by Ufrieda Ho
do an experiential year of training as part of our qualifications and I had
managed to get a job at a community newspaper in Edenvale that was not
too far from my home.
My family and friends rallied around to help me get my driver’s licence
that I was required to have for the job. While I was at the residence, my
friends turned their beat-up Datsuns and old bakkies into my fleet of cars
with the learner driver’s ‘L’ stuck on them. When I learnt to alley dock,
as the K-53 test required, my friends lined up as poles as I navigated past
their legs. They let me drive on the quiet streets of Pretoria to test my
clutch control and to see whether I was checking all my blind spots and
mirrors properly.
My dad took his turn to teach me how to drive at home. He was a good,
confident driver but I think even he was shaky about getting through to
me to co-ordinate my body enough not to stall and to figure out when
you changed gears before the engine started to squeal for it. At least,
unlike Kelvin, my father never sat in the passenger seat with his hand
on the handbrake, just in case. Kelvin’s style of teaching did little for my
confidence and each time I would return from the driving lesson with my
nerves as raw as theirs.
Even though everyone tried to be patient with me, handing over a set
of car keys to me was like looking over a cliff with a frayed bit of rope
as a bungee cord. One time, after a Sunday afternoon of driving up and
down the streets of the city with the big homemade ‘L’ sign on the car, we
finally made it home. I remember dad, who had volunteered to give me the
lesson, walking into the house and going straight for the back rest of the
sofa. He held on to the textured fabric for a while, like he had to steady
himself before taking a few more steps. I think he thought then he would
be driving me around for many more years because it would be unlikely
I would ever get the thumbs-up from the clipboard cops at the testing
station.
But teaching their children to drive is what dads do, even fahfee men
who have little free time. Dads have to let their daughters burn some rubber
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unintentionally and stall more than drive. It seemed like just a few short
years earlier when he had taught me how to ride a bicycle without training
wheels in the old Bez Valley park near our house. I could only balance for
a few metres at a time, then I would squeeze too hard on the brakes and
fall to the side of the bike, refusing to try again.
Dad would urge me on. He even ran alongside me, holding the back
of the seat as I pedalled and as my grip on the brake eased up a bit. ‘Keep
pedalling, keep pedalling, chai, chai,’ he said, until the day I turned my
head to see that I had cleared a whole stretch of park and dad was now
standing still, waving me on.
I started work as a reporter just a few days after my final exams. I
arrived in the Edenvale office of the newspaper that had advertising
representatives and a tea lady, all in an office small enough for me to hear
the receptionist singsong her standard greeting every few minutes when
the phone rang.
But I still did not have a driver’s licence.
Embarrassed to have to ask for anything on my first day at work, I had
to approach my editor for a morning off the following week. He raised an
eyebrow.
‘It is for my driver’s test,’ I told him (my fourth attempt).
‘What, you don’t have a driver’s licence! Well, you better get it,’ was
what he said after agreeing to my request.
I did, thankfully, and much to the relief of my family who was fed up
with carting me around.
At the Edenvale community paper, I was given the crime beat and the
responsibility of covering local council news for the town of Bedfordview.
And, of course, being a community newspaper it involved covering all the
general reporting expected on a small local paper. One of the first stories I
had to cover was a children’s art competition, followed by a Barbie show,
with a tall blonde dressed up to be the toy doll in real life. I went along
with my notebook and took the photographs, remembering the tight
cropping we were taught and remembering to ask people to spell their
names always. Importantly, it was remembering that a rosette on a child’s
drawing was more than a silly first prize, it was a big deal for that child
and everyone connected to the making of that crayon image.
My grandfather loaned me his tomato-red Mazda that he only really
needed at weekends to get to church and mostly he preferred the minibus
shuttle anyway because glaucoma had caught up with his eyes and he did
not like to guess at robot colours and people crossing the streets.
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I was grateful for the old car that my grandfather secured with a
padlocked length of chain from the brake to the steering wheel. It was a
second-hand car and the red on the bonnet did not match the rest of the
car. It broke down often and over time I learnt its little quirks, like how
to get the windscreen wiper going if you manually gave it a shove to get it
into action. It was why I sometimes arrived at an assignment with a wet
right arm, as I had leaned out of the window to yank the wiper just once
before it squeaked into action and sloshed the raindrops to the sides so I
could drive off.
