Paper Sons & Daughters
Chapter 1
Pinky
I lie on the lap of a giant pink teddy bear and stare up at a galaxy of full stops in the perforated canopy of my dad’s old Cortina.
My nine-year-old self starts to count the dots but my stop-start conversation with my dad in the driver’s seat keeps bringing me back to number one. We lurch towards another traffic light and my counting is distracted again as I grip on to the Cortina’s fake leather seats with their exhausted stitching that has long ago surrendered to outbursts of foam.
I work through the dots again. I do not mind because my father is in a good mood, so I am in a good mood. Dad is happy and Pinky is the trophy to prove it. We have bought her at a roadside stall along with two smaller teddies holding their breath inside puffed-up plastic bags. Among the gifts there is a round leather ottoman, dubiously shaped by a rustling straw inner. My mom is going to be delighted with her gift and so will my brother and two sisters.
But these are more than just gifts – Pinky, with her curly blue bow and large flat eyes, is a triumph of dad’s success at the fahfee banks today.
My father, my Ah Ba, is a fahfee man, the mm-china or ma-china of the townships, a so-called ju fah goung, as we say in Cantonese. Fahfee is an illegal betting game with 36 numbers and wonderfully curious connections to dreams, to superstitions and to luck and chance; the dirty gambling of the townships.
In South Africa fahfee has evolved from its recreational gambling roots and has been transformed into an economic survival strategy. It can endure in South Africa’s socio-political space where segregation is so well worn it is like an involuntary impulse to separate, to categorise, to divide. It is South Africa in the 1980s and there is no place for a yellow man, especially not one like my dad who is uneducated, who is not savvy to the social rules that make up polite white society and who is prohibited from even trying to fit in.
It is to fahfee that he turns and the townships far from the mainstream of middle class. And it is what my father does for the biggest chunk of my memory. Fahfee, when the gambling gods will it, brings fortune, good times and even the likes of Pinky. It pays for my school fees, treats at a roadhouse and eventually an assortment of second-hand cars as we climb the ladder to middle class.
All the time, what turns up in the numbers makes real the superstitions of the old country: the mysterious what-ifs that connect the realm of the explained with what cannot be known. And in the dreamtime, the fahfee man’s beliefs and impressions thread together a place far, far east to the golden mountain of Johannesburg, glorious with the nostalgia of when the yellow metal did line the streets.
Fahfee is about sweat and drudgery. It is about toil on the periphery of society where it stays hidden, out of sight and secret. It is about what luck brings and what risks you are prepared to take when you stand to lose everything.
In my family, fahfee means we stand to lose a lot.
Chapter 2
Here be Dragons
I grew up in Bertrams, in the east of Johannesburg, in the 1970s and 80s. I am the third of four children. We lived in a semi-detached house along a wide road that pulled apart the suburb for the cars advancing towards the shopping centre and highway exchange that over the next three decades would become the massive mall of Eastgate and the throbbing clot of the N3 interchange.
This was a so-called grey area, where Chinese people were mostly ignored for living in these spaces that were still legally reserved for whites in apartheid South Africa. No one cared really that a few Chinese lived here because these were not the fancy suburbs where people worried about backwashing swimming pools or keeping appointments at the doggie parlour. Like dragons in fairytales, we were left to become the demons of people’s theories, mysteries and loathing. As long as we stayed in our lairs and did not breathe out fire, we were pretty much left alone.
Of course, I did not know then that things like pool maintenance separated and defined people. I did not know that being Chinese made me different, like I did not know what fahfee would come to mean for my family, and especially for my father.
This gambling game practised in hidden places was never spoken about openly to outsiders. Fahfee was always sullied, polluted somehow. It was associated with the working class, with transacting with the poorest of the poor. And so fahfee was something people skirted around even to community insiders and completely so to outsiders. It remained a practice of humiliation and secrecy, which turned into a practice of shame and stigma.
I did not know these things in the 1980s when I was growing up as we were a part of living these shadows and scars. We were a society full of cleavages; we shared a country, but we were not a nation. Separated in delineated living spaces, we stayed in our boxes of stereotypes, convenient prejudices and simmering tensions.
