by Ufrieda Ho
as a young man for the first time, not the workhorse that he became. My
mother beamed as she watched and she kept talking over the dubbed songs
and filling us in. The memories tumbled out of her and had her pointing
out people at the wedding and remembering in full-colour detail. We asked
about our dad – he seemed arrogant almost – and she smiled and said yes
he was a bit of a ‘ducktail’ or at least a wannabe ‘ducktail’, sporting that
greased-back, middle-parted at the back hairdo that was supposed to be
a sign of the rebel and the Western-styled non-conformist in the 1950s
and 60s. He swaggered more than he walked as the protagonist on that
video.
Chinese weddings are big events traditionally and full of symbolism,
colour and a display of customs and traditions. Even though my parents
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were legally married in a court, the real ceremony played out on their
wedding day in front of friends and family and by following the time-
held conventions that included the ancestors and the deities. My mother
married out of her aunt’s house. There is a small photo of her on a single
bed dressed in her wedding gown as the activities buzzed around her in
preparation for her big day.
The groom and his groomsmen arrived to fetch my mother but
traditionally the men are stopped from collecting the bride until the groom
pays a ‘fee’ to the sisters of the house; sisters here are all the unmarried
women in the bride’s circle. The young women block the entrance and
demand a fee, usually starting with an outrageous amount featuring a lot
of eights. Eight, which is pronounce baat, sounds similar to the Cantonese
word for fortune, faat. When the men are not able to comply, the women
come up with forfeits for the groom and his party to perform. Each fulfilled
forfeit means they drop an eight from the fun until the amount is a fair sum
that the groom can manage. The men will also arrive with a cardboard
tray of flowers. It is a Western adaptation and includes a bouquet for the
bride, corsages, buttonholes and other gifts that the bride’s family accepts.
More lei see is passed around throughout the day as family members pass
on the monetary gift that is meant to bring luck and good fortune to mark
the auspiciousness of the day.
My grandparents did not expect the traditional bride prices and the
toing and froing of gifts, mainly because my father had been orphaned
and was not represented by any of his own family’s elders. But there were
the traditions observed of gifts of dried delicacies of shiitake mushroom,
shrimps, scampi and wolf berries and bolts of luxurious fabrics and linen.
My mother also left her parents’ home with a small trousseau that my
Ah Goung and Ah Por had saved up for. There were heavily embroidered
cushions and square cloths with four straps. They were actually handmade
cloths to cradle babies on a mother’s back. They were intended to be a
lucky omen to rush on the welcome arrival of babies.
That night of their wedding my mother and father feasted like the happy
young couple that they were. The tables were laden with eight courses plus
dessert all with symbolic relevance and they sat under a sign of double
happiness. There were images of dragons, the loung, and the feung haung,
or phoenix, to represent the union of the man and the woman.
The reception was held at the Jack Eustice Hall, a small venue in the
south of Johannesburg. When we were children my mother always pointed
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it out to us when we went down to Booysens Reserve. It was a venue that
held a romance for me when I was little as I imagined my parents’ wedding
day. Even before the end of the 1980s, though, the building had crumpled,
growing smaller and smaller as the grass seemed to creep higher up along
its walls with bubbled and peeling paint. When I was last there, some years
ago, the plot had been turned into a small-sized truck hire place.
But that night, the hall was splendid for this young couple. They were
in a celebratory mood, ready to enter a new chapter of life as a married
couple in the community. They moved from table to table being toasted
by their guests. They were now Mr and Mrs Ho . . . just like it says on the
small label my mother has written in English and affixed to a DVD cover
of her wedding footage – the 8-mm film has made another technology
transfer from video to DVD, even though my mother’s Mr Ho did not get
to see any of this.
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8
Growing up with
Mr and Mrs Ho
The newlyweds moved into a semi-detached Bertrams house before the
dawn of the decade of the 1970s. They rented a room from an old Chinese
widow, who also lived in the house. Mom pussyfooted around the old lady.
She was not her mother-in-law, but some old aunties always watch for
young brides to cook a dinner that does not get a nod from their husbands.
Some old aunties also listen too closely at the bedroom door and ask too
many questions about when a baby is going to be on the way.
It was a relief when some months later the old woman moved out, and
arrangements were made for my mom and dad to rent the whole house.
It was a good thing, too, because my mother had not disappointed the
old aunties. She was pregnant a few months after the wedding and soon
Yolanda would make her entrance into the world.
