by Ufrieda Ho
Sixty is the first counter for an old-age milestone in Chinese custom.
Dad also missed his 25th wedding anniversary that we would have
celebrated that year, too. He did not get to mark those 25 years of intimate
partnership. Together he and mom had watched us grow out of shoes,
learn to drive and be tall enough to help them bring something down from
a top shelf. They opened up our presents of ornaments, crazy ties and
soaps through the years. They endured us slamming doors as teenagers,
then finally were rewarded when we came home with a driver’s licence and
a university exemption.
Now no longer would mom and dad turn to each other in bed in the
comfortable silence of a dark night talking about us, about hopes and
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dreams, anxieties and fears, the to-do lists and even the gossip; all those
basics that glue two people together as lovers.
Yolanda had been thinking ahead about ways to celebrate the wedding
anniversary and she thought sitting for a family portrait was the way to
honour my dad and my mom. We could hang the picture in the lounge.
It was a la-di-da thing to do for our family but it was precisely why she
thought it would be appropriate. It would be a salute to our hard-working
parents who had stayed together mostly in happiness and were there for
each other and for us.
Now his side of the bed would never be slept in again. My mother
would fill the space with a teddy or two he had bought her a few years
ago, but it would stay empty. She put a picture key ring with dad’s face on
it on her keys. He had had it made many years earlier. He had a playful
snarl and grin when the photograph was snapped. The key ring stayed in
a drawer until then when my mother needed him closer.
My sadness was multiplied a million times for mom. Her life partner
was gone. The man she cooked Jungle Oats for, with just a sprinkle of salt
when he was sick, was gone. She would not sit up front in the passenger’s
seat of the car any longer, she would have to drive herself.
I breathe in my longing for him; it is involuntary, reflexive. I miss talking
to him, watching him pore over the horse racing pages while his cup of tea,
with milk and two sugars, cooled alongside the paper. I miss asking dad’s
advice, not in the ways of serious discussion, but just hearing his thoughts
about all the grown-up stuff of life.
Just before he died, we had watched and talked about the night-time
broadcasts of the O.J. Simpson trial that played out in the weeks before.
Dad chewed on some peanuts or cracked open the Chinese melon pips
that he liked as we talked and watched as O.J. wiped his brow. Dad
had stopped smoking for some years and he liked to keep his hands and
his mouth distracted with the melon seeds. I liked that he had stopped
smoking. Every day dad smoked I reminded him to smoke less. When
doctors gave him the ultimatum to quit, he had no choice.
I miss that he is not part of my future or the conversations we will have,
the boyfriends he will or will not approve of, having my own home to
invite him into. I will miss him asking me to drive him somewhere, to read
through a letter for him or to make him a cup of tea.
For years after he died I listened for the squeak of our little front gate,
waiting for it to announce that my dad had made it home and was safe.
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But the nights would just grow darker and quieter and the gate stayed
silent and I would eventually fall asleep. Sometimes I still wake up crying,
having had him visit my dreams.
By the late 1990s, we moved out of our house and into the little suburb
of Judith’s Paarl that had once been welcoming to a Chinese family and
also to the Padayachees and the Isaacs. We were leaving the house where
a peach tree that started off by dropping its sticky offerings to the ground,
had turned to a dried-out stump. The old lucky conifers that my mother
had planted as short little plants on either side of the house when we first
moved in, stood tall on the lawn that was only a few square metres wide.
It was here that my brother and his friends sunk an old tin can to play
their rounds of ‘golf’ and where my mother grew sprigs of spring onion
in between sweet peas and snapdragons. It was the house my father had
saved enough to buy for us and we had grown up with the plants and
the pets, watched coats of paint start new and flake off over time and get
refreshed to start all over again. This was my dad’s castle and it was our
home. He bought that house for us really. He knew his responsibility was
to secure my mother’s future and ours, whatever happened. Now we were
moving out of the house he bought and had managed to pay off a year or
two before he died.
I closed the squeaky gate for the last time.
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17
A New Day
Almost exactly a year to the date of my dad’s death the new South Africa
was born.
Getting to that day was a year of parallel hells. I watched the country
tear itself apart with violence and death. On TV and in newspapers, people
bled to death from gunshots, they screamed and dropped to the ground
as they were burnt alive in fl ames from petrol-doused tyres around their
necks. Rocks and Molotov cocktails were fl ying everywhere.
