by Ufrieda Ho
the site was actually only a primary school, but our entire school, primary,
high and two kindergarten classes, all fitted into the new premises. There
was even room for a school cat and years later a hostel was built on the
same site.
There were only Chinese South Africans in our school but by the time I
reached high school there were a few Taiwanese children who had joined
us. They and their parents were part of the new wave of Chinese migrants
to South Africa in the late 1970s and 80s. The Taiwanese were welcomed
by the National Party government. Unlike my parents and that generation
of stowaway Chinese, these new migrants had something to offer: trade.
Sanctions had hit the country and the breakaway island of Taiwan was
still willing to do business and to bring in its investment dollars.
Even with a few Taiwanese students, by the time I finished school in
the early 1990s, we were a class of only fifteen matriculants. Small classes
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meant that we did not have the benefit of a wide subject choice for our
senior pupils and we were not part of any major school sports leagues
that had dedicated coaches and expensive kit for their top teams. Our
sports field was a grass patch for everything from potato-sack races for the
juniors, to playing makeshift baseball and every other unstructured sport
that PT teachers could concoct.
But small classes did have an unexpected benefit. Even in this tiny
Transvaal Education Department school we got more individual attention
and teachers could actually teach instead of worrying too much about
unruly behaviour. The majority of teachers were state-paid, white teachers.
They took up their posts here because they could expect well-behaved,
courteous and hard-working students, which was the behaviour drilled
into us from when we were little. Growing up I did not realise there was
something like a Chinese work ethic.
When I started work, a white colleague of mine who had gone to a
Catholic school with a few Chinese children, ribbed me when I was fussing
over some small detail: ‘What is up with you Chinese kids? If you are not
top of the class, then you must be second in class. Why don’t you just relax
a bit?’
I rolled my eyes, threw a pen at him from across the room and ignored
the stupid stereotype. When I went back to study as the only Chinese
student in the class at varsity, the anthropological data again showed up
the same thing: Asian students scored better. I was proving them right,
too, with my marks but I put it down to being an older student. But good
anthropology always points to context and of course it has nothing to do
with genes but with socialisation and following the worn path of what
those within a grouping conform to.
On some level, I fitted that picture as a child because growing up was
about discipline, respect for elders and a determination to excel or die
trying. It was not for personal achievement but for your family’s honour,
sparing your parents shame.
At school we jumped at bells, lined up touching the shoulders of the
child in front of us, to be perfectly spaced. Detention and visits to the
principal were dreaded punishments and for the most ‘wayward’ children.
What constituted wayward was pretty regular really, from wearing non-
regulation hairbands to backchatting a teacher.
We did our homework, jumped up to greet teachers and there was even
a class monitor who screamed ‘ chi lee’, in mandarin, the command that
got us scooting our chairs back and standing to attention. ‘ Cheeng lee’ the
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monitor would continue, and we would say ‘ lau shu how’, the mandarin
for good morning teacher. If it was one of the white teachers the singsong
greeting was ‘Good morning Mrs So-and-so and welcome’. The teacher
nodded, greeted and we got back to work.
I suppose it was the expectation our parents had of us. In our family,
mom reminded us frequently that the Chinese school had been set up by
the sweat, toil and even blood of the early Chinese. The community had
fought to establish a Chinese school in Johannesburg, even though they
knew they had no rights and no bargaining chips as second-class citizens.
One of the key negotiators, who travelled between Johannesburg and
Pretoria to meet with authorities regarding the Chinese school, was killed
in a car crash returning from one of these meetings. At the old Chinese
cemetery in Newclare, this man’s monolithic tombstone stands proud.
When we visited the cemetery, we were always encouraged to pay our
respects and to place a flower or two to honour his efforts.
My parents, like so many other Chinese parents, thought that the
Chinese school was the best educational option for their children. The
small school did not have the money for extras like swimming pools, a
proper science laboratory or student exchange programmes. But the extras
did not matter too much because Chinese parents placed a higher premium
on retaining some of our ‘Chineseness’ at a school that would promote
Chinese culture, language and with it the ethic and discipline that they
expected from us. We ended up with school mottos like a ‘sense of shame’,
not a more child-friendly ‘humility’ or ‘modesty’. It was hardcore, and it
was the way it was meant to be, a little like the shame my mother called
up when she said, ‘Have you forgotten the name of your father’s village?’