Children make up the trinity of good fortune for Chinese. It is called
Fok, Lok, Sau in Cantonese. Along with children, the other two pillars of
fortune are wealth and abundance, and longevity. With children, the fi rst
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prize is a boy child, the one who is able to pass on the family name, not a
girl who marries out of the family.
That would come later for my mom and dad as my brother Kelvin
followed quickly after my sister was born. There was a bigger gap before
I came along, maybe because when the boy child was born the pressure
was off a little. But in just under six years all four Ho siblings became the
branches on the family tree that were born under a South African sun.
My parents never became rich, but it did not matter to us children. As
the years passed we moved from a small rented semi-detached home to a
bigger house, still in the east of Johannesburg. Our Millbourn Road house
was not a mansion or anything fancy, but it was an achievement for my
father. It was a step up from the semi-detached. Our new little gem that
now came with a bond, had things we never had before: a garage, some
built-in cupboards, wall-to-wall carpeting and the fantastic mystery to us
of a bidet in the bathroom.
The previous owners, a Portuguese family, were amateur winemakers.
They had caged in the backyard with a network of wire quadrangles to
entice juicy red grapes to grow across every spot where the sun shone. We
harvested some of the grapes and turned their plump, red bodies into juice.
My parents also thought they would try their hand at making a bit of wine,
Chinese-style, o
f course. They enlisted the help of a family friend who had
a ‘recipe’ for wine. The old uncle arrived one weekend for the big brew.
The kitchen table was ready with sugar, yeast, buckets of collected grapes
and the mess to come. First came the bleeding of the grapes, strangled in
a homemade muslin bag. Mom recycled the cloth from the imported long-
grain rice we ate, washed the old bags, cut them up and sewed them into
the more manageable sizes she could always find uses for.
The grapes splattered patterns of juice on the tiles and the unprotected
kettle and kitchen cabinets. Mom carried on squeezing as the old uncle
looked on, putting on his glasses every now and again to scrutinise his
notes.
Long weeks passed and then came the ‘wine’ tasting among the adults.
We children were grateful we were not supposed to taste the strong-
smelling yeasty stuff.
The Ho-made wine was deemed not bad, though my mom and dad
and probably this old uncle had never in their lives drunk wine before.
And so the wine was to be shared. Over the next few weeks friends and
family who visited walked out of our door with samples of the wine and
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the grape juice all bottled in the plentiful stash of dark green glass bottles
that the previous owners had left behind.
Then came the stories – the wine clearly had some kick and friends
would tell how they mixed up the juice with the wine by accident. Mom
took the calls giggling, covering her mouth with her hand, then laughing
some more.
The days of the grapes came to an end. Eventually we got rid of the
vines. They were too dark and gloomy, my mom and dad agreed. The
old concrete wine press was used to store junk, piled higher and higher
each year we lived in the house, and the mini-cellar was transformed
into another storeroom for more things that my mother could not let go
of – tea sets never used, lunchboxes without lids and all the bargain bulk
purchases that helped my mother make her budgets.
Meanwhile, the wires that remained after the vines were cleared made
great stepladders to get up the old peach tree that had found a gap of soil
in the concrete backyard. I sought out the view from the roof sometimes
to see the sunset’s orange arch over the city.
The furrowed bumps of the roof’s zinc sheeting pushed into my bum;
you could not stay very long, just long enough to listen to the dogs claim the
coming night with volleys of howls and barks. I watched neighbours slip
into their backyards to bring in the laundry, slip-slopping their sandalled
feet as they shifted along the washing lines undoing pegs, putting the pegs
back into a peg bag and stashing a growing pile of fresh laundry into a
waiting bucket. Others were in the kitchen, standing over stoves, moving
plates around, getting ready for the evening like the rest of suburbia.
The Judith’s Paarl home was perfect with its knobbly peach tree trunk
to climb, a backyard level enough to bounce a ball on and later also to
set up a fold-away ping-pong table that my mother and brother created,
sawing, drilling and painting it into green and white reality. They even
attached wheels to make it easier to move around; Kelvin’s technical
orientation classes were paying off. My dad bought a plastic pool, too, for
the backyard and the hot December holidays saw us begging mom to add
more and more water. She refused, shushing us with talk of how it would
rack up the water bill. We kept trying to edge up the water level when
she was not looking. One time Kelvin deliberately left the tap running
overnight.
My mom screamed us awake the next morning. We were clumsy and
forgetful, she shouted. We nodded in agreement, not owning up that it was
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a deliberate ‘accident’, then waited for the heat of the day to splash in the
pool that finally looked like the one in the TV advert.