In that year, the man many believed would be president was murdered.
Chris Hani was slain not even three weeks before my father died. Far
right-wing fanatics plotted his downfall and killed him outside his home
in Boksburg, the same place where my father was shot. I sometimes wish
that I could go back to those days and beg dad not to go into the burning
townships at the time. Gou Sok’s banks were just not worth it, I would
have said. I know, though, that dad and his colleagues would have been
cautious; the shooting came anyway.
Another right-wing movement, the AWB – the same crowd that had
scared us enough to jump a red light in Pretoria – were intent on derailing
multi-party negotiations at Kempton Park’s World Trade Centre a few
months later. They smashed tanks through the buildings, terrorised
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everyone and thought they could bully people into not going ahead with
forging a new country.
So-called black-on-black violence, third forces and other nefarious
evils were also at play like an anonymous army commanded to destroy
everything. People went to sleep at night and woke to find their neighbours’
throats slit. All the time, it was put down to the elusive third force.
It seemed there was no refuge. People were slaughtered in churches.
Schoolchildren were being fired on and people were killed by ‘friendly’ fire
as the South African Defence Force’s bullets proved to be indiscriminate.
As we edged closer to the autumn of April 1994 and the date for the
first-ever democratic elections arrived, canned foods became the highest
commodity. The same went for candles and batteries, bottled water,
dry biscuits and all the thin
gs you would have on your bomb shelter
checklist.
Even my granny stocked up on canned viennas and bloated soggy bits of
spaghetti preserved in fake tomato sauce. She never ate the stuff ordinarily
but she was terrified that war was coming and no matter how I tried to
convince her that things were going to be fine, she still kept building her
stash.
Hope tamed the anxiety and there were more ordinary people who
believed that a new day was coming. Radio stations played John Lennon’s
Give Peace A Chance; people stuck bumper stickers on their cars repre-
senting peace with blue and white doves.
Political sentiments were shifting. The US was talking about lifting
sanctions, diplomatic ties were being made thick and fast with our former
pariah state and in the coming months there would be a joint Nobel Peace
Prize for two former foes, one white, one black, who would now form a
government of national unity and set in motion a constitution for a new
country everyone could call home.
That rumour of change that I had spoken to my father about was no
longer an uncertain whisper; now it was being shouted from the rooftops,
and no one could help hearing it, not even if you blocked your ears.
In our house, silence fell into the places where he used to be – the chair he
sat on as he tapped his foot impatiently looking at the fahfee record books
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every night; his clothes that still hung in the wardrobes that he shared
with mom; his reading glasses ready on the mantelpiece; the half-used
bottles of Vitriol still in the mirrored bathroom cabinets. I used to watch
dad shake a few drops into his hand, smooth them into his hair, mess
everything up a bit as he stared purposefully at his task in the mirror. His
brow would furrow as he combed everything back into place and formed
the all important comb-back to cover his bald spot. He would turn a little
to each side, checking that the strands were in place. Then he put the comb
down.
Immediately after dad’s death, we entered into seven weeks of mourning.
It is an old-fashioned observance that is undertaken as a sign of filial piety.
It would be a mourning that my mom and us four children would observe:
49 days with no entertainment, no socialising, no red or bright things in
the house or on your body, no visiting people and just following a routine
of lighting incense and candles at an altar where my dad’s photo, in black
and white, stood. For those first nights of the vigil of incense and candles,
Kelvin moved into our bedroom and slept on the floor. Not one of us
wanted to be more alone than we already felt. Some nights Unisda crawled
into mom’s bed, cradling her as she cried for the man she loved.
We carried on with work or studies but we were dressed in black most
of the time. We had on a black ribbon attached with a safety pin to our
clothes always.
We children knew what was expected of us for those 49 days. We knew
the austerity of the severe mourning regime but our broken hearts did not
know what else to hold on to.
My grieving grandparents, my dad’s in-laws, felt they wanted to carry
this burden of mourning for us. They were not part of the official mourning
but their hearts did not stop bleeding. I had never heard my grandfather
weep until the morning after the murder. Daylight had not ended the
nightmare as I held my grandfather who had arrived at our home. He
was wearing a well-padded suede jacket and as he arrived at the door, he
collapsed like a bear on to the sofa, held on to me and sobbed in my arms.
Exhausted from tears long minutes after, we parted.
