by Ufrieda Ho
Next door to the eating house was a butcher’s shop. Both were owned
by a woman we called Daai Jeh Jeh, literally meaning big sister. Her actual
name was Ah Siu, meaning smile. My dad had known her since she was a
young woman, and he was just a few years older. Daai Jeh Jeh’s father and
mother had first met my dad when he was a new arrival in the city of gold.
I heard years later from my mother that my dad never forgot the kindness
of this family when he first arrived. Then, when Daai Jeh Jeh’s father died,
the family struggled. At that time my father had the small butcher shop
he ran in Alexandra. Many Chinese families lived around the township
and they also used the butchery. Daai Jeh Jeh was among his customers.
She told us that my father weighed out the meat they ordered but always
added in a little more, without saying anything, and wrapped up the parcel
for her to take home to her widowed mother and her sister and brothers.
I guess she never forgot his kindness. And now she had my mom and dad
running the eating house.
Daai Jeh Jeh’s financial life had taken a turn for the better by the time she
had married her first husband. The marriage, though, was less successful.
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She was young when she started her family and her three children were
nearly grown by the time we Ho children were toddlers. Daai Jeh Jeh’s
marriage did not last. It was still unusual for a Chinese woman to be
divorced and a single mother, but she did both and started building her
butchery business by herself. She eventually started and ran a successful
franchised Chinese restaurant that still operates today.
Way before the restaurant business, there was the downtown butcher
shop and the adjoining eating house. She wanted my father and mother
to be the ones to manage and run this part of the business. When I was
little, she always teased that she wanted to adopt me and I was unofficially
her kei neu, her adopted daughter. She eventually emigrated to Canada,
following her daughter and sons. Over the years we have lost touch, but
I always remember her generosity, her big laugh, her independence and
industriousness in a time when a clever and self-sufficient Chinese woman
was not often supported for being so forthright and determined.
I loved the shop as a child. As the third-born of my parents’ four
children, I was the toddler between the older brother and sister in primary
school and my baby sister at home being looked after by my granny. So I
got to join my mom and dad at work. I played with the Coca-Cola tops
as they popped off the hard-working bottle opener fixed to the wooden
counter and I napped in a glass cabinet. It was painted blue on the outside
for my privacy and foam-lined on the bottom half, while loaves of bread
shared the upper bunk. I was called the bread-cupboard child in my
family, something my mom still occasionally mentions, maybe disbelieving
that I could have grown up from that small body that could fit inside the
makeshift cot.
Mom and dad served the overalled workers who descended on the
dingy shop at lunchtime. Mom got to practise her own brand of Fanagalo,
a mish-mash of languages used for communicating mostly on the mines,
years before it became politically incorrect and a part of the shameful
past.
Today my mother slips into this language sometimes; she even throws in
a bit of Chinese. Part of me wants to die of embarrassment, trying to shut
her up, explaining again that it is derogatory to speak this way. But these
days mostly I see people smile at the effort, laugh a little and understand
exactly what she means.
In the shop, though, a bit of English, a bit of Zulu and bit of this
Fanagalo was what got her by. Once the lunch-hour rush was over, the
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eating house would grow quieter until the end of the workday. Taking the
gap, my father would drive to fetch my brother and sister and cousins from
the Chinese school at the east end of Market Street. My cousin Sandra,
who was the oldest of all of us, remembered that my dad would pick her
up and the other two eldest cousins each morning and drop them all off
in the afternoons.
‘If your dad had won at the races he would treat us all to won ton mein,
steaming bowls of noodles in soup with small meat-filled dumplings in
Chinatown before dropping us off at home,’ she told me.
Yolanda also remembered the treats. ‘Most times dad would arrive with
a treat for us. It was a drumstick or a sausage, something yummy.’
Sometimes he would not drop Yolanda and Kelvin at our Bertrams
Road home for my granny to look after; he brought them back to the shop
with him.
Then we could go out to play together at an open lot not far from the
shop. There was a man who would take us out to the lot. It is sad that I
cannot match a name or a face to him any more. I just know he lifted me
up into his arms and bounced me along with his stride to get to the lot.
Because I was the baby he always carried me, and my brother and sister
ran along at his side. He probably worked at the shop or the butchery; I
remember he always wore blue overalls. But he was the one who took us
to the lot and kicked a ball around with us until it was time to go back, to
meet the after-work rush when the other overalled men of the city returned.
