by Ufrieda Ho
they did not make phone calls from jail or end up being in rehab, and this
paved the way for Unisda and me. But we still grew up not really asking to
go out much. We knew our parents did not approve and we took it mostly
as just the way things were done in our house.
109
UFRIEDA HO
Birthdays were not about invites, jumping castles and party packs. Our
birthdays were spent with our family as Ah Goung and Por Por came by
either on the weekend before or after our birthday. Sometimes we got to
take a cake or two to class to share with our homeroom teacher and our
classmates on our actual birthday.
To celebrate, my mother bought a cake and set it up with candles
and then she fried up a tray or two of noodles. She finally sliced cabbage
and carrots with strips of chicken or pork cooked quickly in a hot wok
fragranced with a knob of ginger and crushed cloves of garlic. These
became the accompaniment to the noodles. Sometimes it was a simpler
version of the noodles with spring onions, ginger and garlic, just as good
to eat. Noodles at birthdays are a must; they signify long life in Chinese
symbolism. Sometimes as a treat she hauled out the mini-rotisserie oven
that my dad had given her. She skewered in a chicken dunked in her own
marinade and set the bird into the TV-like oven to cook slowly. The chicken
completed each revolution with a plonk and wobble on the uncertain
rotisserie rods until it crisped up into golden deliciousness.
Before eating, the food and cake were arranged on a tray and taken
to the various altars in the house. One for my ancestors, the joe sien, and
the other for the gods of the home, placed at the entrance of the house.
My mother lit candles and incense at the altars to invite the ancestors to
the celebrations. She whispered a few words over the food, a blessing and
a prayer, and then clasped her hands together. Then she lifted the tray to
offer the food and poured a bit of the tea and sometimes whisky on to the
floor or the side of the tray. This symbolised sharing with the ancestors.
The birthday girl or boy did the same and we would mimic the ritual and
think a little about our granny and grandad whom we never got to meet.
Only then would we sing happy birthday, in English, around our feast,
bringing out the old Kodak to snap a few shots and then cut the cake and
make a wish in the Western way of blowing out candles to make a secret
dream come true.
If we were not celebrating over a weekend, it would likely be something
after school. We would save a slice of cake and some noodles for my dad,
who arrived home much later. If it was a weekend he would try to come
home early, or at least take a few hours to be home to cut the cake with
us. But if he came home after the cake cutting we would flood him with
the stories of our family party as he sat down at the dinner table. I would
take him my gift of a teddy bear or doll or dress to show him my newest
110
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
object of delight and to thank him, even though I knew my mother chose
and bought our presents. He would put a forkful or two of cake in his
mouth and indulge my excited stories. Like my mom, he was not big on
sweet stuff, but he ate some of my birthday cake and fussed a little over my
present as I twisted the doll’s leg to show him what it could do or kissed
my new teddy, showering it with the love that is set aside especially for
new toys.
The last day of school was always a highlight. To begin with, it was a
civvies day. For weeks we would plan what we were going to wear on
that last day when we could leave our school uniforms on their hangers at
home. That top with that skirt, what chunky earrings we could team up
with our shoes or what cardigans would be fashionably stylish enough to
drape over our shoulders. My mother hated us tying jerseys around our
waists, she said it looked tacky and cheap.
The last day of school was also about sanding off the graffiti from
our tables, giving our classrooms the big once-over, doing the windows,
dusting shelves and polishing them up for the new year and cleaning the
school grounds completely. We came to school with dust rags and Mr Min
wood polish and went aerosol wild. We lined up for a final assembly and
then we were off with screaming and clapping as the last bell of the year
sounded and we went to have the big outing of the year.
Just about everybody in the school went to the movies in the old Ster
Kinekor cinema in the centre of town. I went with my group of friends and
we wandered through the Carlton Centre a little, looked around a shop or
two before having a burger and milkshake at a Wimpy and then crowning
off our day with a movie. The other favourite was to go ice skating at the
Carlton ice rink. We would re-familiarise ourselves with being on the ice
after a year’s absence, then we would go round and round as lights flashed
across the frozen arena and songs by Aha and Depeche Mode filled the
cooled space.
By the late 1980s, Chinese children were allowed access to these
public places so the world seemed fine to me. There were Slush Puppies
to slurp and songs from Erasure and OMD to hum along to. The world
111
UFRIEDA HO
of apartheid seemed far away. We knew that the world was split between
black and white. We Chinese were the small wedge that fitted somewhere
in-between, but even this striated racial madness seemed to be the
ordinary order of things. I did not know that we were considered second-
class citizens, or more accurately, that we were in no-man’s-land for the
apartheid government – too white to be black, but too black to be white.
