by Ufrieda Ho
number of Chinese nationals in South Africa was estimated at between
219
UFRIEDA HO
125 000 and 250 000. The official said it was a very small number compared
to diaspora figures in other parts of the world. What struck me more was
that there were potentially 125 000 people the Chinese embassy could not
account for. It meant that for all those in South Africa with legal papers
there were about the same number who had to negotiate their being here
by flying under the radar, still being paper sons and daughters.
Some new migrants are involved with businesses and dealings of
organised crime, but many are not. Many are simply here to make better
lives for themselves. It is the same old migrant story.
I met a young woman called Ah Mooi in Chinatown some years ago.
She and her husband arrived in South Africa in 2006. She worked as a
waitress, trying to improve her English by explaining that chicken’s feet,
fong jeow, are a delicacy and that loofah sponges are not only for drying
out and bathing with but can be turned into bites of vegetable heaven with
the right amount of garlic and wok hei, literally the breath of the wok.
‘The competition for work is just too intense in China,’ she told me
in Cantonese. When I met her, her husband was working as a chef and
kitchen hand at another Chinese restaurant in Sandton. They saw each
other once a week on their day off. They had left a little girl back in China
who was only a voice at the end of the line or the little one growing up
through photographs that arrived in the post. They had not been able to
go home for more than three years at one stage. Like my parents, a year in
Africa had turned into three and then more as the calendar kept flipping
over. I kept thinking of the little girl, like my mom, who was not getting to
be with her mom or dad because they were far away in a place they called
Naam Fey.
Ah Mooi also told me that when they first arrived, her husband had
started out as a fahfee man. She had fought his decision, even though
she knew he could do better financially with fahfee than working in a
restaurant. She thought it too risky and that his life was not worth the
chance of making a bit more money and eventually he agreed.
In 2010 they did manage to return to China. But it was not because they
had made their fortune. It was because her husband, whom I never met,
was involved in a car accident one night. He was given appalling care in
the government hospital, waiting for months for medical procedures and
being ignored by nurses who could not be bothered to try to understand
his few mumbled words of English. Eventually they decided to return to
China where he could get access to better state care and there would be
family on hand to nurse him back to health.
220
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Ah Mooi phoned me before she left. ‘I will be back, Ah Ngaan,’ she
said, ‘and my husband will be, too, once he is better.’
I really liked Ah Mooi’s attitude; she was always cheerful, always
wanting to try a bit more English out on me, as I did to her with my
Cantonese. She never asked for anything, not even a lift somewhere, and I
knew she did not drive or have access to a car. The only time she asked me
for help was to translate for her to the man she was talking to outside the
restaurant one day. No problem, I thought, and left my friends at the table
where we were having lunch and followed her outside.
I greeted the man in a big black 4x4 with a Swaziland number plate.
He grunted a greeting.
‘Please tell him that I need my passport back,’ said Ah Mooi.
I waited for a bit more of an explanation.
‘He said he had connections to someone at Home Affairs who can renew
my working holiday visa. I have already given him R5 000 to do that and
he has not come back with my passport for months now. Tell him please
that I just want to get my passport back. I do not care about the money or
the visa,’ Ah Mooi said, her expression now showing her agitation.
I faced the man and translated for him exactly what she had told me.
But he started swearing. ‘Tell her that I have been contacting Chookie
[or Chuckie?] at Randburg Home Affairs and she will get her f-ing passport
when he gives it back to me.’
I could not believe this man. Now I was getting agitated.
‘Listen, just bring back her passport. When can she expect it back?’ I
demanded.
‘Don’t you speak English? What’s wrong with any of yous [ sic], hey?
She will f-ing get it when I am f-ing ready,’ he said. He actually learnt out
of the window of his car as if he was going to slap me for telling him what
was expected from his end of the deal.
I was ready to have a full-blown confrontation with Mr Delightful,
who did not let up with his threats or his swearing. But as Ah Mooi tried
to pacify me I realised that I could retaliate and walk away from this man,
but Ah Mooi would still have to deal with him – he had to bring back her
passport.
I was embarrassed; I should have known better, sooner. As always, Ah
Mooi was not too fussed. She said he always spoke to her like that; he
spoke to all Chinese people like that.
221
UFRIEDA HO
‘He comes here and just says f*ck, f*ck, f*ck all the time to us,’ she
used the English expletive. She had learnt that word just fine.
