Paper Sons and Daughters
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like your uncle to have to go cap in hand to speak to his neighbours, just
ordinary citizens, to ask if he could have their permission to live among
them?’
She was right, and she went on to put all her insights and findings into
the book A Matter of Honour, which gave voice to the Chinese South
Africans in ways I think they did not even believe they were entitled to. Dr
Park’s book finally validated so much of the Chinese experience, including
mine.
But in my child’s world it was a long time before I even understood
the bizarrely complex layers of apartheid and of oppression; of what was
acceptable and what we came to think was acceptable.
I still believed everything was as it should be. We were made to believe
that being in a Chinese school was a privilege. Discipline and morality
set us apart, we were also told. Heritage and culture made us strong and
the ethos of working harder and being ever humble was all we needed
to succeed, even if we were being prepared to become part of a divided
society where we would be given the scraps.
The formula saw us learn a few Chinese songs, we practised the dances
that had us clicking chopsticks to folk songs and we took sharp blades
to paper in the old art of paper cutting. I even tried my hand at Chinese
calligraphy but I never mastered the balance of flow, stroke and proportion.
We had a few Chinese teachers who took us for our Chinese classes. They
were not paid for by the state but by the community and the school itself.
They shored up our cultural education.
We also had funding from the Taiwanese government. It was a peculiar
set-up. The majority of the children were South African born, and came
from Cantonese-speaking families who had a mainland Chinese history.
The Taiwanese government represented the Chinese who broke away to
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the island under Chiang Kai-shek. Even though people from the island
and those from the mainland were all Chinese, the historical disconnection
could not have been greater. There was the barrier of language and the
divide of the independent island with the lifestyle of Westernised South
Africa.
But the Taiwanese had by the late 1970s, as a pariah state in the eyes
of the Chinese, found diplomatic and trading common ground with the
pariah apartheid state. This relationship meant the Taiwanese involvement
was tolerated by the South African government. As for the Taiwanese who
arrived in South Africa, their government knew that immigrant children
needed a familiar place to be educated and so it donated books, helped
out with funding and implemented a policy to teach Mandarin. Even
though Mandarin was the official language of Taiwan and Beijing, it was
useless in the 1980s and 90s for those of us who spoke Cantonese, at home
anyway. We were taught the phonetic alphabet, the 37 zhuyin characters
commonly called bopomofo (a term made up of the first four phonetic
characters) that in different combinations make up the basics of Mandarin
pronunciation, especially as it is taught in Taiwan. Then we went home
and unlearnt them with our mother tongue, Cantonese, and the increasing
encroachment of English in our homes.
Language is always central to a culture, and being Chinese somehow
seems to survive even beyond the language connection. Being Chinese is
almost like an essence you carry in your blood, even when you can only
just muster a greeting in the vernacular. You cannot escape what shade of
skin you are born with.
As I grew up, I saw many young Chinese people rebel against their
Chineseness. Teenage heaven was the Western model of blue eyes, blonde
hair; the perceived freedom of sex, drugs and rock ’n roll; and Johnny
Depp. It was a seductive picture, so tantalisingly dissimilar to having to
obey your parents’ old-fashioned rules and spend weekends helping out at
the family shop or recording fahfee numbers as another of the expected
chores that everyone in a typical Chinese family is assigned.
Then, in 1989, we could not ignore that we were Chinese after all. From
across the oceans, students who were not blue-eyed or had coffee-coloured
complexions were doing something completely radical and teaching me
about democracy and the fight for freedom.
Tiananmen Square was burning and the mighty public plaza in view of
Peking’s Forbidden City was the scene of a bloodbath for freedom.
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We saw it all on TV – students, academics and protestors standing
defiant for those things called democracy and reform, while tanks mowed
them down and gun shots made them fall to the ground bleeding.
Yolanda and Kelvin were both students at Wits University by then and
they were all swept up with this fight so far away. I was in high school,
unsure of these new words but I joined them anyway and built a papier
mâché replica of the goddess of democracy and hummed along to the
cassette tapes Kelvin and Yolanda brought home, full of Mandarin freedom
songs that played over and over again.
We identified more with this struggle far away without even knowing
that there was a man called Nelson Mandela fighting for freedom. As we
pasted more newspaper over the statue in solidarity with a cause in another
world, we did not know what was happening in our own backyard. It
was our socialised norm; we could see China burning and the Berlin Wall
falling but we were still bricked in by the lies and secrets of apartheid.
