Paper Sons and Daughters
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children anyway. It was tiny but we grew up along its central passage that
seemed perfectly long enough for my six- or seven-year-old self. It was
a house with hiding places and unusual nooks and crannies. There was
a small pantry and scullery attached to the kitchen. The pantry was like
a science laboratory with shelves upon shelves of strange and wonderful
things stored in glass Consol jars and tins with faded pictures of cherry
blossoms and Chinese words. They were filled with dried wood fungus,
dried wolf berries (now marketed as superfood goji berries that make it
on to the ingredients list for smoothies and muesli), dried shrimp and
dried sheets of crinkling, brittle tofu; there was pungent fermented tofu in
jars of spicy brine and pickled lettuce and pickled salted fish. Sometimes
when my mom was not looking, my father would sneak down a handful
of dried shrimp from a shelf we children could not reach. Usually these
shrimps were soaked until soft and added to other dishes like glutinous
rice cooked up in sticky deliciousness or taro potato cakes dotted with
these treasures in their sturdy slabs. To eat the small and salty, peanut-like
morsels was forbidden – they were expensive delicacies that my mom tried
to ration and use sparingly. Sometimes we would chew on these curled
salty bodies, giggling in our secret pact.
When our games spilled out of the semi-detached house, we amused
ourselves in the backyard. The backyard began with a long strip veranda
jammed with a few chairs, pot plants and an outside cooking area that
always left everything slightly greasy. Every authentic Chinese house needed
one of these cooking spots. It was here that a fierce gas fire could be tamed
into a cooking plate to make woks sizzle for gastronomic alchemy and it
made easy work of even a three-tier bamboo steaming rack.
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To get to the yard, you went down a flight of grey, concrete steps.
The yard’s uneven surface was filled with small, dark, coal-like flakes,
not concrete paving or sand or grass. It crunched under our feet and was
so loose and uneven you could not bounce a ball on its rutted dreariness.
There were also two small hollowed-out areas under the house and the
stairs. These cavernous structures spooked me. They were used to store
coal in the house’s previous lives when people still relied on coal for their
stoves and fireplaces. In our house, though, the stained, larger hollow was
filled with junk, mostly broken furniture and appliances that no longer
worked but that my parents thought might be fixed and prove useful again
some day. The smaller hollow became a dog kennel of cardboard and old
blankets for the dogs that shared our lives as children.
There were also three smaller storerooms in the yard and an outside
toilet. One was used as a storeroom with more old toys, broken appliances,
wedding gifts never opened and saved for a special occasion and more
toilet paper and soap bought in bulk that did not fit in Kelvin’s room.
The second storeroom was turned into a pigeon coop on and off in the
years we lived in Bertrams. When it was used to raise birds, the stifling
dark room was filled with stacked old five-litre oil tins with pictures of
sunflowers on the front. These were cut out crudely, folded back and filled
with dried grass and straw for the nests. These pigeons were not pets.
They were raised for slaughter. I did not like going into their room and
the adjoining open aviary but we were expected to clean the coops, scatter
the feed and change the water bowls. As the pigeons’ cooing gave way
to sudden flapping, I was always startled and felt like holding my breath
among the dirty airborne down feathers and bird poop. I guess I also never
liked the coop because I knew the pigeons’ throats would be slit and their
sagged bodies would be plunged into boiling water sooner or later. They
would be plucked of the feathers that made them resemble the birds that
were just moments ago pecking away at their corn and my feet. Then they
would be deep fried to a crispy delicacy that my father was particularly
fond of. I also liked them for many of my childhood years, I have to admit,
but it became too sad to connect the dots to their death and then to my
stomach.
Throughout our time in the Bertrams Road house, and even for a few
years after that, my mother raised chickens and even a duck or two. We
all eventually learnt not to get attached to them as they roamed around
pecking corn and seeds that we scattered for them. I was never comfortable
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UFRIEDA HO
with the slaughter even when it was deliberately hidden from us children
and sometimes we were simply told the birds had flown away.
Unisda (or Ah Saan as I called her by her Chinese name) and I also
had two pet rabbits. Hers was snow white and her eyes looked reddish
sometimes in different light. We called her Jane. My bunny was called
Dick; we decided he was a boy because he was black and white. The names
came from a book my sister and I had to read as one of our first readers,
the iconic Dick and Jane series.
My mother built our rabbits a hutch, sectioning off a part of the
charcoaled backyard for them and putting up chicken wire held together
with scrap bits of wood nailed together. We fed them wilted Chinese
spinach leaves, vegetable scraps and treats of juicy carrots wedged through
the hexagons of the chicken wire.