I trusted completely that the adults knew what they were doing. It was
my job to bring home a good improvement certificate at the very least and
not to smoke or get pregnant before I could drive. Their job as the grown-
ups was to keep the world in the serene balance of my childhood fantasy.
Our Afrikaans teacher, a wise, no-nonsense woman whom you respected
and feared simultaneously, had been with the school for decades. One of
her earlier memories with the school was being asked to leave a theatre
when as a white woman she had taken a group of senior pupils from our
Chinese school to watch a play.
When she told the story I was scared that it could happen to us, even
though the 1990s were already on the horizon. My teenage self was
mortified at the idea of how embarrassing it would be if we had to be
humiliated by being turned away from a play or festival event. I imagined
the white children who would be lined up with their tickets, pointing and
snickering at us as we had to make our way back to a bus.
That never happened to us but racial cleavages were still keeping the
country apart and the 1980s were nervous days. At school, the safety drills
of the mid-1980s were part of the anxious everyday. Every few months the
siren went off and a crackling message came through the school intercom
telling us to observe the siren as a drill. During these dril
ls we were
supposed to discern whether it was for a fire, for stones and bombs being
thrown through the windows, or if it was a hurricane about to hit us. We
were to leave the windows open or closed, depending on the drill. Then
we had to push our desks against the walls and take cover under them. We
were also supposed to have taken careful notice of posters of mines and
bombs that were put up on noticeboards throughout the school. If we were
good children we would have examined carefully the 3-D posters of limpet
mines and other explosives and been on the lookout for these strange
objects throughout the school. They looked frightening enough, but I
did not appreciate their capacity for evil. I was too young to understand
apartheid and all its devices of destruction. I was more concerned about
the possibility of a hurricane in Bramley Park.
112
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Still, we all did the drills; we took them seriously and naively anticipated
the day we would get to see if pushing our desks against the walls and
crawling under them did stop flying Molotov cocktails.
At the same time, our parents made us cautious of dustbins in town; it
was about the only inkling I had that things were not exactly as they should
be. The Zibi bins, named after a no-litter campaign mascot at the time,
were dangerous, we were warned. Each dustbin was a possible receptacle
for a bomb, my mother reminded us, as we returned a Nancy Drew
or Tintin book to the central library that we visited on many Saturday
mornings.
‘Do not stand anywhere near the dustbins. Stay inside the library and
get to the bus stop just in time so you are not waiting there for too long,’
my mom told us.
The world may have been a dangerous place but I did not connect
it with politics or the leaders that we saw on TV. My world remained
carefully insulated at school and at home.
Government schools were not allowed to talk politics and politics was
not part of our home either. High school came with other crises for me.
There were pimples to zap, hair to perm, or not, boys to talk about and the
weekly Pop Shop videos to watch. On our bedroom doors and walls were
the pictures of the dream boys of the 1980s: Johnny Depp, hot from his
21 Jump Street days, River Phoenix, before he dropped dead from a drug
overdose, and George Michael, before we knew what being gay meant.
I hated my teeth more than politics or racial segregation and uprisings.
My teens came with the catastrophe of bone and enamel gone wild in my
mouth. I never showed my teeth in photos or my hand was always cupped
over my mouth. My lips remained steadfast guards against the skew and
crowded teeth. I dreamt of braces, the miracle wires that could straighten
my teeth, like some children had. But we could not afford braces and I
never asked for them.
But there was a stroke of luck. As we were in a government school
we had annual medical check-ups. A nurse arrived and she set up her
makeshift rooms in the science laboratory. She weighed us, measured our
height, checked our eyesight and told us to say hello to ‘the mouse’ in
her special box every time we heard it squeak softer and softer. She also
checked our teeth, gave us pink fluoride tablets and sometimes there would
be a dreaded injection for some or other inoculation.
It was at one of these annual check-ups that she must have felt sorry
for me or been horrified by my unruly teeth. She put in the paperwork so
113
UFRIEDA HO
that my teeth would be looked at by an orthodontist at the University of
the Witwatersrand dental school.
