by Ufrieda Ho
They figured they would not need to know English. Sure there were
the odd gwei los, the white ghosts, that made up the white British ex-
pats living on the island they had colonised since the cession of Hong
Kong in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking as the Opium Wars came to
an end, but Hong Kong working-class people like my granny and mom
would probably never have to ‘Good Morning, Sir’ anyone. And anyway,
a violent shake of the head or a raised hand signalling an insistent ‘no, no’
was usually enough to dissuade any attempt at conversation – just the way
they wanted it.
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UFRIEDA HO
But my mother figured wrong. One day she would be heading for South
Africa and there English would come in handy, even her schoolgirl phrases.
And that day had arrived.
To this day her English is poor even though she manages in her own
way. ‘How was I to know that we would actually end up in South Africa
for good?’ she says.
My mother had met a young man in Hong Kong, too. She sometimes
told us stories about him and how she fantasised about marrying this
educated, handsome gentleman one day. Once or twice he walked her
home and they occasionally swopped books. There was nothing serious
about her crush, but it was filled with all the promise of romance.
My mother can remember knowing that their nascent romance would
never go any further when she realised that in a matter of weeks she would
have to say goodbye. It was also a farewell to the land of her birth and to
the future she had imagined for herself.
She did end up writing a few letters to this young man once she had
finally settled in Johannesburg, but their correspondence tapered off as
they had less and less in common. It made me a little sad, as a child, that
this was a love that never was. I could not make sense of all the maybes
and what ifs and I could not know of my mom’s backward glance of life
when as a child I was still counting my years in halves.
For my mom, there were very few freedoms and even fewer extras as
a child. There was certainly no room for boys even if it was as innocent
as her friendship with this young man. As a child she recalls seldom being
allowed to play as much as the children back in the village. While others
stayed out late into the night, taking part in lantern festivals that marked
the end of the fifteen-day new year celebrations, my mother would be
called back home earlier than anyone else. Then at school in Hong Kong
there was hardly a school trip she was allowed to be part of and she was
not permitted to stay away from home overnight, and of course she never
dated boys.
She grew to resent my gran hugely as she grew older. It was not because
this romance was denied. But it seemed like all the times my gran said
no finally made it easy for my mother to choose sides when the cold war
waged between her father and mother went into full freeze many years
later.
The pressure on my grandmother was immense. She had to raise this
daughter, her only child, without fault or fingers being pointed at her and
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
there was no one to share the blame with. She would not have known how
to answer to my grandfather or his family if something had happened to
my mother. And now she had to deliver her safely across the Indian Ocean
and into the arms of an unknown land.
Still, this journey was for a better life, she had to imagine, and some
of her friends must have congratulated her on her good fortune to be
destined for a life in a city of gold. My gran must have let herself have that
wish, too.
In a family album we have a black and white studio photograph of
my grandmother and mom as a pre-teen girl. There is a studio backdrop
of trees and deep cool pools and a serene, water-coloured world. It was
probably a photograph taken to be sent to my grandfather. These studio
backdrops were sentimental landscapes of sugar-coated denial. The truth
was that Mao had set China on a path of disaster by the 1950s and into
the 60s. And even though Hong Kong was in the hands of the imperialists
in the form of the British, the spillover of the Cultural Revolution was
evident on the island, too. Life was equally strained in Hong Kong where
the majority of people were part of the working class, happy simply to hold
on to low-paying jobs such as working in factories and on the docks.
It meant that my mother and grandmother would make the journey
and put their faith in what my grandad had built up in the close-to-two
decades of separation.
It was in the mid-1960s that my gran and mom paid their fees to
be smuggled on to a ship. They packed the barest of their possessions,
and they crossed the Indian Ocean in the same way my grandfather had
eighteen years earlier. My mother remembers having to get rid of her Little
Red Book, a standard issue from the Communists, and also a red scarf that
she had been given somewhere along the line. She remembers ripping them
both up and flushing them down a toilet. She handed over her identity
card to her uncle, my grandfather’s younger brother, who was working as
a driver in Hong Kong at that time. Now, without an identity or a country,
she could say she was a citizen of wherever she had to find somewhere new
to belong.