It was an illegal transaction that she had entered into, buying papers,
hoping someone would come through for her and skirting the laws to get by.
Ah Mooi was exactly like my parents all those years ago, a paper daughter
trying to buy herself some freedom, some time and some opportunity in
the promised land.
Then, one winter morning in June 2008, I woke up black – legally black
that is. The Chinese South Africans had a won a nine-year legal challenge
to have the definition of black, as it is applied in the Employment Equity
and Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act of 2004, extended
to the Chinese community.
The challenge started in 1999, even before Black Economic
Empowerment (BEE) legislation was enacted. A pair of Chinese architects
in Kimberley had applied for an affirmative action tender only to be told
they did not qualify. With the rejection, a wave started to ripple through
the community. South African Chinese were classified as ‘coloured’ under
apartheid South Africa, but then were deemed not black enough in the new
South Africa, once again caught in the no-man’s-land of racial limbo.
When I initially heard of the representations to parliament and the
pending legal challenge that the community was instituting, I did believe
the Chinese were jumping on to the BEE bandwagon. So was everyone
else who was not white. To me, it was an infected policy not really
designed to level the playing field or fast-track people who were previously
disadvantaged.
I had no respect for the ‘we have struggled/suffered, now we must eat’
mentality. It was myopic and unsustainable and a pact with the devil. I saw
&nbs
p; the devil cutting his deal: you can gorge yourself today, take on the labels
and titles of fame and higher designation, drive the government car, use
the company expense account and watch your share portfolio mount. You
can have this because apartheid stole it from you. All you have to do is
answer one question truthfully when the devil returns. One day, the devil
will re-appear and he will ask: ‘Did you live up to your full potential to
create this success?’
222
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Without the correct answer, he will take the prize that even apartheid
could not wrest from you; he will take your dignity.
It seemed to me that the Chinese were dancing with demons. Then
the chairman of the Chinese Association of South Africa (CASA), Patrick
Chong, quietly chided me. He said: ‘Ufrieda, you and all the Chinese
children were protected from the worst of what apartheid dished up. This
challenge is about political affirmation, recognition that as non-whites we,
people like your mom and dad, were treated like second-class citizens. We
were discriminated against like all other non-white groups in South Africa.
We could not go to white schools, to cinemas or get on to certain buses
reserved for whites. If you wanted to go to university you had to make it
on to a quota system.’
I was at Pretoria High Court the day the ruling was eventually handed
down. I saw Mr Chong shed a tear as he embraced those who had come
out to support CASA’s fight. Among them was George Bizos, the celebrated
human rights lawyer who, through the Legal Resources Centre, had taken
up the community’s case.
I knew then that the long years of the court battle were not about
being able to buy preferential shares or about pulling up a seat at that
head table to gorge; they were about setting the record straight and about
reminding other South Africans that the Chinese were part of the South
African story.
But still it was not over. A court’s ruling is fiction for some people. It
does not change heads or hearts. Immediately after the ruling, I walked
into work and colleagues, who happen to be black, gave me hugs and said:
‘Yay, Ufrieda, now you are really one of us, sisi.’ I laughed and shrugged,
not sure what it all meant.
Then, about two weeks later, fury over the ruling exploded among
organisations such as the Black Management Forum. How dare the
Chinese South Africans claim a piece of the BEE pie? They never suffered
as much as blacks did and they had more opportunities. It was like saying
losing your legs is more serious than losing your eye. The Forum was
going to challenge the High Court ruling. At that time, it was estimated
that there were between 10 000 and 12 000 Chinese South Africans in
South Africa – the sum total of people who would qualify for any BEE or
affirmative action because the ruling did not apply to the Chinese who had
only arrived in the country after 1994.
Coincidentally, there was at the time a preferential share option for
a state-owned oil and petroleum company. Now that the Chinese were
223
UFRIEDA HO
legally black they were allowed to buy shares at a very good price. And
when newspapers snapped pictures of the Chinese in the queues it was the
confirmation that the Black Management Forum needed to say: ‘See, they
are eating our pie.’
I was not thinking environmentally or economically when I decided to
buy these shares; I was motivated more by anger, precisely because there
were those who said I was not allowed to and who were challenging a
court ruling.
When I went to buy the shares, there was a man in the queue in front of
me who looked as white as any other white South African. He said he was
buying shares, and that he was black. The lady behind the counter at the
post office looked him up and down once or twice but in lieu of pulling out
a pencil to administer a post-apartheid version of the infamous pencil test,
she processed his transaction. I had to laugh at the insanity of it all but it
was not a laughing matter.
