by Ufrieda Ho
Phoenix’s pictures with brooding eyes and flicked-back hair stared out
over our beds – the white boys my parents feared. They never made us take
down the posters but they did not like the idea that we hero-worshipped
pop idols of the blond, blue-eyed brigade.
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My parents also had to contend with the Western phenomenon of a
matric dance, that symbolic graduation from childhood into the adult
world of things formal and proper like high-heeled shoes and bow ties.
The matric dance meant trips to dressmakers, shoe shops and the Oriental
Plaza, the fabric and haberdashery hub in Fordsburg where they stocked
fabrics with names like lamé that were as glittery as their names sounded.
Fortunately for me, Yolanda and Kelvin had also eased this path for me
with their share of sequins, dressmaking, cummerbunds, corsages and, of
course, dates. Yolanda’s poor dates and dance partners were subjected to
all the embarrassing jokes and jibes that we as the younger siblings could
muster, peering through curtains, howling and giggling into our T-shirts as
they rang the doorbell.
My parents were supposed to be a little more at ease with this farewell
dinner when it was my turn to dance through the schoolyard rite of
passage.
‘So have you found a partner yet for the matric dance?’ mom asked me
one afternoon after I had got home from school.
I was not thinking about it too much at that moment and jokingly I told
her I was sorted out.
‘I am taking a boy called Donatello to the matric dance,’ I chirped.
‘What kind of a name is Donatello?’ my mother asked, and I joked that
he was a hot Italian.
My mother did not get the joke and she started to get tetchy. She did
not believe me when I told her I had come up with the name because it was
a character from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the four green reptiles
turned mutant heroes who saved the world from their gutter hideout,
which I watched on TV most afternoons after school. I took her tongue-
lashing and put it down to something being lost in translation and left it at
that. But a few nights later when my dad was home a bit earlier than usual,
he called me to him before I went to bed.
‘Mom tells me you are thinking of asking a white boy to your matric
dance.’ The lecture was coming, so I rolled my eyes and tried to tell him
my Ninja Turtle defence.
He listened but it still did not save me from a lecture. My dad said that
white men were not a good choice for Chinese girls. He said they did not
understand or have respect for the traditions and customs. I had only to
look at some of the people we knew, he continued. My father angled the
story to an old family friend. She had had a failed marriage with a Chinese
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man and became involved with a white man who started treating her
abusively. My father was called in often to intervene, calm things down or
to take her and the children away when her boyfriend acted up and could
not be reasoned with. I nodded, silently cursing the turtles and my silly
joke.
With my sequined dress and my hair done up, I went to the dance with
a Chinese boy whom I did not know, but who thankfully was not too
much of a reptile.
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10
My Father, the
Fahfee Man
Townships and locations, those kasis where black people were forced to
live in divided South Africa, and all the shadow places in the oblivious
white suburbs, were my father’s offi ce. He clocked in every day for a boss
who controlled numerous fahfee banks around Johannesburg. As midday
approached, my father, the ju fah goung, got behind the wheel of one of
his boss’s cars and drove off to ‘pull’ fahfee.
I am not sure where ‘pull’ comes from but it sticks as an English term
that people use for fahfee. Maybe it has something to do with the arm
action of gamblers at one-armed bandit machines; maybe it is because the
ma-china literally pulls out a small piece of paper at each round of play
that bears a number between 1 and 36. Betters who match the number the
fahfee man has chosen in that round of play are the winners.
A fahfee man’s betters are arranged in groups called choangs or ‘banks’;
it is another word that sticks when Chinese people refer to it in English.
The fahfee man comes to his betters wherever they usually gather, outside
their factory gates or on the dusty streets where they live, or on the street
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corners of white suburbia. At each bank, the betters’ bets are ready and
waiting inside numbered and labelled purses, wallets and bank bags. To
bet, the player writes the number of his or her purse or money bag on to a
corresponding betting slip. Mostly, these are printed on cheap newsprint-
type paper and cut into sheets that are slightly smaller than an A5 size. The
fahfee man supplies these.
I am not sure where they are printed because, of course, fahfee is
technically illegal and they cannot be confused for any other use. You
could and still can get fahfee betting slips in shops all over Chinatown,
even though they are not displayed in shop windows like stacks of dried
Chinese egg noodles or clingfilm-wrapped bow ties and bottles of imported
soya sauce. Instead, the shopkeepers disappear to a back room and return
with something that looks like a weighty rectangular parcel wrapped and
sellotaped inside plain newsprint or brown paper.