My mother has vivid memories of the ocean crossing. She was stuck
in a stifling, hidden area of the ship, which would be their home for the
long weeks ahead. Still fresh in her mind would have been the goodbyes
to her friends and the sad parting from the man she had started to fall in
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UFRIEDA HO
love with. She left many of her books with him as a parting gift. With each
forward thrust of the ship, she would have felt life as she knew it slipping
away.
My mom would tell us years later of the things she had to leave behind,
not valuables and expensive possessions, but the small material things that
web together a childhood – a book she read over and over, a dress she
loved to wear or a pen with ink that flowed just right over a sheet of
paper.
The windowless room where they were holed up would become like
an airtight container of anxiety. To make matters worse, my mom had to
share the space not only with my gran but also with another woman and
her two young daughters.
‘We were stuck in that little room sometimes for days on end before
the ship hand would bring us some fresh food and water and let us sneak
out to walk around a bit. Of course, we could not leave the room for long
periods because we would be caught and thrown off the boat.
‘There were these two girls with us who were such brats. I remember
that in the beginning of the journey one of the girls had an apple. She took
a few bites, decided she did not want it any more and threw it to the corner
of the room. Then, a day or two later, when we had nothing to eat because
the ship hand had still not arrived with food, the girl went to the corner
of the room wher
e she had discarded the apple. She picked up the now
rotting fruit silently and ate.’
It was like a parable of the sin of wastefulness when my mother
recounted that story.
I remember that story all these years later because it has metaphoric
potency – how vulnerable the group of stowaways was on that ship; how
circumstances change your attitude very quickly; and how humble pie or
humble apple, in this case, always tastes like poison fruit.
This weeks-long journey was about the mercy of the seas and the mercy
of some ship hand motivated by his fee rather than by kindness. But this
hidden journey across the ocean was the only way for Chinese to get into
South Africa and to circumvent the authorities’ dislike for non-white
foreigners and the quota system. My Ah Goung must have known the
very real risks for his wife and daughter on that journey. He knew first-
hand the brutal reality of imprisonment and the threat of deportation if
they were caught.
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
Over the years I have found more literature about the indentured Chinese
labourers who arrived in South Africa in 1904 to work on the reef’s mines.
There were newspaper articles, missionaries’ accounts and distilled writings
by historians and researchers for a modern audience. There were even
postcards. In these graphic representations the labourers are exoticised,
caricatured. ‘Greetings from Chowburg’, says one postcard in a book
about early Joburg. It shows labourers with their long ‘queues’, the single,
braided pigtail that was a sign of dignity and manhood for Chinese men,
but often a symbol for derision and mockery in South Africa.
Historians believe that there were more than 60 000 Chinese migrant
workers who arrived here between 1904 and 1911. The Employment
Bureau of Africa (TEBA), the South African mines’ recruiting agency
during that period, even had an office in Shanghai because Chinese labour
was so sought after. The men arrived from the northern parts of China
as the dirt-cheap labour that would resurrect the ailing mines of South
Africa’s gold reefs after the Anglo-Boer War.
South African Chinese history scholars, such as Professor Karen Harris
of the University of Pretoria, tell how the first piece of segregationist
legislation in the country was in fact the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1904
in the Cape Colony. The indentured Chinese labourers who arrived
around the same time to work on South Africa’s mines had contracts that
restricted their movements and freedom while in the country. Built into
their contracts were strict conditions that all Chinese workers had to be
repatriated at the end of their contract period. Their cheap labour was
wanted, but they were not, and by 1911 they were put on ships and sent
back to China.
They were the ubiquitous migrant bachelors and it is why today’s
Chinese community in South Africa knows that these mineworkers were
not their forefathers. The men would not become ‘free Chinese’ after
working off their contracts. They were not allowed to stay on in South
Africa. They had to die here working on the mines or go back to China.
And die they did. Many of the men who arrived in South Africa never
made it back to the northern provinces of that faraway mainland.
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UFRIEDA HO
Researchers, such as Dr Yoon Park, have told me that probably those
Chinese who had become so-called free Chinese by the dawn of the 20th
century had written to their families in the south, warning them not to
take up the contracts because the living and working conditions were
appalling.
There is a graveyard in Germiston which I have visited a few times,
a cemetery for Chinese migrant labourers. There are no tombstones, no
flowers. You can only just make out the rows and rows of small humps
flattened out over time. I spoke to two locals on one visit. They were
brothers who had grown up in the area in the 1960s. They remembered
riding their bikes there in between the rows of old graves and as they
played they watched as a few people used the graveyard as a shortcut to
get to the railway station that flanked part of the cemetery.