After 1994, and especially after 1998 when the ANC-led South Africa
opted for diplomatic ties with China over Taiwan, many more Chinese
nationals ended up on our shores and continue to arrive. The people I
meet these days come from the far-flung expanse of the Asian landmass.
Some of them are from close to Siberia in the north and others nod with
regional familiarity when I tell them about where my family villages
were situated. They connect me with the motherland. You can take on
the nationalities of other countries, you can align yourself with whatever
current political ideology is in vogue but you are always overseas Chinese
in their eyes; you are still the sons and daughters of the Yellow Emperor,
you are Tang Yun, they say. It is the same thinking I hear from so many
Chinese nationals when they speak to me about Taiwan or Tibet. There
is almost stubborn disregard for complexities or realities about people’s
identities, their culture. They and I hold that essence of being Chinese, and
that is all.
By high school we felt that Chinese classes were a waste of time. We
attended class, went through the motions, but we also knew that we
never had to write an exam in Chinese; it was not part of the syllabus as
stipulated by the Transvaal Education Department and Chinese was not
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what we thought would be part of the world that we would inherit in our
future.
One of the Chinese teachers had the most beautifully made-up classroom.
He transformed his one bookshelf into a cabinet of
Chinese culture. He
painted it, put up beautiful ornaments of fans and traditional old ink wells
and covered the whole cupboard with plastic sheeting.
But we were naughty and rubbed the sheeting until the static drew all
the tassels of the fans and all other frilly bits to stick to the plastic.
We all took part in altering strokes on the calligraphy that he
painstakingly wrote on the board. We rubbed out strokes, added a few
extra ones and giggled at each other when Mr Wu tried to figure out what
had happened.
Then one day a group of girls decided it would be funny to add a few
of the eucalyptus leaves that spread across the school yard to Mr Wu’s big
beer mug of Chinese tea. That was going too far, I thought, but still I was
complicit for saying nothing and for having less respect for this teacher
who taught a ‘less valued’ subject.
I wish I had taken those Chinese classes more seriously. The gaze of
the 21st-century world looks to China as the rising economic dragon,
breathing its fire all over the globe and especially in Africa. Knowing this
now, I really wish I had not used the Chinese classes to finish off maths
homework or to cram for a test later in the day. I also cannot help feeling
a bit like my mother, who, as a schoolgirl, did not pay too much attention
to her English classes because she thought she would never have to say to
anyone: ‘Good morning, how do you do.’
Maybe it is the fate of the Chinese diaspora wherever they end up and
especially as time erodes memory. Sometimes I look at online discussion
groups and Facebook postings made by overseas Chinese communities in
places such as San Francisco. There is that same feeling of ambiguity and
puzzlement about being Chinese but only having a phantom umbilical
cord to the motherland. I can almost hear myself in the questions on these
Internet sites. There is uncertainty and doubts of origins and belonging.
There is confusion over history blended with stories that are handed down
generation after generation. There is what is lost in translation and the
mystery of context one simply cannot know.
‘I am just one mixed-up Chinese girl’; ‘Pity all the books we are reading
are written in English by people who are not Cantonese’; or ‘Please can
someone give us the Cantonese Class 101’ are some of the messages. I smile
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a little and feel sad a little, because I know there are no simple answers.
But even as mixed up as I felt straddling the two worlds, especially as
a teenager, my parents expected us to take school seriously, especially the
Chinese classes.
Our school introduced a holiday winter school when I started high
school. It was a week-long programme open to all Chinese children, not
only those who attended the Chinese school, and it was meant to bring
together the community’s Chinese children to ensure a cultural infusion
with cooking, karate classes, dancing and Chinese lessons. My mom and
dad approved and my mom was excited when we came home with recipes
from a guest chef.
She was a Taiwanese lady who did not speak much English; she waved
her arms about a lot and exaggerated the techniques so we could get what
she meant as we gathered in the home economics laboratory. We were
supposed to make a Chinese savoury pancake. The chef started to divide
out little bits of dough to each of us. We took our floury blobs and fiddled
with them as she carried on cutting up smaller and smaller pieces. Then
she realised she did not have enough for everyone.