A part of my Por Por died along with my dad. She buried some of her
soul with him, and until the day she died, she would find her way back
to a worn pleading to the gods. They should have taken her and spared
her precious son-in-law from the bullet. Dad was her champion; he held
her heart in safe hands; he stood up for her when my mother wielded her
cruelty and unkindness.
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I felt betrayed, angry and bruised. A new world was being made and
this, too, my father would miss out on.
But we had to survive, like the country we lived in, and we had to make
it through the uncertainty, believing a new tomorrow would bring a better
day.
After the 49 days of mourning, we ceremonially burnt the small black
ribbons that we had pinned to our clothes for the long weeks that passed.
My mother also wanted us to burn the piles of sympathy cards and notes
affixed to sympathy bouquets that came to our house. To her, they were
messages for my father, not for us.
Although the mourning period came to an end, our sense of loss did
not.
People stopped asking after a while how you were doing. Even my
closest friends did not know that I perfected a split life. I cried silently into
my pillow at night, then I would wake up and have to remind myself that
the rest of the world was not responsible for my dad’s murder and I would
have to learn to tame my rage.
But death can be unsentimental. Life throbs on.
I returned to the crime beat. At the time of my dad’s death, my editor had
decided to give me a buffer from having to look through crime dockets and
police reports about shootings and also having to talk to family members
about losing their loved ones to bullets tearing through their hearts and
heads.
Mostly, I fought him when he tried to stop me covering certain stories,
like the time he refused to send me to cover an AWB meeting. I insisted on
doing everything the job required, be it wearing a skirt and proper shoes
to sip tea at the ladies’ club (they had handbags that matched their shoes)
or watching police process crime scenes as bodies laid like lumps before a
mortuary van arrived. Now I did not fight him; I was just grateful to sip
tea at the ladies’ club, and I still did not bother about a proper handbag.
Weeks passed and I realised that my colleagues were doing acrobatics
around me to try to share out a big chunk of my workload, the crime beat.
It was the old-school way of working in a small newsroom. It involved
watching each others’ backs, not hanging anyone out to dry, not insisting
their byline came before mine if we shared the workload.
They deliberately worked around me, shielding me. They went through
a convoluted process of getting someone’s telephone number instead of
just asking me to flip through my contact book. When I walked in on a
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conversation about a crime lead they were working on, they shifted the
conversation and walked off to their desks.
I cottoned on that they were trying to protect me at any cost, so I told
my editor I was ready to get back to my old beat. I was still finishing my
last year of study and my lecturers were happy that I had come to this
decision. They had been supportive and careful not to push me too soon
in the weeks after the murder. But they showed enough leadership not to
capitulate to sympathy. They had to separate my loss from what lay ahead
for my career.
And more than covering the crime beat, the most amazing story was
about to unfold: the democratic elections were going to make front-page
news everywhere. The new day was finally dawning.
I got dressed up on 27 April 1994. It was an occasion. I wore a dramatic
black dress that fell to my ankles. It had a beaded top with plastic beads
of stars and hearts and some other shapes full of colour and spectacle. I
called it my witch’s dress. On my head was my favourite black hat and on
my feet a pair of Doc Martens. Unisda had embraced the grunge scene and
I had tagged along. Among our most treasured items were our eight-eyelet
Docs that we wore to alternative night clubs like The Doors where they
played the anthems from Nine Inch Nails and The Smiths. We wore our
Docs to work and now also to the elections.
Phone calls started early in our house on election day. I was making
arrangements with friends to rendezvous and to check on the election
station queues. From the TV and radio coverage, we knew we were in for
the long haul even if we were just going down to the local recreation centre
in Bez Valley.
My Por Por was in a panic. She phoned us, scared and confused. People
in her block of flats were saying that all the old people living there had to
vote for the National Party or they would not receive their pensions. My
gran hardly spoke English and she had no grasp of the political situation.
Months before she had decided that she would be in no position to make
an informed choice and we agreed with that.
But a minibus was on the way to fetch the old people from her flats
to take them to their voting station. I phoned the Independent Electoral
Commission (IEC) twice. I was so angry that I was put on hold and when
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I finally got through to someone all I could do was lay a complaint. The
IEC had warned the nation about intimidation and had urged people to
report any incidents. But before I could get to my gran, the minibus had
arrived. The old Chinese people who lived in the building were told to
bring their IDs; they were shown where to make their mark, next to the
face of F.W. de Klerk, their supposed guarantee to receive their pensions.