‘Sometimes you would find a piece of rubber or something from a
miner’s boots. We were told that these were placed on top of the graves
when the Chinese miners died. They never reused a dead man’s shoes,’ the
one brother said.
They remembered that back then the graves were quite well taken care
of, maybe because the land was still owned by the mines. They could make
out the various graves and some sites were marked off with small metal
barriers or lengths of chain-link that were meant to be decorative. The
brothers also pointed out two slabs of stones believed to be the only two
tombstones in the cemetery, tombstones of two priests who had worked
among the mineworkers, converting these men to Christianity in the years
they were far away from the deities and gods of their homes.
But nearly 40 years on from these brothers’ childhoods and by the time
I visited, the land was coming up for sale to be turned into townhouses.
Heritage laws dictate preservation of all the valued things of memory, but
there is also a property revival and there is no land to waste on memory,
especially graves that belonged to a minority group of forgotten men.
It was a tough life for the miners and being forgotten is almost
predictable. The invisibility of their lives was very conspicuous to me when
I visited an old mine manager’s house that has today been converted into a
B&B. Back in the early 1900s, however, it was a house of secrets. Beneath
the floor were hidden rooms and to get to these underground chambers
there was a door disguised as an ordinary linen cupboard door. It led to
the locked chambers of indentured labourers.
‘I think the men never saw the sun because it is believed there were
tunnels that led directly from these underground compounds straight to
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PAPER SONS AND DAUGHTERS
the mines,’ the B&B owner told me. He also brought out a book he had
which detailed the wages paid to the men on the mines. The Chinese were
paid the least, less than both the South African white and black miners and
that is why they were so sought after.
Eerily, there is a food cage that has been preserved in the old house. The
B&B owner said it was via this descending cage that food and essentials
were passed down to the men – discrete, never disturbing the civilities of
the comfortable life above ground.
It was a haunting place to visit. The owner at the time I visited had
put in red and green light bulbs in the basement chambers with their
concrete bunkers. He had also put up a huge Chinese fan as decoration.
He encouraged some guests to take their meals down in the bunkers as a
way of reliving history.
I did not say anything when he told me this, but I thought the place
held a creepy imprint of their lives, like the spirits had never been freed
from these concrete cells. Ghosts
seemed to slip in and out, passing by the
gaudy, tacky decorations that looked like a film-set brothel.
The treatment of these men set the tone in so many ways for how the
Chinese would be handled in South Africa. It was all part of the continuum
of discrimination and it was also the start of the creation of an in-between
space of half belonging and half being somewhere else for the Chinese. The
Chinese labourers came to be charges of a Chinese consul general who was
dispatched to meet the needs of these men. The diplomatic presence gave
them some kind of loose protection from China, but not being citizens of
the Union they also remained feared outsiders – the geel gevaar; the yellow
peril that were not welcome in the first place.
By the time people like my grandfather and my father berthed in
Durban harbour, more than half a century had passed since those men had
helped to rebuild the mining sector on the reef and then vanished from the
South African picture. The practice of racial discrimination and the idea
of controlling people in oppressive compounds were, however, as fresh
as ever. By 1956, the Group Areas Act would create the compounds of
segregated townships and homelands and the grand apartheid plan drawn
from the blueprints of years before were now in the statute books.
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UFRIEDA HO
The waves of the Indian Ocean brought another ship to berth for a reunion.
But for this family, it was not to be the scenes of running into each other’s
arms and falling back into love and into the closeness of people who never
really leave each other even when continents and oceans divide them.
The unfamiliarity between my grandparents hardened. It never eroded,
not even with the intimacy of shared spaces and their fusing into the roles
that people accept as the marks of marriage. Instead, the reunion was like
accelerant meeting resin and the start of a slow hardening.
Still, my grandparents stayed together, year after long year. Separation,
divorce; these were words that tore at the inviolability of the most sacred
of all unions and they were unheard of for Chinese people, especially for a
small community like the isolated diaspora of the Chinese in South Africa.
Pocketed communities, far from the motherland, are almost always the
purveyors of the old traditions, the ones that attach a rigid inflexibility to