by Ufrieda Ho
superstitions that were attached to gambling and to fahfee. One of mom’s
superstitions was about our shoes. If she found our shoes flipped over, she
would get very upset. She believed this would bring bad luck to dad, that
our flipped-over shoes were an omen about dad’s car turning over in an
accident. He spent so much time driving that one of her biggest worries
was that he would be injured or even killed in a car crash. If my shoes were
found in the crash position, I would not be able to sleep for nights on end,
worried that I had willed the portents of death to dad’s car.
Of course, I was not allowed to talk about the fear that filled my heart.
There was another superstition attached to that. ‘ Choi, choi, choi! ’ my
mother would exclaim if we said something ominous or unlucky. The
‘ chois’ in triplicate were for countering the evil that would be made real as
the thought turned into words.
She had other superstitions, too. We were told not to touch or bump
the chairs of mah juk players when we were at gatherings and parties.
Their losses and bad luck could be blamed on us, my mother warned.
And lose people did, whether we bumped them or not. There would be a
grand performance of mock rage, throwing down their mah juk tiles and
letting out some angry exclamation, shaking their heads and pushing their
chairs away from the table in disgust. But after a break, they were back at
the mah juk table ready to have another go. And at other times, a player
would ask us children to fill up a teacup or bring back a snack from the
kitchen. For this small favour we were given a generous tip, a dak jay, so
sometimes we were seen as a good luck charms, too.
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For my dad, gambling was the adrenalin of a win, a high with rewards. But
like all gambles, it was followed by the tumble of mood swings, desperate
raging when Lady Luck turned her back on him and more of his chewed-
up nails would be bitten down into the infinity of regret.
I knew dad’s mood swings that came with the seesaw of wins and losses
but I also knew that whatever gambling tempted him, it never consumed
him enough to cloud his biggest priority of raising us properly. Dad and
mom went without treats or new things for themselves to make sure we
had rice in the pantry, money for books and even for the extras of a field
trip or a treat at the roadhouse.
Mom moaned a bit about dad’s gambling but she often said to relatives
and friends: ‘At least he is not a reckless gambler. He has never gambled
with money that we needed for school books or to pay the mortgage and
when he does win he gives the money to me for running the house.’
I separated dad’s social gambling from the gambling of fahfee. One was
fun and the other work. And while even social gambling had its fair share
of superstition and peculiarities, it was fahfee that defined the codes and
unspoken rules that came to dominate the Ho household.
Fahfee had an overwhelming code of silence. Its stigma and secrecy
grew formidable in the silence. This stigma and secrecy became a striking
emblem of my parents’ existence of working and more working, but still
being excluded from an economic mainstream and being labelled socially
unacceptable outside the Chinese community. Fahfee stayed relegated to
taboo, even though it was a strategy for economic survival.
As children, we kept quiet about fahfee, even to our Chinese school
friends. They knew about this code of silence, too, because their fathers,
mothers or uncles were also involved in fahfee. We dodged the truth on
all official forms asking for ‘Father’s occupation’ and for his official work
status we piggybacked on the details of the one legitimate shop that a
relative of ours had in Denver.
We knew to turn off the TV and hide, not making a sound, when
policemen, both black and white, came knocking on our door. We hoped
to fool them into believing there was no one home, but more often than
not the knocking did not stop and my mother or father ended up opening
the door and thrusting money into the deep palms of these cops.
There were also the times when the urgent ringing of the phone would
bring a panicked call from some police station where my dad had been
detained. But, ultimately, fahfee did not land anyone in jail for very long.
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When there were court cases, they ended in suspended sentences. More
often, there were simply warnings or money, bottles of brandy and bow
ties changed hands. These were the weapons of agency and power when
you were not part of the system.
I hated that dad sweated and laboured like he did and still had to suffer
the demeaning injustices of someone else’s laws. I hated that fahfee took
so much out of him and that we had to pretend this was not what he did
at all.
My dad was not a bitter person; he never took it out on us that he
worked so hard and he never resented that there were so many of us to
feed and raise. But I remember well the one day when his frustration with
us, his surly ungrateful teenagers, overflowed. The house must have been
in a mess and maybe he could not find something he thought we had
misplaced and he exploded.
‘I work like a donkey for what? For you?’ he burst out as the four of
us children scattered from his anger. He did not speak much English, but
he chose to use this foreign tongue because he wanted us, his growing
children, who had become estranged from the ideals of his imagination, to
understand unequivocally that as much as he protected us from his pain,
and spared us having to repeat his hard life as a child and young man, that
old hurt resided in him still.
