swirls across the glass. Toasted sandwiches with cheese
turned into dripping goo would also be on our roadhouse menu of Western
food.
In our house we also acquired a quintessentially Western invention – a
plastic Christmas tree. We anointed the green spikes each year with tinsel,
miniature reindeer and smiling snowmen. Every year my mother would
buy each of us a new decoration. One of my favourites was a little white
mouse with big eyes, a red cape and a plastic violin. Even as an adult I
look for the little mouse each Christmas and place him on his bit of fake
evergreen among the tinsel that has survived from when we were children.
We learnt to sing Christmas carols and strung Christmas cards across our
mantelpiece.
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But we were a home that also prepared for Chinese new year with a
spring clean; the pantry was restocked, the incense at the altars was relit
and dishes were cooked that had lucky-sounding names. Dishes like faat
choi, the fine, black strands of seaweed whose name is meant to bring
good luck. Some of the dishes included prawns fried in chilli and garlic.
Prawns were cooked because they are called har in Chinese, for joy and
laughter, as in ha ha, hee hee.
There was also the celebration of the moon festival and of the mid-
autumn harvest that dominates the lunar calendar, edged into second
place only by new year’s. We ate the rich, sweet moon cakes heavy with
their crumbling dense pastry, embossed with writing and their lotus-paste
fillings with a preserved, slightly salted egg yolk at its centre to represent
the celestial orb as it grew heavy and full, a reminder to give thanks for
the autumnal bounty. Even though we were so far flung south, we stayed
linked to these festivals and commemorations of another hemisphere’s
seasons and calendars. Our remembrances were made with dumplings
wrapped in banana leaves for a sacrificed sage, a hero drawn from a distant
history of emperors and dynasties. We also had a Confucius Day at school,
meant to show respect for the wise teacher and those who followed in his
footsteps. It was Confucius’s teachings that were hallowed, but the day
was also supposed to be about showing respect for elders, teachers and
life’s lessons.
On this day, which we celebrated at the end of every September, some
rich man on the PTA would pass out lei see, the red lucky packets, to all the
schoolchildren. We all got R1 each from this man to splurge on Fizzy Bites
sweets that went for 10 cents a roll or a packet of crisps for 40 cents.
We loved the lei see but as the saying goes ‘there’s no free lunch’. Our
Confucius Day lei see came with the price of having to sit through a special
assembly that included the PTA honcho making a very long speech.
As he walked to the podium to deliver his speech in Chinese, followed by a
few words in shaky English, the older children would set their stopwatches.
Peep-peep, peep-peep the watches would fire off in synchronicity, setting
off snickers in the lofty school hall that was overseen by a picture of
Chiang
Kai-shek in the front and Sun Yat Sen in the back. First came the muffled
laughs, then the vicious glares from the teachers who could not pinpoint
the culprits among the cross-legged mass seated on the floor.
These worlds blended easily for us as children – moon cakes next to the
custard slices with French names and spongy cakes representing a tower in
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Portugal next to steamed Chinese baos. The Portuguese cakes came from
a bakery that my father liked to shop at in Bertrams where there was a big
Portuguese community. It was also the merging of the world of the lei see
packets in bright red with gold writing along with Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer at Christmas and chocolate Easter bunnies. We were told these
were hollow to remember the empty tomb of a resurrected Jesus Christ;
we thought it was rude that the manufacturers had cheated us out of all
the chocolate that could have been in the middle.
To be one of four siblings was a good number as we grew up. We were like
a readymade cricket team, Ho-style. We made up our own rules; if you hit
the ball on to the roof it was a four, if you hit it into the veggie patch it was
a six. Six because by the time you had lifted the spinach plants searching
for the tennis ball or crunched through the vines that spread out with
winter melon buds, the batsman would have run up a victory.
There were enough of us to play hide-and-seek or whatever made-up
games we concocted. We played our version of fun Olympics; we scooped
water from one section of the yard with a lunchbox or old tea tin and
carried it to the other end and then we saw who had managed to spill the
least. Kelvin built makeshift ramps for us to fly our bikes over. We had
two bikes between the four of us. And we balanced across beams that
we would set up between two chairs to get crowned the Ho champion of
whatever school holiday.
Before we had the backyard of the Millbourn Road house, we used the
stoep of the Bertrams house to play games of balancing on the rounded
edge that marked the end of the front passage and the start of the tiny split
garden. We would distract each other to see who would topple first. We
also dangled yo-yos here and Unisda and I tried to mimic Kelvin’s tricks
like ‘walking the dog’ or ‘around the world’, and we sent tops spinning
across the fine cracks that lined the red floor. The stoep was polished a
shiny red after years and years of Cobra polish filled up old cracks that
pooled with water when it rained.
This stoep was also where my mother’s love for plants flourished in
a mish-mash of old cans, faded biscuit tins and plastic pots balanced on
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chipped teacup saucers and lids of old lunchboxes. This place was home
to flowers sprouted from shared clippings, nicked nodes from neighbours’
gardens and the feisty propagation of spring onions that needed little more
than a bit of soil to grow. Many Chinese also believe that a good dousing
of human urine collected in night buckets makes the spring onions grow
thicker and stronger. We were not children of the village, and even though
my mom persists with the practice to this day, it grossed us out and we
always pulled up our faces in the determined, dramatic way that children
do so well.