Some would have changed back into their ordinary clothes, some would
still have their blue uniforms on. They bought the half loaves, the cans of
pilchards and beans and whatever else they needed before heading for the
trains and the taxis to go to their homes, far from the city where they were
not allowed to live.
Behind the shop counter was my private playground that I did not
have to share with any of my siblings. Sometimes Daai Jeh Jeh would pop
around to pinch me on the cheeks or to talk to my parents. But mostly the
two shops ran separately.
My mom remembered that once I saw a mouse run across the floor
and scurry under some pallets. I screamed ‘ lou su, lou su’ (mouse! mouse!)
and then I sat calmly watching the commotion that ensued, with Daai
Jeh Jeh climbing the walls because of her enormous fear of rodents and
everyone else either scrambling to catch the frightened creature or catch
their breaths from laughing at Daai Jeh Jeh’s hysterics.
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I remember my personal intimacy with the space. This was my domain
to watch these small dramas unfold. As long as the busy adults could
keep sight of me, I was left alone in my corners to watch a mouse scurry
somewhere, to make up games with the toys of empty cigarette boxes and
matchboxes or to explore among mazes formed by goods for the store,
towering stacks of bars of strong-smelling soap and canned food in bulk,
plastic-wrapped trays.
I got to watch over the entire eating house but I was not really part
of any of the transactions. Lunchtime brought the thunder of men, loud
and noisy, ready to eat and to relax for a few minutes
as they tucked in.
The men sat down at the metal tables and their plates and cutlery clanked
noisily as they ate with hungry gusto. They spoke to each other loudly and
laughed and argued rowdily; it was their pause from driving pickaxes into
the city’s soil, from laying bricks in new buildings and shaping the city
they were not allowed to live in, and from simply nodding their heads and
saying ‘Ja, baas’ (yes, boss) to their employers.
From my bread-cupboard view, peering through the small peepholes
where the blue paint had flaked off, or sitting behind the counter on an
upturned Coca-Cola crate layered on top with a few sheets of cardboard
for some cushioning, I watched the comings and goings of these customers,
but did not know anything about where they came from or where they
were going to after they had put their change back into their pockets and
mumbled a thank you or goodbye. The following day they would be back
again.
Eventually I was enrolled in nursery school and there was no more
sleeping in the bread cupboard or stacking bottle tops into the towers of
my imagination. It was time for me to join the world of other four- and
five-year-olds playing on jungle gyms, making Plasticine animals, doing
paintings for my parents and sitting still for reading hour.
I hated nursery school in the beginning. I wanted to be back at the
shop, happy among the commotion and noise of the eating house with
my parents. I cried for weeks when I was dropped off each morning with
Yolanda and Kelvin. I was so stubborn that I managed to keep up the
waterworks until eventually the nursery school teacher would send for
Yolanda at the primary school to console me. I refused to be comforted
and it was many weeks before I settled into nursery school life.
My mom used to bribe me by giving me sweets to take to nursery school,
also hoping they would help me to make friends and start to enjoy playing
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with other children. But still I cried and cried most days and probably ate
all the sweets myself, not bothering to share with anyone.
Now I was stuck with the routine of a scheduled nap, a pigeon-hole
that held my small suitcase and a jersey, and snacks of a glass of Oros and
a Marie biscuit before home time. There were no more of my mother’s
lunches, treats from the shop shelves and nodding off in my cupboard
whenever I wanted to.
The nursery school was in the basement of the Chinese school building,
so we never saw out of the windows. Thankfully, there was a small library
and this I did love. The stories were fantastic and almost as much fun as
some that my granny used to tell us. The teacher would read to us about a
flying car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that could get his family to their beach
destination before everyone else by flying over the traffic. There was the
gingerbread man, gobbled up by the fox that was supposed to help him
across the river. There were the pigs that got gobbled up by the big bad
wolf with his mighty huffing and puffing. The teacher read these books to
us, and I returned to them in my own time, working through the stories by
looking at the pictures. I never tired of them.
While I thought about what sweets looked best as buttons for a
gingerbread man in the fairytales I was being introduced to, my parents
carried on working in the eating house for some years. Eventually, though,
both the butchery and the eating house either closed down or changed
hands, I am not sure which. Daai Jeh Jeh and her brother opened up a big
butchery that became a booming success and she also started her restaurant
businesses. My mother and father went back to what they knew: fahfee.
My dad would be a fahfee man for the rest of his days once the Sauer
Street eating house closed its doors for the last time.