I was blissfully unaware of all this as a child, a bit like the small fertile patch in our garden that showed happy oblivion or maybe it was quiet rebellion, growing with abandon against expectation and convention. Where there should have been hydrangeas and pansies, the small patch of soil became a vegetable haven of downy winter melons, smooth green Chinese spinach and eruptions of spring onion – the vegetables you could not find in a local greengrocer in South Africa in the 1980s, but which were the staples on a Chinese family’s daily menu.
Most Chinese we knew used whatever land was around them to grow food. No one really moaned about the fluttering strips of plastic bags that stood in for scarecrows because this was a crumbling bit of suburbia.
Further down the road lived a Chinese woman and her adult son. She raised chickens on the small property and sometimes we walked down to her corner house to buy a freshly slain bird.
The old aunty disappeared behind the backyard door, closed it and told us to wait. There was a muffled squawking, the sound of someone moving quickly. We sat in the kitchen in silence, imagining the poor chickens darting across their small pen hoping not to be the unlucky one. She reappeared some minutes later with a limp bird, some of its white feathers wet where the first blood of its death had been rinsed off. The chicken was placed into a double-bagged, blue-grey plastic bag and we walked home with its still-warm body knocking against our legs, ready to be paired with our winter melons on the dinner table.
Outside the stout walls of our house an oak tree’s trunk burst out of the grey pavement. It was the pavement where the old brown Cortina was parked, because there was no garage or driveway. There was no grassaround the old giant, just a scattering of its leaves and acorns; the rest was tarred. I liked to collect the little nuts, pop off their hats and peel off their hard casings until my fingernails were split and sore. The pain was worth it to treat the squirrels that I believed lived in our neighbour’s tree. My older sister Yolanda (I called her Kaa Jeh or Kaatch) convinced me that my furry friends did appreciate my efforts, so I happily peeled away in pain, but there were no squirrels in suburban Joburg. Yolanda kept up her poker face and I believed her, thinking that the more I peeled, the more grateful the squirrels would be and then I would surely see them.
I did my growing up with Yolanda, who is the eldest. She was short, cheeky and always hatching a plan to get her way and to get us to be at her side when it happened, just in case things went pear-shaped. My older brother Kelvin was the only boy, all stringy and weedy when we were growing up. He tempted us to join in his invented games and we could not help being his participating audience for his card stunts and magic tricks, begging him to show us how to do them, but of course he revealed nothing. He was the brother who offered to ‘operate’ on a pair of talking teddies. He said he would open their voice boxes, tweak their wires and electric chips and they would greet us again with ‘Hello, I am Teddy the bear, the one who is always there’. We believed him but once their little voice boxes landed in his surgeon hands, our bears never greeted us again. Perhaps they just needed a fresh set of batteries. The baby was Unisda. She was quiet and mostly went with the flow, scooped off her feet by the waves of her older siblings. Unisda and I were so close in age we became like twins relegated to the bottom of the pecking order.
Together we made up the generation of Hos born on South African soil, here in the eastern suburbs of Johannesburg. We have Chinese names, too. Mine is Chiu Ngaan, which means colour. In Chinese your surname comes first. My sisters are Chiu Yeng and Chiu Saan. Chui is the common name for us girls and it means jade. My brother is Beng Leung; it means bright, and Beng is a common name he shares with all the other second cousins in the extended family. My parents realised that in South Africa we needed to have English names, too. I thought I had a strange English name; for years until I was well into my teens I resented the unusualness of my name. Not only did I almost always have to repeat myself, but I also had to think up explanations that I had no answers for.
Even Ho is strange. People always wait for more, like surely I mean to say Hough or Home or maybe at least the addition of an ‘e’ and I have tosay: ‘That is it, just H.O.’ There is not even an ordinary animal I know that starts with U, as in Betty the Bear, David the Donkey or Helen the Horse.