The policemen I met at the four police stations that made up part of my
beat thought it hysterical that I bothered to lock the car that I stuck bumper
stickers on. There was one sticker that said ‘No to Animal Vivisection’
and another about clean air and clean rivers. They said that if my car got
stolen they would replace it. The also made jokes about the car being held
together by its bumper stickers.
‘Do you leave your car outside at night, Ufrieda?’ asked one of these
cop contacts one day.
‘Yes, why?’ I asked.
‘You must be careful,’ he warned, ‘the mosquitoes could puncture those
tyres.’ He would burst out laughing and even I had to smile about the
beat-up car that I loved so dearly.
But even as I loved the car, my Ah Goung loved it more. Once or twice
when he did need the car, he would drop me off, or wait for me at an
interview, then pick me up afterwards.
One rainy day, we were together on one of these first assignments of
mine and the Mazda cut out. It started to rain but we got out and flipped
up the bonnet. My grandfather fiddled a little, but there was nothing
obvious to him or to me that was wrong with the car.
As the rain came down harder, I went to retrieve an umbrella from the
car. My grandfather was always prepared and the car was an extension of
a storage space for all the emergencies you could think of. But instead of
an umbrella, Ah Goung took out a Checkers plastic bag, unfolded it neatly
and placed it over his head with the handles drooping around his ears. As
the raindrops fell, the centre of his plastic hood started to sag, leaving the
corners
of the bag looking like bright yellow Batman ears. I urged him
under the umbrella and he dismissed me.
‘Shush, this is fine,’ he said.
‘But please, Ah Goung, you are going to get sick and then what?’ I tried
to scare him a little.
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He still ignored me. Eventually another car stopped. It happened to
be a Chinese man who greeted us warmly, calling my grandfather the
respectful Ah Buk, uncle, and I called him Ah Gor, my brother. Then he
started to do fiddly things to the car. I died of embarrassment at my Batman
grandfather with his plastic bag hat. This was how I was going to start my
journalism career, I thought, in the rain, with a car that was going nowhere
and my grandfather with a canary-yellow plastic bag on his head. But in
my other life, I was still the granddaughter of this frugal, practical man,
whose Batman ears may just have been what caught enough attention for
someone to stop and help.
Work was a window into a strange new world for me. I was allowed
into strangers’ homes as I interviewed them and took photographs. It
involved everything from telling the stories of those fighting the council
over illegal dumping near their homes, to letting surviving family members
devastated by a violent crime speak about their loved ones or telling me
about celebrating 50 years of marriage. These were homes without the
Chinese altars for the ancestors or the fai cheun, the four-character lucky
poems that are so typical of Chinese homes. There were people who
lived in shacks where swept dirt stood in for carpets and where sunlight
never penetrated once a makeshift door was closed. I also entered into
mansions that had staircases leading storeys and storeys upwards to where
chandeliers dripped from the ceilings. None of them was the home of the
fahfee man or the Chinese shopkeeper that I knew so well.
My job was letting me see a world very unlike the one I grew up in.
There were so many ways to live a life, so many variations on family, on
relationships, on success and failure and on what people held close to their
hearts. I was happy to be working at the little knock-and-drop that was
always jammed full of advertisements and inserts. My job meant I was
actually getting a pay cheque, too. Even though it was still a study year,
we had to complete a training year to qualify. The newspaper paid me a
junior reporter’s salary and expected me to deliver like any rookie on the
beat, not a student.
After a few months, I decided I wanted to pay my father back for that
year’s fees that he had already paid upfront. I was living at home, driving
my Ah Goung’s car, and apart from keeping his car running I really did not
have many expenses and I wanted to be able to give back to my father.
I handed over a wad of money to my dad one day. He refused to take the
money. He said it was his duty as my father to provide for my education.
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‘Just keep on working hard, do your best at work and learn everything
you can, then I will be a satisfied father,’ he said to me.
Proving yourself in my parents’ books meant doing more than what
was required of you. ‘Sweep the floor if your boss asks you to, do not say
it is not your job and do not put on a sour face when you do it. Help your
colleagues, help them carry the load and be ready to learn from them.’ It
was the kind of advice that my mom and dad always gave to us. Do more,
moan less and the hard work will pay off. It was also about working with
dignity. ‘You can be the street sweeper or the president, it does not matter
as long as you have pride in your work and you do it with dignity,’ was
another of my dad’s oft-repeated sayings.
I was happy for his advice; I was happy that my dad saw more dignity
in sweeping a floor well than in complaining about a raise or stomping all
over others to get to the top.