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14
The Outside Toilet
The fi rst dog I can remember having, I had for only one night. I was about
fi ve years old and I simply picked up the furry bundle of caramel from the
street corner and carried her home. I was convinced she was a girl dog
and I was also convinced we could keep her. She loved me instantly with
warm licks and a wagging bushy tail and I loved her back so I fi gured such
a certain bond had to be the start of a beautiful friendship.
But my mom said no. She said the dog probably belonged to someone
who lived in the block of fl ats at the corner of the street. She said she
had seen the dog in the garden there sometimes. At these words, I must
have cried and cried and my mom realised I was not going to give up this
new friend easily. She calmed me by saying we could keep the dog, so my
siblings and I played and fussed with her the whole day until, exhausted,
we tumbled into bed. Mom said the dog could sleep in the backyard and
assured me we would be together again in the morning.
Late that night I was woken by a commotion outside our bedroom that
was always lit by a night light of a lampshade with soft tassels and purple
pleats. I heard my parents talking and I heard the front door opening. But
I turned over in my lower bunk bed and went back to sleep.
UFRIEDA HO
Morning brought news that my caramel friend had escaped in the
night, but of course my parents had returned her to her owner, saving me
the heartache of goodbyes and saving them from having to go through
another round of impossible explanations.
It was this incident, Yolanda said, that convinced our parents to get a
family dog we could all grow up with.
Our pets were so-called pavement specials with no pedigreed pretensions,
just big spirits and wagging tails and we fell in love with all the dogs and
one cat who came to share our home over the years. We also came up with
our own language. We ‘furry’ our pets, instead of ‘petting’ them. Even as
grown-ups, the Ho-styled verb sticks as our own sentimental all-gooey
doing word for loving pets and animals.
Our parents did not expect this when they finally agreed to have animals
in the home. My parents believed dogs were for warding off intruders.
They growled and barked to keep the dangers of the dark from the house.
Cats caught mice and kept one eye open for birds that pecked at the
spinach and prickly melons growing in the garden. Pets were not for being
pampered at fancy parlours or for annual vaccinations at the vet. In our
house, dogs had to have sturdy digestive systems; they ate store-bought
food and scraps off the table, not the luxuries of scientifically designed and
imported dog foods.
When we were much younger, Kelvin was allowed to keep silkworms
when the craze hit our school. We collected mulberry leaves for them and
Kelvin first kept the slim slithering worms in an old Mill’s cigarette tin. As
the worms grew fat, he put them into a shoe box. Personally I was grossed
out by them and I hated it when other children took the worms in their
hands and thrust their opened palms to my face for me to get a really good
look.
When we looked again, the worms had disappeared, having woven
their chunky bodies into tight, yellow cocoons. Mom told us that in China
people would collect the cocoons, boil them and create silk from them. She
even had a story about how she once used a few strands of silk to fashion
an almost translucent slip knot to fish out a few freshwater prawns from
a brook near her village.
I did not believe the story. I did not want to believe silk came from
silkworms. Surely the worms, ugly as they were, did not have to be
sacrificed to make silk and how could mom bear watching them pop the
living, breathing worms into the vats of boiling water?
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Nowadays I understand quite well my parents’ attitude. It was summed
up for me in a documentary I watched on TV some years ago that featured
migrants’ thoughts on the relationship between people and pets in the
United States.
‘I could not believe they let the pets sleep in their beds; they treat them
like children or a member of the family and some of them even have toys,’
said the subtitles as the newcomer to the US spoke to the interviewer.
Our parents loved our pets in their own way. Pets had their
place – outside; being useful, functional. With each new pet that joined
our lives, we used the opportunity to test the functionality rule; we also
ended up testing our parents’ ability to pronounce English pets’ names
that went from the reasonably-easy-to-pronounce Happy and Winnie to
Figaro and Mozart.
‘Please can Mozart sleep in the kitchen?’; ‘Please can the dogs come in
the house in the daytime at least?’ We never convinced our parents but we
tried damn hard.
The first pet dog to join us was a straw-white mutt called Lingo. She
was a medium-sized dog with a pretty coat that curled in places and she
had the sweetest face.
But it was in her litter of puppies a short time later that I met Happy.
Lingo’s tiny black puppy was the one my parents decided we should keep.
I was about five years old when Happy was born. So we grew up together.