My mother’s uncle was entrusted with the role of giving us English names, because my parents did not trust their own English proficiency. My theory is that this grand-uncle, whose English was also a little dodgy, managed fine with Yolanda and Kelvin – both being reasonably ordinary names. But by the time I came along I think he believed some creative licence had been earned. My younger sister also got a ‘U’ tagged on to the start of her name and she became Unisda. At least we both had Us and that horseshoe letter looped us together as we grew up. I always laugh when I imagine what would have happened if my parents had had a fifth child who would probably have been subjected to a concocted ‘U’ name, too.
In my family we call each other by our Chinese names. I respond to Ah Ngaan and we used an old-fashioned address of calling older siblings not by their names but by something that translates as ‘my family sister’ or ‘my family brother’. With only a year or so between me and my younger sister, Unisda took to calling me Ah Ngaan when we were children. I was too little to think that it was not proper but my parents kept trying to drum into Unisda’s head that I was Yee Kaa Jeh (second family sister) not Ah Ngaan to her. It did not work – I am still Ah Ngaan or Ngaanie to her today.
We were squashed into a less-than-six-year age gap from youngest to oldest so it made for a riotous growing up in our household.
We three girls shared a bedroom painted in a peachy pink. It was topped with a naked light bulb in the centre – there were no extras like fancy light fittings – that cast gently swaying shadows over the walls and floor at night when there was a bit of a breeze.
Unisda and I shared a bunk bed in the room, while Yolanda was pushed up against the opposite wall. For years we switched between taking up the bottom and the top bunk. We liked to push our feet up against the soft steel frame and irritate the person who was on the top bunk.
‘Hey, stop it man,’ the top-bunker whined as the bottom-bunker pushed harder against the diamond mesh of the bed frame, bouncing the top bunker a bit.
But the top bunk was also a refuge. With every few feet from ground level the lucky top-bunker got to escape the general madness of the congested shared space that was our bedroom.
The assortment of furniture in our room collided with patterned homemade curtains, dark, practical carpets and rugs and the rainbow frenzy of smiling teddies and toys that shared our beds.
We also made a mess, a lot of it. Clothes we never folded and never put away made ever-growing, crumpled mountains. And mom and dad’s moans and threats could not keep up with the neglected dust balls we were supposed to clean up.
Across the passage my brother fought off the dolls and girly saturation with train sets and Lego. As the only boy he did not have to share a room but he did have to give up some of his domain for storage space in the form of locked wardrobes, canned food and toilet paper bought in bargain bulk.
Sometimes my parents opened up the wardrobes to air out a winter coat, lined and heavy, or to retrieve a satin-finished, heavily encrusted evening bag replete with sparkling beads and tassels. These were the outfits and accessories reserved for weddings, an 80th birthday or some other dress-up event. When my parents did open up the wardrobes, the strangely comforting smells of mothballs, old wood and dark places filled my nostrils. It was the release of these otherwise intangible treasures, the moment that these items of whimsy and wonder were temporarily let loose to interrupt the ordinariness of a normal day.
Normal days for us children were made up of the bliss of turning the passage that dominated the small semi into our playground. It was full of potential for hide-and-seek, which we played often, and games of fantastic make-believe.
An old record player had its home in the passage, wedged into a corner behind the front door that had a frosted glass panel in a design resembling a flower and was complete with an ankle-high letter flap that said ‘Letters/Briewe’. My father had won the record player in a community raffle years before he met my mother. For a long time it was the only fancy thing he owned that was not handed down, loaned or bought second-hand.
Even as it stood in our passage, it belonged to a different world, not the world of a fahfee man who worked long hours every day dodging authorities, arguing with grumpy gamblers or becoming grumpy himself on days when the gambling gods turned the tables on the ma-china. He did not have the luxury of turning to a music box for pleasure.
I do not remember my father ever pursuing a proper hobby all his life, just the distractions of his own gambling, or on the odd occasion being themaster chef of a cook-up of a special dish like crispy deep-fried pigeon or garlic and ginger crab, all creepily alive, scratching in the boxes punched with small holes or in shallow buckets of water, waiting for my father to come home for the big slaughter.
The record player flanked a wardrobe filled with sheets and homemade curtains. My mother never threw anything out; a worn sheet was cut down the middle and sewn together again where the fabric still endured. Even when its life as a sheet was finally over, it was reincarnated as a patterned floor rag that found itself useful again on the kitchen floor.