Even dad would come home on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon
and decide to go for a swim. Mom would have to go and find a pair of
swimming trunks far back in a wardrobe so that dad could have a dip. We
have a set of photos that still makes me laugh. In the first picture dad is
in his swimming trunks, barely containing a belly of middle-aged spread.
In the second photo, mom is with him; she is laughing and dad now has a
shirt on, Hawaiian-style with bright motifs. I remember what happened.
It was a novelty to see dad in his swimming shorts so we took a picture of
that. Then mom said it was terrible that he was posing without a shirt on
so he put on the shirt, but it only made him look more comical because it
looked like he had no bottoms on at all in the second photo.
As the days wore on, our feet started to squelch along the film of algae
that formed at the bottom of the pool. It was the first sign that school was
just days away. Soon we would drain the pool into the vegetable patch, no
wasting of course, and it would be dried out and folded away.
We spent eighteen years in this house. Again Yolanda, Unisda and I
shared the biggest room. It was painted blue and had a flower-painted
lampshade that was a wonderful upgrade from the naked bulb in the
Bertrams semi.
In our room we brought our dolls to life with the stories we made up for
them. Ours were not fantastic Barbies but we loved our plastic wonders
with their arched feet ready for small plastic heels, their impossibly tiny
waists, their green or blue eyes and the hair we ran toy brushes through.
I dressed my doll up, with dresses my mother sewed or scrap pieces of
material I could tie into my own designs, to go to a ball like Cinderella and
to meet a prince, even though we did not have a Ken doll.
The bedroom also saw me suffering from long bouts of coughing. As a
child and into my pre-teen years I woke the household with my coughing
fits from something like bronchitis that kept me from my sleep. First
Yolanda would come to my bed to try the trick my parents would use
by adding an extra pillow or two under my head. I knew I was keeping
them up but my lungs would not co-operate. Then eventually mom or dad
would come into the room with the Vicks. Two types; the first was sweet
menthol that would cool my angry throat and chest. Then there was the
Vicks they rubbed on to my back and chest to soothe me and get me back
to sleep.
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Along with the Vicks, mom and dad had other potions and remedies of
healing that were from far away. If I had a cough, the next morning there
probably would not be the ordinary Joko tea, our standard morning fare.
Instead, inside my mother’s little stainless steel teapot would be heads of
dried chrysanthemum flowers infused in hot water. I hated this ‘clarifying’
tea as a child. Bits of petal and pollen always made it past the strainer and
I would be gagging and sticking my fingers into my mouth to retrieve the
endless little bits of desiccated flower. It had a clean, strong smell that I
could not bear. Mom tried to make it mor
e palatable with a bit of sugar or
with a sweet to chase the tea.
‘Drink up then you can have a sweet,’ my mom would say to us as we
walked into the kitchen and groaned as we were greeted by all the mugs
lined up with a sweet next to each. We would eye out the cups, seeing
which one had the least of the icky tea, then try to make a grab for it.
We would hesitate and mom would start to get cross. ‘Don’t start your
nonsense, drink up quickly, it is all cooled down already.’
My mother also made another brew, a bitter, truly medicinal tea, the
leung cha, also a hot brew for cooling the system and bringing back the
body’s balance. I much preferred this bitter tea to the floating bits of petals
and pollen from the flower brew. Mostly I just thought about the sweet we
were getting afterwards as we all pulled a face and gulped down the tea.
There were also a few made-up remedies, concoctions from old wives’
tales, common sense and creativity. For bee stings my mother said a paste
of sugar and water could draw out the poison from the sting. There was
butter on my knee the time I collided with a big rose bush in a relative’s
garden. For a tummy ache my mother took a peeled hard-boiled egg along
with a silver coin (my mother used some of the special R1 coins that
she reserved and which she said were genuinely silver just because they
apparently sounded different when they were tapped) and wrapped the
combo in cloth so she could roll it over our abdomens. It was probably the
heat that calmed our cramping tummies but as the coin became discoloured
with a dark grey stain my mother was convinced that the toxins had passed
through the coin and were contained in that boiled egg that was now the
egg of sickness and had to be thrown away.
The years passed and we became teens. The remedies felt increasingly
foolish and backwards. I turned more to my diaries and journals and
spent hours dreaming into the pressed ceiling of our bedroom of all the
possibilities of when I would be older.
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UFRIEDA HO
I kept a diary for many years as a girl. On the front I scribbled ‘strictly
private’ and I also included a death threat for my prying brother and sisters.
I found hiding places for my journals, shoving them under my mattress or