The Black Management Forum and eleven other black associations
were ready for court action. It was Patrick Chong who flew from Cape
Town to address the Forum, ironically at one of their sit-down dinners in
swanky, swish Sandton.
He knew it was going to be a hostile crowd, but he stood up and started
his speech with words to the effect of: ‘Not one of us in this room needs
BEE.’
That was the truth, whether they wanted to hear it or not. When I
interviewed him some time after that dinner, I said I was confused and
irritated by all the labelling that had occurred since the ruling on 18 June.
The legally black ruling made me ‘a sister’ in one of the newsrooms where
I work, but a few weeks later I was a ‘ lekgoa’ to the same person, the Sotho
word for a disrespectful white person that has its derogatory origins in the
word for the white scum that rises on the top of waves to crash against the
shores. I wondered what had happened to simply being Ufrieda, as I had
always been.
Patrick Chong had more wisdom for me. ‘Ufrieda, you have to realise
that this ruling is not your right, it is your responsibility. You, like every
Chinese South African, has to work even harder to make sure everyone
around you who truly needs BEE will benefit from it.’
He was right. There was enough food to go around, less so generosity
of spirit.
I will always be someone’s ‘Ching Chong Chinaman’ and someone
else’s ‘ lekgoa’, ‘ kaffir sussie’ or ‘banana’. I grow more detached from these
224
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
labels each time I put my mind to it. I see more context for past hurts and
old injuries and I try to be patient for peace that cannot come just yet. In
the meantime, I know I can choose who I want to break bread with.
225
Dear Ah Ba
The world has changed so much since you left. I want to tell you everything
and share so much that is in my heart. But let me tell you what matters
here.
Some of your worst fears for the country did happen. I could tell you
about crumbling infrastructure, about manholes waiting to swallow small
children because they do not get fixed by councils that do not bother to
spend their budgets. They use the money instead for the big men with
small hearts; you can spot them in their over-the-top imported suits or by
the way they seem umbilically tied to so-called blue-light brigades.
I could tell you about rising road death tolls because no one has a
proper driver’s licence. Sometimes I wonder why you bothered to take me
out on all those driving lessons. And when we are on the roads we are all
so angry. Now they have a term for it. They call it road rage. It sounds all
new, dad, but sometimes I think it is old anger. We are angry because we
have all lost so much in this country and we cannot say it.
Crime has not improved since you were taken as a victim. South Africans
and ne
wcomers have even burnt people for having a different accent, for
not being able to say ‘elbow’ in Zulu. I have said goodbye to many more
people from violent crimes than I care to count. I am angry and tired of
226
PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
saying ‘my condolences’ to people who have lost their mothers and their
fathers. Too often I hear people say, ‘At least you got away with your life,’
when thieves have ransacked their homes and invaded their privacy and
the things they hold sacred. All those who do not die, keep paying the
price in terror. It wakes them in the middle of the night and grips tightly
in their hearts, making them cold even towards someone begging at the
side of the road.
But you were wrong about some things, and I am glad for that. The
black president who first came to power did just fine. He did better than
fine; he was part of a miracle. We came to respect him, to love him even,
and he reminds us of what is good and what is possible, even now.
Some things got bigger and better; some things just got bigger. Chips in
a can made it to South Africa, and Kodak came back after isolation. They
make cars with bum warmers these days and some even have little alarms
to guide you into a reverse parking. Just imagine, dad, you would not
have had to hold your breath sitting next to me, waiting for me to clear
a pillar or a pole in a parking lot. There are American fast food burgers
everywhere; you can even order straight from your car – that is part of the
bigger, not better, bit, I guess.
The little roadhouse on Louis Botha is still there, the one you took us
to for ‘puppies’. It is fighting for its share of tummy space with the big
franchises. I have not been back since you took us there. I think I am
overdue for a parfait, one for you, dad!
You will be glad to know I fry my own egg noodles, not the two-minute
variety we used to eat after burning crackers at midnight on New Year’s or
when we had played cards, 13-card rummy, doh daai dee , until late into
the holiday nights and you thought a midnight snack would be a good
idea. I actually soak the mushrooms and I cut the vegetables finely. I have
even mastered Ah Goung’s steamed eggs recipe; the right proportion of
cooled boiled water to beaten eggs and just the right minutes for the wok
to work its steaming fury. I get it right almost all of the time!