The record player was the princess in this sea of sensible practicalities. It looked like an old-fashioned letter-writing bureau with its wooden legs and its curious flip-up lid. It had a revolving rubberised disc and a slow-moving mechanical arm. My mother kept a few records that were loaned from friends and family. They were mostly Chinese opera records or high-pitched sweetly sung folksongs, all dusty and housed in crumbling paper sleeves. When my mother plugged in the record player and set it into life, it never failed to fascinate us as its mechanical arm shifted across with fluid precision and dropped exactly as a vinyl flopped gently on to the revolving disc. It broke into the squeaky opera songs and we mimicked the singers and then put our hands over our ears as the records squealed on. My mother, though, loved it. She did not have a singing voice but it did not stop her from testing out the tunes and the lyrics. We laughed and laughed, making faces at what sounded like pained cries and howling. The singing was mostly in old-fashioned Chinese and with the added high-pitched squeaks we caught very little of the storyline, even though mom tried to tell us what was going on as the characters wailed to each other.
The record player also doubled up as a counter top when we played shop. We lifted its lid, took in the smell of its wood, pushed the arm and turned the dials like it was a cash machine. If I was the shopkeeper, I got to stand by the record player. Unisda was my customer most of the time, picking up her ‘purchases’ of bits of tea set, teddies, pencils and crayons before coming to the ‘pay-point’. I pretended to ring up her goodies, pushed the buttons and the dials, then packed her purchases into a plastic bag and said ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye and see you again’.
Later on I learnt the dials were for record speeds and we drew out the comedy in the records by making them yelp at chipmunk-speak speed. Sometimes the record player was simply a place to sit and swing our legs when our mom and dad were not looking.
The old semi had pressed ceilings and old-fashioned chair rails. The chair rails created a split wall effect that convinced my ever-practical mother to paint the walls in an odd contrast of midnight-blue and creamy white in a paint that had a shiny finish. It was shiny because the oil paint finishes were easier to wash, my mom said. She chose midnight-blue on the bottom half of the wall, so the dark paint disguised our grubby handprints and our wax crayon art that proved to be stubbornly permanent – a little like the lingering sting of a whack on the bum for making the drawings in the first place.
We were punished quite harshly if we were naughty, misbehaved or were disrespectful. There was no thinking-step, time-out or negotiations; that is all the stuff of 21st-century parenting. In our household you could count on a tongue-lashing and a hiding. We might also be banished to our rooms or locked out of the house for a few hours, threatened with no dinner and told to ponder our actions on the stoep (veranda) – or rather to wait for my mother’s seething finally to evaporate. If my mother was really mad she would wait until my dad came home. If he thought what we had done called for a second round of punishment then we would see a replay of my mother’s rage, acted out by my dad and maybe even a whip or two from one of his belts.
One day, though, when I was about nine or ten, my dad said he would never hit me again because if I had not learnt my lessons by then no amount of hidings would teach me to be the wiser. It scared me more, thinking I would have to live up to the expectations of my parents rather than deal with a stinging bum.
But we did not fight with our parents much; we dared not. Chinese children, at least as far as my parents were concerned, did not negotiate, did not backchat. Filial respect was not an option for Chinese children. There was a Confucian thread that ran through our childhood of honouring your parents, of trusting their word even if you disagreed. I believed my parents were harsher than other parents. As I grew up, I thought them old fashioned, conservative; now I know that they were exactly as they had to be.
The old ways were ever-present in our house. Sometimes we were scared into good habits with old wives’ tales and the superstitions, myths and rituals that were bred in a closeted place in China but were never far away. If we left grains of rice in our bowls, we were told that children were starving, that each grain could grow into a plant and we had wastedits potential. Other times my mom said it meant we would find an ugly spouse. If you sneaked food from a chopping board, she said it would mean we would be cursed to be damned for things that were not our fault.