My mom did not drive until I was about eight years old. So sometimes
she let Saan and I walk to the local greengrocer a couple of blocks from
our home to get food for Dick and Jane. We dragged home a big mesh
bag of carrots for our bunnies. We loved to watch them hop close to the
mesh and gnaw down at the sweet carrots, leaving small stumps once the
sweetness of the sections of new growth were spent. I liked that we could
pet them without fear that they would dart out of their hutch or retreat
to a corner.
One day we arrived home from school to find an aunt we called Yee Gu
Mah, a spinster and an older relative on my father’s side of the family, had
come to visit. It was a novelty that she had come over to visit on a school
night and she said she would be staying for dinner. The break in routine
was fun enough; it meant mom let up on the routine of homework and
chores as she was distracted with Yee Gu Mah’s visit. We changed out of
our school uniforms, which my mother was always strict about, and went
to feed Dick and Jane.
When we could not find them we rushed with alarm back up the stairs
to tell my mom that the rabbits were missing. She said they must have
burrowed out of the hutch and run away. We were heartbroken and
crushed. That night, though, my chopsticks could not connect with the
pieces of meat that were generously piled in my bowl. I did not know for
sure then that our rabbits were the meal and years later I have never asked
outright either. I guess it is because I have always known the answer.
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As
we grew up our games were made up of the mystical East and the
reality of South African life. They were two different worlds that adhered
together, contiguous and joined, and in places they fused in a weird but
easy mingle. The copper-plated springbok ornament with mighty horns in
relief was the epitome of 1970s kitsch decor. Ours was mounted alongside
a fabric wall-hanging of an artist’s impression of the precipitous drop of
China’s sheer mountains as they spiked into the mists of the old country.
A game my brother Kelvin invented one afternoon saw Unisda and
I pretend to be the lion from the traditional Chinese lion dance. The
dances are part of every Chinese celebration, chasing away bad spirits and
welcoming new abundance. We were the head and the tail of the lion and
Kelvin played the part of the daai dou faat, the caricatured big-headed
man, who leads the menacing lion away from the village in a fable of
triumph over evil, of bravery and community celebration.
To lead the creature away from the village, as the myth goes, Kelvin
needed a magical wand, a chalice of sorts, as all good daai dou faats have.
For that day’s game he managed to smuggle a joss stick from the bundle
that my mother kept locked away to light for the ancestors and the gods.
They were lit for protection and prosperity on auspicious days or days of
remembrance. We knew these fragrant incense sticks were not toys and
playthings, along with all the other paraphernalia of pretend gold and
silver printed papers that were folded into intricate paper ingots to be
burnt for the dead, our revered ancestors. But which eight-year-old could
resist something that burned and glowed and left a wisp of fragrant smoke
in a tidy trail just long enough to be noted before it dissipated?
Kelvin had figured out that the small cupboard in the hallway where
the joss sticks, candles, matches and papers were kept locked away was
topped by a drawer that could be removed completely. If you slipped your
hand carefully between the partition of the drawer and the locked door
you could maybe fish out a prize like the joss stick he successfully captured
that day.
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UFRIEDA HO
Unisda and I took up our positions as the head and the tail of the lion
under a brightly coloured blanket. The lions in the dance were always
brightly coloured with bells and ribbon frills and my favourite – their
fantastically long-lashed eyelids could be pulled along a pulley on the
inside by the dancer to make the lion look like he was winking. In keeping
with the festive shades of the lions we were so used to for these dances, the
blanket we chose to use was one that had bright blooms on the one side, a
soft cloth underside and a pleated ribbon edge.
We threw the blanket over our heads, Unisda bent and gripped my waist
to become the hind legs and we peeped out to follow Kelvin’s glowing
joss stick as we danced around the bedroom, careful not to bump against
the double bunk. As the joss stick glowed, we followed its seductive
smoke coils, making up our own version of the rhythmic drum beat that
accompanied every lion dance. ‘Boom ba da boom, ba boom, ba boom, ba
boom,’ we shouted out. But in our manic twists and turns and our jokes
and giggles, the joss stick dropped on to the blanket and its decorative
flower prints proved to serve better as synthetic kindling. There were no
flames, just an enlarging hole that spread at a speed outpaced only by our
growing horror of what we could look forward to when my mother and
father found out.
We would be punished for sure for this palm-sized hole we had created
and for playing with the joss stick. We stamped out the rush of the burn
but the hole stayed and the room filled with a chemical stench. And so, in
the end, we decided to conceal the evidence of the now holey blanket. We
said nothing and hoped to high heaven that we were never caught out.