I ended up working on Sauer Street as a journalist for The Star
newspaper in the mid-1990s. My father and I both worked on the same
Joburg street.
By the mid-1990s, the street had changed so much I could not make out
exactly where the shop would have been as I got off the bus each day for
work. Gone were the small shops, the dignified old Barclays Bank with its
heavy revolving doors, and the giant unicorn that had flanked a building’s
facade further up from the main drag.
As children, we often waited in the Cortina as my father did his banking
at Barclays. We even got money boxes once. I remember a solid steel money
box fashioned like Cape Town’s Table Mountain. It had a one-way slot so
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that coins could be slipped through the flat top that was the mountain but
no coins could be shaken out of it. It could only be opened with a special
key so it stayed full, heavy and unopened for years. It outlived other money
boxes from the bank as they started giving out cheap plastic money boxes
that would split even before you had filled them halfway.
As for the unicorn in town, I loved it because it was the only creature
that started with a U, just like my English name. Unicorns were my special
animals, even if they were the creatures of myths, or maybe because of
this.
Even with changes to the area by the 1990s, I would still scan the street
trying to imagine where the eating house had been and where we had
kicked a ball in the open lot until Yolanda and Kelvin’s black school shoes
were covered in a fine dusting of red earth.
Fahfee was not my dad’s first choice of occupation. Instead, it was a last
resort. With fahfee you were harassed by the police and you ran the risk
of actually being arrested. You were up against irritated betters most days
and your profits were a seesaw of luck and chance.
By contrast, shopkeepers might have a bad month or two, but they did
not face the blow that came with a succession of losses that could not be
predicted or planned for.
But fahfee was what my father did, and being an employee was also
one of the hard choices he had to make. Working for someone else meant
he did not have to find the capital to float a sustainable number of fahfee
banks; there were minimised risks and a fixed income.
Dad had tried to run a few small banks by himself before he worked
for Gou Sok but they never turned out to be as lucrative as he had hoped.
Throughout that time, my mom played a role, counting out the money
and helping with the recording of the playing trends. As my brother and
sister grew older, they also learnt how to transcribe the data from the
betting slips to the record books. My mom was meticulous, neat and fast.
Her accuracy and speed meant that when my dad worked for Gou Sok
my mom occasionally took on work from other fahfee men who needed
someone to keep their books up to date and ready for each day’s num ju.
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When my dad returned to fahfee after the shop, it was as Gou Sok’s
employee at the Doornfontein flat. Eventually Gou Sok and his wife
moved to a bigger house in the suburbs that became the base for their
fahfee busines
s.
But we knew the flat in Doornfontein best as it was just around the
corner from the other grey suburbs where Chinese families like us could
live. In the flat building were a number of other Chinese families. Our
school bus even stopped in front of the Robincrest flats that were a short
distance from the concrete trunks that held up the noisy old Harrow Road
offramp.
We sometimes went to the Doornfontein flat to drop off my dad, pick
him up or fetch something during the day. We also visited the flats during
the holidays for one of our family’s favourite entertainment: Chinese
videos.
An old man who lived there hired out Chinese videos on Beta and VHS.
We had a Beta machine, and we liked his secret shop that was illegal for all
sorts of reasons, including piracy and operating from residential premises
without a permit.
The old man knew people in Hong Kong who recorded the various
Cantonese drama series on TV there and shipped the tapes out to him.
The old uncle had a slow drawl that was about as ponderous as his walk.
He wore his neat, belted trousers pulled well above his waist to contain
his bulging belly. He would lead us into one of the bedrooms converted
into his video store. In metal cabinets lined up against the walls, there
were rows and rows of hours of drama, period movies, kung fu movies
and variety shows.
My mom read out the titles and asked the old uncle about them and he
told us about the stars and the plots. Most series spanned four cassettes,
sometimes six, and there were even epics over eight or nine tapes. We liked
movies with modern-day plots but we also enjoyed the kung fu movies with
the heroines with their perfect hair pinned back in black, shiny buns and
hair clips dangling with beads and silk flowers. The heroes and heroines all
had powers, special fighting magic. My favourites were the heroines who
could strike a kata pose, then unfurl a bolt of flying ribbon from inside
their beautiful, wispy Chinese dresses to reveal a deadly strangle of silk
that would stop a baddie in his tracks.
We selected a series and headed home for one of the video marathons
that marked so many of our school holidays. There was only one final
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wait: rewinding all the tapes so we could watch without interruption.
People never rewound video tapes; we never did either. Then, with only