The printed fahfee betting slip is not compulsory, though. A corner torn
from a cigarette carton will do; a scrap of paper saved from a half-empty
page of a notebook or the back of a flyer are all acceptable. The fahfee man
may moan and groan about the tacky, untidy note every now and again,
especially if it is a piece of cigarette packet with scribbling on that holds
a winning bet. He will pay all the same. The better selects the number or
numbers he thinks will be played and also writes down how much money
he wants to bet on each of his lucky numbers. Then he has to make sure
that the exact amount that matches his bets is placed in the purse.
Fahfee numbers are conjured up from the fantastic possibility of dreams,
symbols and the personal interpretations of life’s uncanny coincidences.
When I started my first reporting job on a community newspaper, the
receptionist would call me to her around lunchtime on most days.
‘Give me your arm, my darling, I have to rub you for some luck.’
In the beginning I would look at dear Phyllis with questions all over
my face. She would laugh a bit and grab my arm. ‘I am betting with the
Chinaman today so you have to bring me some luck.’
I laughed as she explained and let her have my arm.
When the better has done deciding on her numbers, she hands her purse
to a runner whose job is to collect all the purses, wallets and money bags
that will make up the bets for each round of play. The runner mostly
checks that purses are numbered properly and are sealed so no m
oney
falls out because ‘being short’ of the exact betting amount is usually how
pay-out disputes occur.
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The runner is the betters’ man; they choose him, but he has to be
accepted by the ma-china as a suitable go-between. He is the one who
hands over the bets and simultaneously receives the all-important slip
of paper on which the fahfee man’s chosen number is written at each
round. He announces to the gathered betters what the number is and he
sometimes stands by when pay-out disputes get heated. For his role, the
runner receives a small stipend from the fahfee man.
In return, the runner is expected to collect the purses on time for the
fahfee man’s arrival and to encourage new betters to join the bank. And
he initiates new betters into the peculiarities of the fahfee man and their
fellow betters. They talk about the fahfee man. Is he a decent person who
may occasionally allow a few credits for regular players or the occasional
small loan, or is he difficult and grumpy? Maybe he is argumentative and
aggressive when there are pay-out disputes.
The runner will also fill in newcomers about what numbers the fahfee
man seems to favour, numbers that have been played recently, the ‘can’t
comes’, numbers that cannot be played during specific rounds, and the
usual size of bets, even though there is no limit, and what times the fahfee
man arrives each day.
And the fahfee man always arrives twice a day, every day, except on
Sundays when he may only make one trip. When he arrives, it is in full
view of all the betters, children and whoever else hangs around. Everything
is done in full sight of the betters and especially the runners. This way
there are fewer arguments later. The fahfee man hands over that day’s
number to the runner once he has passed his collected purses through the
car window. The runner takes the number, unfolds the small rectangle of
paper and the word passes around the gathered betters what number is
being played. Some betters may show their happiness outright, whooping
and clapping their hands. Others prefer staying quiet but confident as they
wait for their purses to return bulging. Others kick the ground or shake
their heads as the announcement of the number means they have lost the
few rand they shoved into the betting purse just minutes before.
Sometimes I joined my dad on his fahfee rounds during school holidays.
One of us children often tagged along with my dad when he was in the
mood for some company during the more laid-back shifts. He did fewer
banks, missed out the factories that would have closed for the holidays,
or made only morning rounds to others over the height of the Christmas
holidays. It was an opportunity to have him to ourselves on those trips,
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mostly because he could not have all of us children with him on his route;
it was work after all. Once or twice I went out with Kelvin and my dad; I
probably nagged long enough for my dad to give in and let me tag along,
even though Kelvin, who would have been more helpful, was already in
for the ride.
My dad’s boss was a man we called Gou Sok. Dad worked for him from
the time I was about eight years old. My father was hard-working and
loyal and was respected and generally well treated by this man and also by
his colleagues. Even some of my dad’s older friends and compatriots called
him Kee Gor. Gor is a word for an older brother and many people called
him by this informal but respectful title.
One of my dad’s biggest responsibilities was to num ju, to ‘think up’ the
numbers that would be played each day to the betters at the various banks,
even those run by his colleagues. My father was particularly good at this
peculiar skill that involved working out numbers in a mix of statistics,
superstition and a little bit of his own luck. The statistics came from the
information carefully recorded in the square-lined books. Recording data
was called cheow ju, literally scribbling down the numbers, and creating
recorded data that each player in each bank has played for as long as they
have been part of the bank.