We had been worried for days when Lingo did not want to come out
to play and barely touched her food. Then suddenly there were all these
puppies. I loved the happy face of the puppy we were allowed to keep and
I called him Happy. He was coal-black like the charcoal backyard that was
his domain, but he had the lightest, truest spirit. In our Bertrams house,
Happy shared the backyard not only with pigeons, chickens and rabbits at
various times, but also with Sophie, our domestic worker.
Sophie’s room was in the basement beneath the kitchen. It had one small
window and seemed to me always to be in pitch darkness, probably because
there was no electricity in her room. She had a paraffin lamp for light and
sometimes she cooked on a hissing primus stove when she wanted to make
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her own meals and not eat what my mother had put aside for her. On some
nights, she took chunky slices of white bread with margarine and jam and
her enamel cup filled with tea with three sugars and said goodnight for the
evening.
Sophie wore canvas takkies without laces and with the tongues turned
up. She tied a doek (headscarf) on her head and wore housecoats over her
voluminous layers of skirts. In winter, a hand-me-down jersey, stretched
and misshapen, might top her shwe-shwe fabric dresses that always smelt
faintly of the no-nonsense green bars of Sunlight soap.
Sophie was a third parent to us in many ways, but in so many other
ways she was simply a servant – never eating from our plates, living in a
room separate from the house, where the pets were, where the outside
toilet was. She was someone whose birth name or family name I did not
even know.
In Chinese culture you do not address people who are older than you,
strangers included, by their first names. You show deference by tagging on
an honorific. Even Yolanda and Kelvin, my own brother and sister, I call
names that translate as ‘my family sister’ and ‘my family brother’; I do not
use their names. But Sophie, this stand-in parent, was never afforded this
respect.
When my parents were away and when, on many occasions, my mom
helped out at relatives’ cafés and eating houses in downtown Johannesburg,
it was left to Sophie to keep order and look after us children. It was Sophie’s
discipline and judgements that we conformed to and her ‘ haibos’, the Zulu
exclamation of surprise, that she used to keep us from mischief.
When we had it our way, we squeezed out the fun of each day in games
that included sibling feuds ranging from irritating each other to physical
fights involving hair pulling and punching. My brother exploited his bigger
size often and it was to Sophie’s skirts we girls would run, clutching the
material in fistfuls as my brother reached around the skirt trying to swipe
us and grab us, until Sophie put her foot down. Literally, it was an ankle
she decorated with the woven woollen threads that represented her church
colours. When she demanded that my brother stop, he would.
She never care
d half-heartedly for us and sometimes she even stepped
forward in our defence when we were being punished by our parents,
knitting her brow, shaking her head and putting her hands out to ward off
a slap destined for our behinds.
During the year, Sophie sometimes went on leave to visit her own family
for weeks at a time. I never knew where she was going. In Chinese my
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mom explained she was going to her ju kaa (family home). It was far away
in my imagination, in reality, too, I am sure. She would prepare big, hardy,
crunchy plastic bags that stood like firm rectangles when they were filled.
They would be bulging and neatly zipped up as she readied to leave. The
housecoat would disappear and so would the doek. On her head would be
a jaunty beret and she would wear a freshly pressed dress and short coat.
We waved her goodbye at the gate and then she would be gone until a few
weeks later.
Only years later did I even begin to wonder about her life away from
us as a wife, a mother, a woman, a friend. At the time, I never thought
much about Sophie’s other life or the things that were important to her,
like why she wanted us to bring her back some sea water when we once
went on a family holiday to Durban. Why would anyone want sea water, I
wondered? It was salty, it burnt your eyes and it was the gigantic toilet of
all the sea creatures and holidaymakers, too, no doubt.
I only learnt about the spirit in those waters much later. In the meantime,
my mother saved up the empty bottles, rinsed them and made sure they
got stashed in the car boot as we headed south to the coast for our rare
treat of a beach holiday together.
Sophie clapped her hands when we presented the water to her on our
return. I knew it held a kind of magic, but just looking at the bottles, and
the few grains of sand resting at the bottom, I was not convinced.
Years later, I got the chance to visit a cave in the Free State, a sacred
site. The ancient mountain, and the river that runs alongside it, was a
place of the ancestors and a place of the gods for those who know it. My
friends and I found a small, hidden path and walked it until we reached
the river. A few faithful were being baptised. They were dressed in church
outfits that I remembered looked like what Sophie wore all those years ago