Over time, the superstitions were infused with my mother’s personal concoctions, too. We did not wash our hair on the first day of new year or on our birthdays or each other’s birthdays because the word for prosperity, faat, sounds like the word for hair and washing your hair on these luckiest days would rinse away prosperity. My mother also believed that if you broke something on the last day of the old year, you took the same clumsiness and misfortune into the new year … very unlucky. My gawky child’s co-ordination dribbled food on my clothes and often relieved cups of their handles so I spent most New Year’s Eves terrified of a slip-up.
Superstitions slipped directly into my beliefs, too, even though I eventually acquired enough common sense to doubt their actual power to manifest doom and gloom or to alter destiny. I understood that superstitions gave people something to hold on to. They helped them to contain the unexplained and they gave some order and hope when none existed. Still, I was not immune to these forces.
One day I was playing around in the house with Unisda and I accidentally bumped a stand where the porcelain statue of Kwun Yum took pride of place. One year my granny had bought each of us grandchildren a figurine of the most important deities that rule a Chinese home. Kwun Yum is the goddess of mercy and goodness, and she was Unisda’s figurine. She rose out of a lotus flower with a flowing robe, a beatific expression, pure and so good. I literally decapitated this 30-cm saintly deity as she fell backwards. It was a clean break right across her slender neck and as I held her head in my hand I could peer down through the hollow core right to the small hole at the base of the porcelain goddess’s lotus pedestal.
Terror gripped me as I imagined how angry my mother would be when she found out. More than this, though, I was also horrified that I had invoked the anger of this mystical creature and that she would rain bad luck and evil on me or my family for my insult and my violation.
Unisda could only look on in relief that she was not the one who had crashed against the stand. I had to enlist her help and her complicity and we took Pritt, the paper glue stick, from our schoolbags to glue her back together. I smeared the glue around the clay-like rim and balanced Kwun Yum’s head back on her neck. I almost breathed a sigh of relief when I sawshe was still smiling and looked surprisingly whole, no visible chips or anything. Still, I clasped my hands together, almost involuntarily, assumed a prayer position and bowed three times in front of the statue, in that old respectful Chinese way.
Kwun Yum made it and even survived a house move years later. In fact, she still stands in my mom’s house today, perfect bar the faint line above the beads that adorn her throat. What also survived were my sister’s sneers. She reminded me even when we were grown-ups about my submission to superstition. It embarrassed my adult wish to snub silly superstitions, but actually I was happy Kwun Yum was still smiling.
I even once followed a very old Chinese custom of going down on your knees and offering a cup of tea as a sincere apology. It was like a dramatic scene out of a Chinese period film. Imagine the flowing silk robes pushed to the side as the person with the guilt drops to the ground with head bowed and two hands raised holding up a teacup. The person who must grant forgiveness gazes out of a rice-paper-filled window pane and sighs; and tears maybe then roll down the cheeks of the person on the ground as the teacup is taken and the contents gulped down.
On one occasion I played out this scene with my mother because I had made her so angry. I cannot remember now what I had done but it had been terrible and I was truly sorry. On top of this, my mother suffered from migraines and on the day I had made her so cross she was struck by one of these headaches. When the headaches came they scared me because she would get so ill she would have to take to her bed with the curtains closed and she would lie there in the darkness.
My mother – who could fix anything of ours that broke, knew instantly where to find our missing shoes, toys or whatever, even when we said we had looked everywhere, and was never late with a dinner or for picking us up after school – was diminished to a groaning patient with no one to take care of her. We could only watch, occasionally slipping into the darkened room and calling her softly, only for her not to respond. She would not feel much better even with the green and white capsules that were in huge supply in her drawers and even after tying thin slices of potatoes with a cloth around her forehead and smearing the Chinese bak fa youw, the menthol-smelling ‘white flower oil’, on her temples and behind her ears.
When a headache coincided with that terrible something I had done, I was horror-struck and sure that I had brought on the pain. I remembered the old custom of asking for forgiveness and how my mother had said itwas old fashioned but correct. So I brewed a cup of Chinese tea with a few dried leaves, throwing out the first seep then refreshing it with more hot water. I put a saucer under the cup and took it to my mother’s room. I called her and she turned on the bedside lamp in the darkened room. I said my teary sorry as I dropped to my knees and I offered her the tea. She drank the tea; mothers always do, I guess.