She shouted at us but we did not know what she was saying; her arms
went again and eventually we realised that we had to hand back our blobs
of dough. To our horror, as each blob returned, we could see that some
people had washed their hands and others had not, making for spring
onion pancakes that very few people chose to eat.
The winter school made my mom particularly happy. When we came
home and told her about another song we had learnt it was sometimes one
she could remember from her own school days and she broke into song,
testing her memory and her voice box.
Winter school was also a way to widen our circle of Chinese friends,
even though the only people we knew growing up were other Chinese
children anyway.
Kelvin and Yolanda, who were right royal teens, made and took phone
calls from their new friends. Unwinding the telephone cord to its maximum,
they pulled it around the side of the passage and cradled the receiver until
their necks and arms got tired or until mom screamed for them to get off
the phone.
Mom and dad supported most of the decisions taken by the school
because they were about the enforcement of rules and the inviolability of
discipline, Chinese-style. They might not have understood the intricacies
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of the breeding cycle of frogs as it was taught to us in our biology classes.
And they did not particularly appreciate why we put on nativity plays in
primary school, but they did understand that school was about rules and
about the gospel of the teachers’ words.
It was why my mother paid for scientific calculators and geometry sets
when I was in high school, and it was why when I was little, she sewed
cloths to drape over my head as I played another primary school shepherd
herding a few cotton-wool and cardboard sheep across the desert of the
dusty school hall stage.
My mother would take up her seat in the audience of the darkened
school hall. She watched me sing ‘Away in a Manger’, not understanding
too much about this story of the Christ child born in a stable to a virgin
mother and the winged mystery of the angels, but she would be there
anyway.
And as always at these school functions she duly prepared a plate or
two of eats as each parent was expected to do.
I cannot remember my father ever attending more than one or two of
these concert nights, prize-giving events or arriving at school for a parent-
teachers’ evening during my entire school career. He was always working.
We did not sulk about it or get angry with him for not being there. His
absence was almost like a contract with us; he worked hard and we had to
work hard at school. A sealed deal.
By high school, despite my best efforts, science had become a completely
foreign concept to me. Chemistry bombed and physics and I were like two
vectors going in opposite directions. In maths, equations and theorems
terrorised me and even accounting confused me with its reconciliations, its
double entries and all the columns that needed to be filled in. I disappointed
my parents as I failed science and only scraped by in maths. I had to rethink
my subject choices completely by Standard Seven. Even the principal, who
was our maths teacher in high school, said: ‘You know, Ufrieda, Chinese
people are supposed to be very good at maths.’ I had no answer to her
comment. She made me sound and feel like a genetic dud, someone who
had failed her ‘Chineseness’ b
ecause I could not tell my parabolas from
parallelograms.
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I was able to help friends decipher a soliloquy or do ‘ met ander woorde’
in Afrikaans but I remember a friend nearly throwing herself and me down
the stairs when, despite her best efforts, I simply could not understand
calculus.
I had to fumble through maths as a compulsory subject but eventually
I saw the light with science and chose to change to business economics. I
spent every Thursday afternoon doing extra sessions to catch up on the
lessons I had missed. At stake was the all-important university exemption
I had to get in my matric year.
Failure to get a full university exemption would be the ultimate
disappointment for my parents. I remembered them beaming as Yolanda
passed and went to university and likewise with Kelvin. I remembered the
happy congratulations my parents received and their smiles and pride they
could barely contain. I needed to get that same reaction when my name
appeared in the national newspapers in my matric year.
For my parents, a university exemption meant they had given us a key
to the door out of the life they did not want for us. It was the fulfilment
of the contract of their working and my working at school. To miss out
was to be sentenced to the burden of the uneducated, to the world of
shopkeepers and fahfee men, men like my dad.
Paradoxically, though, education also put more and more distance
between us and our parents. As the world opened for us through books
and new knowledge framed with a Western world-view, it pushed us
further and further from our parents’ outlook on life.
A news bulletin in English started to make more sense to us than it did
for my parents, especially my mom, whose English was even more basic
than my dad’s. His work outside the house exposed him to more English
and the languages outside our home. Yolanda and Kelvin started to take
up positions leaning over my dad or mom’s shoulder when they had to
open up a letter from the bank or when some other official correspondence
needed deciphering. ‘Well, I am not an educated person like some people,’
my mom would snipe at us as we got older and used increasingly rational
arguments when we butted heads.
The West had also won over our walls. Johnny Depp’s and River