They wanted us to grow up knowing other Chinese children and in that
way to have some hope that we would marry within the race.
Even without the extras, I was well aware that our school was not
the worst. Only a few kilometres away from our school in Bramley were
schools in Alexandra township that did not even have the luxury of enough
school desks for everyone or glass in some of their windows.
I did not stop to question why the children were worse off than we were
and I did not ask why we did not all go to school together. Sadly, I simply
trusted that this was the way things should be.
Most of the children in the Chinese school came from families where
fathers and mothers were shopkeepers or fahfee men and women, or
both. But nobody spoke about fahfee; it remained an open secret. Many
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years after school I interviewed some friends and acquaintances for an
anthropology research essay. Many of the people I interviewed were my
peers and they said it was the first time they had ever spoken openly
about fahfee, even to other Chinese people who were not in their families.
Friends said they kept to the code of silence because it was what was
expected and it was what would protect their families from the police and
the authorities. Unlike my dad, most of them had a front that they could
use: a shop, a video business, a butchery. But they all knew that fahfee was
how food was put on the table.
I also asked them how they navigated the questions as they got older
and entered into broader society, a mixed socie
ty. How did they answer
that ordinary question, ‘What does your father do?’
Many said they invented something, some said they changed the subject,
but they still kept to the code of silence and they still bore the weight of the
stigma even if it was internally.
Stigma and silence came to be so much a part of our lives because we
existed outside of the law essentially. So we got these dual identities – one
we owned up to in our inner circle of community and family and another
that we claimed or managed when we were in the company of ‘others’.
But even if our parents were seen essentially as lawbreakers by the
government, our school was run with unquestionable discipline; mostly
the children toed the line and stayed within the boundaries of what was
expected. Even the so-called naughty children were nothing like the teenage
nightmares that we heard about.
We went along with the way of the world, we did not question, we
followed a state-approved curriculum and we accepted the picture of life
as the apartheid government presented it in its textbooks. We did not
register that it was a history that did not include the context and reality
of our lives.
The bus drivers, garden staff and kitchen staff at our school were all
black or coloured. We called the coloured man Mr Abrahams and we
treated the black staff with the respect that was expected of us but we
still called them only by their first names. No one bothered to tell us their
surnames.
As the years went by, there were a few teachers who shook things up a
bit and their lessons pulled back the blinkers a little for me. I am grateful
because we were painstakingly protected from the outside world and I did
not realise how much until long after I matriculated.
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In my early high school years an English teacher, Mrs Southey, pushed
the boundaries. Years later I realised that her covert way of teaching us
to challenge the world as it was presented to us in apartheid South Africa
must have made her hugely unpopular among those in the Chinese school
establishment who would have stuck to the model of not rocking the boat,
of keeping us insulated from the evils of the outside world for our own
good.
Still, this teacher made her point. When we were meant to follow the
government syllabus to commemorate the Great Trek anniversary, she
asked us not for an historical essay but to write a typical propaganda
speech that the Voortrekker leaders would have used to stir up the would-
be trekkers to pack up and go. When she chose a book to read it was To
Sir With Love about a black teacher in an all-white school and the lessons
of prejudice and stereotype and ultimately of humanity that came from
those pages. When we were new teenagers, all infatuated and filled with
raging hormones, she once commented: ‘The children in the schools in the
townships have the same issues that you do; they are also fighting with
their parents and worrying about their pimples and the boy that they have
a crush on.’
It was a light-bulb moment, though years later most of my classmates
from that time just shrugged about these lessons; they could barely place
this teacher, who predictably only lasted two years in the regimented rigour
of a school that could not tolerate such out-of-the-box thinking.
Mrs Southey, though she may never know it, was one of my ‘extras’; I
preferred her lessons about the wide world I knew nothing about over a
school pool or a computer centre.
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9
Johnny Depp,
Segregation and
Sequins
School was our job as children. My father went to work, my mother
looked after the home and we had to go to school. That was all. I never
knew the concept of being rewarded for doing well at school. I still cannot
understand the negotiations of parents with their children about good
behaviour or about doing well. The promises of gold stars lined up on a
chart or a car for a matric pass did not feature in our family.