The urine sprinkled on the ground around the spring onions, like the
miscellany of mismatched pots used for her plants, was characteristic of
my mother – practical and intuitive rather than scientific and determined.
She was sensible and frugal and her unsentimentality was hard-boiled,
impenetrable.
My school pinafore dangled way below my knees as I started Grade
One as a five-year-old with the 1970s coming to an end. Mom said it was
so I could grow into the pinafore and be spared the unsightly telltale signs
of a released hem that would divide the faded fabric from the released hems
of virgin pinafore. I remained convinced that I looked like a geek kid with
no knees and it did not help that my school blazer was Yolanda’s hand-
me-down or that my home-done haircut left me with an uneven fringe. In
primary school I was teased by a few girls who told me only boys wore
trousers when mom decided it was ridiculous to keep replacing ripped
stockings for a child over the entire winter season. She said I would wear
trousers – they were warmer anyway, she would say with brisk dismissal
as I began to protest.
I also survived hand-knitted jumpers, when everyone else has the finely
machine-knitted ones bought in the uniform Mecca of Burgers Brothers in
Mayfair. This was where all schoolchildren in the province went to buy
their school uniforms. When we did have to buy something that my mom
could not make, we undertook an annual trip to the store in the days
before the new school term. We children would run through the racks and
racks of school uniforms, poking fun at some schools’ regulation hats and
coveting the pink-tasselled sashes of others.
The shop attendant folded the blazers and uniforms in brown paper
before slipping them into plastic bags. Mom or dad counted a wad of
notes and left with not much change. I knew how much it dented my
parents’ budget, but there was also delight knowing that I had my own
new blazer.
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I even made it through the carefully Tippexed-out mistakes on my book
labels as my mother wrapped our books and put labels on the top right-
hand corners at the beginning of each new year. Even as I begged her to
replace the labels, she said something like: ‘It is a waste of a label and no
one will notice.’ I would sulk and be cross that she had made the mistake in
the first place. But how could her neat, clear script of the English language
make allowances for what was little more than her making outlines of
long and odd words – like ‘Comprehension’ or ‘Science’.
My mother was the hands-on parent. She attended PTA meetings and my
father went to work. My parents did not care too much about getting
involved at school the way some parents did, like ‘Mr Red Lucky Packet’,
who was out to impress others and smooth the way for his children. But
my mother always did her bit. She made us cakes for fund-raising and she
came to the library days when parents were asked to buy extra books to
bolster the shelves of books and encyclopaedias.
After one of these events the media centre teacher told me she was
truly pleased my mother had bought a set of educational finger puppets.
Parents overlooked the sewn-up felt faces, choosing something with spines
and small print over and over again. At first I was a little embarrassed that
everybody else’s parents went for the safe option of no-nonsense educational
literature. But as it sank in, I realised my mother, in her own way, always
knew there were more ways to learn than just through books.
It was my mom who woke us up in time for school and packed our
lunches. She cooked dinner and ate our meals with us in the hours before
my father finally returned home. She was the one who ticked off the list of
erasers, coloured pens and crayons that we needed to be educated in this
Western world.
Polishing everyone’s school shoes was my task each week and I
sometimes had to be nagged to get around to it. But I developed my own
method of just how much polish to apply, how long to wait for the waxy
goodness to work its magic as it baked in the sun and how to work the
polishing strokes quickly enough to get a sparkly shine afterwards.
Mom shouted at us when we forgot to offload our lunchboxes in the
kitchen sink on a Friday afternoon. Left in our schoolbags until Sunday
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night, the lunchboxes would grow wild and stinky, full of strange moulds
and furry spores that she would have to clean out.
We lost our lunchboxes often and it forced mom to go to the extreme
of etching our names into the boxes, in Chinese and English, with a sharp
knife. While other children had printed labels on their jerseys and gym
shorts, my mother painstakingly sewed our names on to the tags with her
neat stitching.
We attended the Chinese school in Johannesburg. It started off in
End Street in Doornfontein, with the motorway arching overhead like a
constant concrete cloud. It was a spooky, grey building without a blade
of grass anywhere. I started nursery school and Grade One at this school,
until the community secured better premises in Bramley.
The community was so small that when I started Grade One I had
just seven classmates. We learnt the English alphabet with its vowels,
consonants and capital letters, as well as that each has a baby letter, too.
We also tested out our sharpened HB pencils on the sequenced strokes
that made up our Chinese names. Chinese names start with the surnames
first, followed usually by two other characters that complete most Chinese
names. Interestingly, the first thing I ever published was written in Chinese
and submitted to the local Chinese newspaper. It was a simple piece I
wrote in high school that started with ‘My name is . . .’ and included who
my parents were, my hobbies and the pets I loved.
The school had moved to its Bramley Park location by the time I started
Grade Two. I found out a few years later that the school that used to be at