Unisda and I had matching versions of this ill-fated blanket, hers with
dominant blue colours and mine with stronger pink colours. As with so
many of our things, from our clothes to our toys, they were identical or
almost matching. Even our teddies and soft toys that have survived into
our adulthood are twins or near twins and we named them similarly. We
found tiny differences in our toys to distinguish ownership. Like ‘Pinky
Winky has longer whiskers and Winky Pinky has shorter whiskers’; we
also had matching St Bernard toy dogs called Sweetball and Meatball,
sausage dogs we called Dakin and Dalkin, and small teddies we called
Blackey and Purpley. When we played Big Ears and Noddy, I was Big Ears
and she was Noddy but we had matching orange knitted hats with multi-
coloured pompoms at their ends made by my mother; my pompom was
slightly bigger than her pompom, we decided, always finding the small
differences of our twinned things.
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It was a system that Unisda and I worked out and kept to quite naturally
and it followed us into our adulthood. Many years later, my sister-in-law
gave us beautiful classic bears after she and Kelvin were married. There
were three bears for her new sisters-in-law and she asked us to choose.
Two of the three bears were identical and as always Unisda and I chose
the twin teddies simultaneously. Joe, my sister-in-law, could only laugh.
‘Kelvin said that was exactly what you would do.’
Yolanda, too, had a favourite game that she made up when we were
growing up – a completely South African one that she liked to play on
cold days when we were stuck indoors. The game started with the four
of us piling on to her bed. An old Sealy with wheels, it was my dad’s bed
from his bachelor days. Our backs faced the wall. In her scariest voice
she told us that the bogeyman, the ghost of a man called Vorster, was
going to come and get us if we fell off the bed. Much, much later I found
out that Vorster was the prime minister at the time and he was indeed a
bogeyman, but then he was a random name Yolanda had plucked from
her imagination or maybe snatched from a passing conversation she heard
from the adults. In her game, it was about who fell off the bed first. With
her legs, which at that stage of her life (and about the only stage of her
life) were longer than all of ours, she nudged the bed away from the wall,
telling us the Vorster ghost was stalking us. Screaming in terror as the bed
squeaked along the worn carpets and the floor, we scrambled around the
bed, pushing each other to stay away from the edge. But inevitably one
of us, usually Unisda or I, fell, or was pushed on to the floor and into the
abyss of Yolanda’s horror stories. We sobbed and vowed never to play the
stupid game again, at least not until later that afternoon.
On hot summer days we wished into being the pale blue ice cream
truck that said ‘Roomys’ on its side and, like the Pied Piper, cranked out a
mechanical tune to lead the children into lactose heaven. We wished even
harder that our mom would say yes to the treat of creamy ice cream swirls
and the du
bious ooze of pink syrup.
Occasionally she conceded and then we screamed down the street,
waving to stop the van as its musical tune started to get softer and softer
in the distance. My mom stood watch at the gate, purse in hand, as we
chased the van, then ran back to her for a few shiny, solid discs that were
the old R1 coins with their assured springboks. We raced back to the idling
van, stood on tiptoe to watch the ice cream vendor push down the lever
that made the ice cream flop in crenulated twirls into a coloured cone.
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UFRIEDA HO
Mom did not have much of a sweet tooth, so she mostly shook her head
when we asked if she was sure she did not want an ice cream, too. We
returned to the stoep, walking, licking our ice creams. She told us to eat
up quickly before they melted, but already the serviette wrapped around
the cone was sticky and wet and so were our hands.
At dinner we crunched through fare of yummy delights of black wood
ear fungus or savoured the rich grey mush of the yolks of 100-year-old
preserved eggs. These were the foods of the Cantonese plate.
The kitchen was my mom’s domain for preparing vegetables, steaming
dumplings and creating slowly cooked rice soups, congee. There was always
the sound of chopping, knives slicing vegetables into julienned perfection
or mighty Chinese choppers slashing down into animal carcasses – all
done on a prized dense round of tree trunk that even the sharpest Chinese
chopper failed to penetrate. My mom also had a pasta-making machine,
but in our house it was for noodles and wonton skins. It was hi-tech for
its time with its shiny silver colour, its metal screw-on bracket to keep the
machine firmly wedged against the kitchen top and its removable winding
arm to slot into varying settings.
My mother kneaded the eggy dough patiently, turning it over again
and again, slamming it against the table, anointing sprinkles of flour
everywhere and then repeating the squish, squash action.
Cutting thick slices from the dough, she dusted them and set them
through the machine to turn the dough into silky tumbles of noodles. She
collected the noodles with her fingers and coiled them into little rounds that
she laid out on a baking sheet with grease-proof paper. The wonton skins