We were expected to work hard, do better than we thought we could.
We did not slack off or squirm out of things that we were not particularly
fond of. We never missed school unless we were so sick that it even scared
my mom.
At best I was average at school. There were a few subjects I did better
in than others. Languages proved to be a strength; anything involving
fractions and equations terrifi ed me, as did the prospect of playing netball
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for weekly PT sessions on the grassy sportsfield. I was so bad at team
sports that even some of my own friends chose me last when they got to
choose players for their sides. Then again, I could not blame them as I
ducked the flying volleyball I was supposed to lift up over the net and my
aim for a netball or basketball hoop almost always was a miss.
Education was a priority, though, and I knew I had to keep at it. Each
term we brought home our report cards. My mom looked at them first.
The first term was usually a breeze. My mom looked at the symbols that
we had got and she might ask us about a subject where she could see we
had strayed from the first few letters of the alphabet. It was the second and
third terms that presented more problems. Now there was something to
compare with and if we had slipped through the year, then we were grilled
about our not being able to keep up our grades.
Each time we came home with our reports we also left them on the
table for our father to see when he got home. By the time he saw them,
they had already been signed by my mother. He called us over and gave
us the same pep talk as my mother had and also told us to keep working
harder.
We were all expected to make a showing at the school prize-giving
awards every year without even a word being said about it. My brother
swept the board clean a lot of the time. Kelvin achieved in the classroom,
and in almost everything else from ping-pong to debating, tennis and maths
Olympiads. He went on to be head boy and, unfathomably to us, he even
had girls interested in him. We girls did okay; Yolanda, the motor-mouth,
did well in speeches and debating but mostly we brought home certificates
and book vouchers for things like bagging the odd distinction or two, or
good progress or some other pat-on-the-back-type award. But we scraped
by and mom lined us up for pictures after these prize-giving ceremonies
with our blazers neatly cleaned especially for the awards. She took a few
frames on our Kodak camera that flipped open to make a wonky ‘L’ shape
that doubled as a handgrip as you framed your shot. Then she lined up my
brother’s trophies on the mantelpiece and put our certificates into albums.
She would say, ‘Good, well done, now you must keep it up for next year.’
Apart from Kelvin’s fancy trophies that were part of the floating silverware
for the school, we girls sometimes came home with a baby trophy, the kind
that is smaller than an egg cup, and the school was happy for
us to keep
those forever. Over the years, they filled up with the odd paper clips, a few
coins, lost screws that used to fit somewhere and a host of small things
without a home.
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Even the floating trophies had to survive their year in the Ho household.
Most times my mother bought some Brasso and Kelvin polished them up
to return them for the next year’s prize-giving. One year, though, one of
the trophies dropped on the floor and one of its ‘ears’ broke off.
‘Just tell the teacher that it broke,’ we urged Kelvin to own up as the
day for returning the cup crept up.
But he had a better idea. Inside our mess of a hardware cupboard was
one of Ah Goung’s old soldering irons and the pliable wire that is melted
to form little droplets of metal. This was Kelvin’s plan to rescue the cup.
We gathered around him under the kitchen’s fluorescent light, like there
was an operation that was going to take place, remembering a little how he
had ‘operated’ on Unisda’s and my talking bears years earlier only to leave
them mute forever. He tried to keep the metal patch as neat as possible but
the soldering iron was angry against the silver-plated cup and flared up
with a grey burn stain. The droplet of melted metal had also turned out to
be more blob than delicate droplet and oozed out untidily.
Kelvin found sandpaper, more Brasso and went to work, but it was
not going to escape notice. All we said again was, ‘Just tell the teacher,’
grateful that we were not going to have to do it.
These pieces of embossed paper and engraved silver cups did make my
parents quietly proud. They kept working precisely for these. And if we
kept working hard and achieving, they knew that they would have given
us the best chance when we became adults.
School was also the sum of our social lives. If a social activity was linked
to school or being organised by the school then we could convince our
parents to let us go along. They said no most of the times to things like
sleepovers, parties and weekends away, although as I got to high school my
parents let up a little on keeping us from all the freedoms that we thought
other children had. Yolanda and Kelvin had navigated the strange seas
of teenage life with relative calm. They did come home from the movies,