There are casual players, regulars and even once-off players who may try
their luck. By looking at the playing tendencies of the betters and reading
the mood of each bank there was some kind of a process of elimination
that would point to a best option of the 1 to 36 numbers that my father
could choose. But it was not a process of science because it could not
count for the whimsy of superstition and for the mystery of sheer luck.
Gou Sok would officially close down the banks over the December
holidays but he would allow his employees to run them as their own for
a week or two a year and my dad almost always decided to work in the
extra time, as did the other men who worked for the boss. My father
could pocket whatever winnings there were, but he would also shoulder
the losses; it was a gamble.
That was when we got to go out on the fahfee route with my dad. I
enjoyed those work trips. I got to sit up front with him and set off in the
late morning knowing we would only be back home well after dinner time.
My mom would remind me to take along a jersey, just in case.
In the hours before we left the house for the fahfee routes, my dad
would sit down at our dining room table. He was absorbed, focused on
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the neat script that filled the stack of squared A5 notebooks that made up
the record books. Somewhere in between sitting, examining and making
notes, my dad would work out or num ju what seemed like a magical
formula for winning. It is a formula that is mockingly capricious, but
when it obliges, it guarantees a bounty, like it did on the day Pinky came
home with us.
This was how my dad’s work day began and it was a quiet time in our
house; we were told not to disturb him. ‘Go play outside’, ‘make the radio
softer’, were always the start of the sacrament of num ju in our house.
The only time we would disrupt his ritual of ‘thinking up the numbers’
was to bring him a cup of tea. Sometimes we would spill a little of the tea
as we walked from the kitchen to the dining room table. Sometimes dad
would moan that we were being careless, but mostly he would simply pour
the tea back into the cup that hardly ever matched the saucer, slurp, let
out the aaah of a satisfying swallow and let his gaze fall again, as it had
done countless times before, on to the pages of the well-thumbed record
books.
Occasionally my dad could not settle on the number he wanted to play
and then he would call on Lady Luck with everything from throwing a few
dice to folding up pieces of paper with possible good numbers and then
selecting a random number from the small origami of folded squares. But
even when he did this, it was not all random; it was as if chance and luck
had to be part of the perfect recipe to guide him to the right number to
play. Sometimes we were asked ab
out our dreams and my mother also told
what she had dreamt about. Those dreams were meant to spark something
meaningful for my father as he sat and tapped his feet, sucked hard on a
cigarette and worked through the record books again; sometimes there
was just no way to connect a pattern of coincidence.
But as the clock ticked on, my father finally had to make a decision.
From a ready-cut stack of matchbox-sized slips of paper, he would
eventually write a number on one and the corresponding bank. Then he
rounded up the record books, took the last few drags on his cigarette and
stubbed it out in that determined grinding way that smokers extinguish
their cigarette butts. Ready to go, he put everything into two or three
fabric bags that would hopefully come home swollen with money. My
mom had made those bags for the fahfee men. They were made from a
soft, denim-type fabric and she had sewn on reinforced handles to carry
the heavy coins.
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Then we were on the road, heading away from all the places I knew and
ending up far from the suburbs of traffic lights and walled-in gardens, these
places where people decorated with garden gnomes and house numbers
next to a caricatured snoozing Mexican under an oversized sombrero.
The suburbs gave way to patches of undeveloped veld, then came the
start of the townships and locations. Homes pieced together with sheets
of zinc and roofs held down with rocks vied for a few centimetres of space
with a neighbour’s house or a perimeter marker of a patchwork of chicken
wire and odd bits of salvaged wood and scrap metal long ago succumbed
to rust. Apollo lights, the towering street lights, sometimes split into three
extended arms, sometimes a solitary one, stood in for trees, and there was
hardly a blade of grass anywhere.
We made a few turns, around streets with no names and no pavements,
and arrived at a bank. Dad’s regular betters greeted him as the car slowed
down next to them. They called him ‘Jackie’, the ‘kie’ derived from Ah
Kee, I assumed, and they smiled and asked about me and why I was there,
how old I was and all the nice exchanges and encouragement that people
reserve for small children. They waved at me from outside the car and then
it was back to business.
Hopeful fahfee purses, wallets and bank bags were fished out from