Essentially, her signed documents meant I got to be a guinea pig with
ugly teeth for postgraduates at the dental school to sort out. I was probed
and examined as doctors selected their cases. The weirder the better, I
guess, and my teeth made the grade. My doctor was an Indian man whose
friendly eyes seemed extra-large as they peered out above his surgical mask
for the years I said aaaaah in front of him. He was the only non-white
doctor in the department and I realised that sometimes he was treated
a little differently from his white colleagues. I picked up small things,
like him coming in only at the tail end of a joke and being greeted as an
afterthought as someone sailed past the room with its four or five dentists’
chairs. I could not know for sure what went on, but there was something
uneasy and a deliberate distance that even I as a teenager could pick up
on.
As my doctor he did all the right things. He tut-tutted at me for
not wearing the painful elastics that bound my teeth like unforgiving
harnesses. And he felt sorry for my near-raw gums, scraped by the wires
that sometimes worked themselves loose in between my visits.
It was on one of these many visits that I realised that being Chinese
also meant people treated you differently, a little like how my doctor was
treated. Every few months I took a few hours off school for an orthodontist
visit. My mother drove me to the dental school first thing in the morning,
waited for me and dropped me off back at school.
On one of our first visits to the university, we were shunted from
administrative person to administrative person. We eventually ended up at
the receptionist who was supposed to attend to us and all other patients.
The woman saw us enter the room but ignored us. We patiently took
some seats near her and waited for her to be ready for us. Eventually
my mother got irritated, but not wanting to upset this white woman she
simply cleared her throat in an exaggerated way.
Suddenly the receptionist sparked to life. Not to finally give us some
assistance but instead she turned to a colleague and said loudly, ‘Oh, this
woman has something stuck in her throat.’
I was about fourteen at the time and I was shocked that my mother,
trying to be unobtrusive even after a really long wait, was being dealt
with so rudely. I understood the sarcasm right away and was sad that my
mother still had to do the whole ‘Excuse me, please lady’ routine to this
ineffectual and rude receptionist.
114
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Chinese were officially classified as coloured under apartheid. We were
never honorary whites as some people believed, confusing Chinese racial
status with that of Japanese in South Africa. In Yap and Leong Man’s book
Colour, Confusion and Concessions, the authors included an anecdote that
brings into clear focus the insanely degrading and even oxymoronic busi-
ness of being ‘honorary white’.
They write about how a bus driver refused to pick up a Japanese man
he thought was Chinese. The man turned out to be a Japanese consul staff
member and the incident erupted into a diplomatic furore. The Japanese
consulate demanded an apology, the bus driver and the city transport had
to say sorry, but still the drivers could not tell the difference between a
Chinese person and a Japanese person.
The authors went on to quote the Rand Daily Mail of Febru
ary 1962,
which reported at the time:
So once again we have this queer logic: the Japanese must be allowed
to swim with Whites because they are important commercial allies.
The Chinese must be admitted because it is hard to tell the difference
between them. And apartheid, they say, is a matter of principle.
But the Chinese did get more concessions than other non-white groups.
By the late 1970s and 80s, Chinese were allowed into white Catholic
schools, Chinese were for some time allowed into universities under a
quota for coloureds and they could even stay in whites-only suburbs if
their neighbours did not object.
My Uncle Johnny, my mother’s cousin, who I call Mmm Kou Foo, for
the fifth uncle, was the first and only one of his six brothers and sister to
go to university and graduate. He still has the documents and letters from
the neighbours who had to give their consent to allow his family to live in
their home that was not in a so-called grey area. He had to ask ten would-
be neighbours to the left of him, ten to the right and those in front and
behind him if they minded that he, my aunt and their three young sons
would live there. I have heard similar stories from other Chinese families
who had to go through the same exercise in humiliation.
In primary school I did not appreciate the complexity of this situation; I
simply thought Mmm Kou Foo’s house was big and fancy when he hosted
family parties. The thatch roof was a novelty with the grass all tightly
bunched up under the wooden rafters. There was also a perfect green lawn
and the pool was like the icing on a cake.
115
UFRIEDA HO
Even when I had left school I thought the Chinese were lucky to have
a concession like being able to live in a nice white suburb, as Mmm Kou
Foo did, and I thought we should not complain too much. I also thought
we did not have the vote because no Chinese boys had to go off to do
their military service, which was a fair enough exchange, I figured. I knew
others suffered more severely than the Chinese.
It took an outsider, the American researcher Dr Yoon Park, who worked
extensively interviewing and writing about the Chinese community in
South Africa, to set me straight some years later.
‘No, Ufrieda. How demeaning do you think it must have been for people