Most of all, I was thrilled to be working, my writing was being published,
people were reading my articles and responding and even though I was
still a student I was indeed starting my journalism career. I had an editor
who believed you earned a byline, you did not get it just because you typed
a few sentences on a computer screen. But soon, in that small office, I was
getting my byline on the big stories and I was pulling my weight. And now
I had a salary and I had some money that I wanted to give back to my
parents.
My father still refused the money I had offered to him, but I insisted.
‘Take it, dad,’ I said. ‘Take the money and go bet on something or
whatever.’
I wanted him to be able to do something absolutely frivolous with the
money and enjoy it even if it was on gambling. Maybe especially if it
was gambling because it was the guilty pleasure he enjoyed so much. He
finally relented, happy, I hope, to recognise that he had a child becoming
an adult. He had worked hard enough.
A few nights later my dad was dead.
My father was shot somewhere in Boksburg on Johannesburg’s East Rand.
He was on a fahfee round and he was with two other colleagues, wrapping
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up the banks before heading back to Gou Sok’s house. My father was in
the driver’s seat that cool April night. He had a younger colleague who
had done most of the driving in the few years since he had started working
for Gou Sok. That day, though, my dad volunteered to drive because the
younger man had obviously had a rough night and my dad pitied his
youthful excess. The gunman came up to the driver’s window and the one
shot he fired into my dad’s face killed him instantly.
He may have been a soft crime target for the car or the cash they
associated with the fahfee men. My dad’s shooting may have been a
revenge killing of some aggrieved gambler or maybe it was part of how
violence was starting to become a way to settle things, that dark shadow
that is a seductively convenient solution in South Africa. Those of us who
loved him had no answers; we never will.
The news came to our house like a dark cloud moving over the tin roof
and it began with a ringing phone. I was working that night, covering a
council meeting that was one of my monthly night-time jobs. When my
dad was shot, I was sitting in my little press gallery seat in the Bedfordview
town council’s chambers. The mayor would walk in with his chain and his
robe and we would all rise until he took his seat at his special, raised seat.
There was a lot of ritual and ceremony, then the toing and froing would
start as we worked through an agenda and each councillor muscled for his
or her personal wants and desires for the small East Rand town.
While the storm tore into my family home as the news came from
someone with the telephone message, I was still sipping on a drink and
snacking on the food that was always the way monthly council meetings
ended.
After the meeting, I drove Ah Goung’s Mazda back home and turned
into our street as the night’s quiet deepened. I u
sually parked the car in a
neighbourhood garage. The old lady, who lived a few houses from us, let
us use her parking spot for a few rand a month. We could not park on the
street; we had already woken up one morning some years earlier to see
an empty space where our second-hand car was the night before. I could
see Unisda walking up the street to meet me from our house. She did this
sometimes so I did not take much notice of her as I started wrapping the
metal chain-link around the two gates to padlock the gate for the night.
Unisda walked slowly like she could not bring her feet to me. Her arms
were folded and she was gripping her forearms, hugging herself tightly.
Maybe she thought she could squeeze away the news she was about to
give me.
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I started chatting immediately as she got within earshot. I was nattering
about my day and the council meeting.
‘Ngaan, dad has been shot,’ she stopped me.
I looked at her for a few seconds; the words sank in, but they did not
make sense.
‘Oh no, no, where is he? Is he alright? Oh my God, no,’ I was pleading.
I could not imagine that my dad, my precious, precious father, could be
dead, surely he was only hurt and the doctors would be able to make him
better again. The seconds she did not confirm his death dragged out in
slow motion for me. She had made a mistake; it was Unisda’s idea of a
cruel, cruel joke; this was just a nightmare and I was going to wake up.
‘He has been killed, he is dead, Ah Ngaan.’
My silent scream ripped through the night. Nothing came out of my
mouth but my body was trembling; my skin instantly felt like it did not
belong to my body as the tingle of tragedy crawled all over me. My head
was spinning. I ran back to the house with Unisda following my pace.
Even before I made it inside the front door, the weeping and the desperate
sobs from inside the house rushed at my solar plexus and I knew then that
a part of the sun would never rise for any of us ever again.
My dad did not live long enough for his 60th birthday – that would have
come just two months later in June. Years earlier, we as a family had settled
on 26 June as my dad’s birthday. Of course, we had no way of knowing for
sure, it was just following the data made up for this paper son.
