by Ufrieda Ho
the play button to push, we were in video rapture.
After the first three-hour tape, we broke for dinner – something quick
and easy to prepare, like leftovers and a spinach soup or instant noodles,
so we could get back to the TV. Sometimes we popped out to get takeaway
fried chicken or pizza. For the pizza we went to a local café that had a
wood-fired oven among its Pac-Man machines and the racks of canned
goods, soap powders and newspapers that made up the rest of the store. It
was a café and pizzeria in one, without any fancy Italian decorations, but
the pizzas were delicious all the same.
During these video marathons, we were allowed to eat in front of the
TV and our dinner bowls were stacked in the wash basin to be dealt with
in the morning. We also neglected the chores that we were expected to do.
Mom was as engrossed as we all were.
We kept watching until dad arrived home. He did not spend much
time in front of the TV with us, but settled at the table in the living room.
One of us made him a cup of tea and he often crunched on a few peanuts,
one of his favourite snacks. He liked the nuts that came in sealed tins.
Sometimes my mom cooked up kilos of fresh nuts in salted water before
drying them in the sun. We would peel them and put them in little money
bags so dad could snack on his treat without any effort.
Dad forced himself to watch only a few glimpses from his seat because
later, when we had finished the second tape, said our goodnights and gone
to bed, he would watch the first tape.
In this way, the family would all watch the series over two or three
days, and then return to the flat, ready for the next release the video man
had on offer.
By the end of the school holidays, we were dreaming about the handsome
heroes and their beautiful counterparts and singing the theme songs sung
by Hong Kong celebrities from two or three years previously.
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13
Mah Jong and Ponies
Other dads may have had hobbies, from tinkering with car engines to
getting stuck into DIY projects or playing and watching sports. These
were not pastimes for my father. He was a gambling man and betting for
the fun of it was his favourite relaxation. He enjoyed betting on the horses,
playing mah jong, or daa mah juk as we say more commonly in Cantonese,
with a few friends or others who gathered at private houses or in the back
rooms of restaurants to play a few rounds. Years later, he also started to
gamble at the casinos when they opened up closer to Johannesburg. He
preferred one-armed bandits, roulette and the blackjack tables.
It was the best of both worlds for dad when we went on an outing that
also involved gambling. Sometimes we went to Sun City, about three hours’
drive from Johannesburg, in the former homeland of Bophuthatswana
where a black man ruled. We knew this because there were lit photos of
him in the dark, artifi cial spaces of pseudo-plush casinos and he wore an
impressive sash and a lot of medals on his jacket. Only many years later
would I learn about homelands and the poisonous concessions and trade-
offs made by the National Party.
At Sun City we spent our day at the pools and waterslides, exhausting
ourselves as my mother looked on. Occasionally she checked in with my
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dad and tossed a few coins into a one-armed bandit to try her luck as the
sevens, cherries or bells lined up. Then she came back to soak up a bit
more sun. She was never in a bathing suit, but she wore a sundress and a
big peak cap to keep the sun from her face.
Photographs from those days showed us splashing at the poolside or
clutching balloons and sitting on the velour seats where under-eighteens
were allowed to wait as adults gambled in the casinos. We nodded off
and goofed off, fiddling with the tops of the ashtrays and seeing who
could slide off the seats with their velvety finishes, as our dad played
just one more round, placed one more bet. There was always that one
last try that stretched out our waiting and delayed the return journey to
Johannesburg.
We mostly went to Sun City on day trips as it was too costly to stay
overnight. But occasionally, usually in the Christmas holidays, we did stay
at the hotel for a weekend or a few nights. There were perks to being a
regular like my dad; the casino cut some deals and there were discounts
designed to keep him at the tables a little longer.
No matter how it happened, the hotel room was a complete treat for
us children. We turned the air-conditioning right up, then right down; we
stroked the perfectly ironed and perfectly white linen; and we could not
get over the miniature soaps and bubble-bath containers being replenished
every day. We crammed on to two sofas and two camp beds in the space
behind the folded shutters that adjoined the room that had a double bed.
It was a squeeze, but we did not argue; the hotel was too much fun.
My dad allowed us to order room service. He knew we wanted to be
like characters in the movies who lounged around on their beds, picked up
the phone and had their meals delivered on a trolley covered with a silver,
domed lid. Yolanda was in charge of ordering as it was unfamiliar to all of
us. The first time she wanted to order bacon and eggs but was confused by
the fancy-sounding ‘continental breakfast’ and asked for that instead. We
all waited for our bacon and eggs but instead along came six baskets of
toast, croissants and more baked goods than we knew what to do with.
Dad also loved betting on horses. In our house there was always a stack
of racing magazines that had photos of horses and jockeys in black and
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white freeze-frame victory. There were also piles of betting slips that my
dad kept handy. Betters were supposed to mark off their favoured ponies
on the small rectangles printed on the betting slip and hand these over
with their money at the tote. I sometimes went to the tote with dad. TVs
were affixed with adjustable arms to shelves and betters tilted their heads
to look at the horses cutting through the wind. Their arms were folded.
Crumpled betting slips and old receipts lay abandoned on the tote floor,
testament to changed minds and disillusion following loss.
We were not supposed to waste the betting slips at home, but we could
not resist the crisp sheets to doodle on or to fashion into origami lanterns,
folded paper cameras or aeroplanes we launched against each other. As
long as we left enough in the stack of slips for dad’s use we mostly escaped
him noticing.
When dad was home on Saturday afternoons he listened to the racing
results on the radio or he turned on the TV to the racing coverage if there
was some live action happening. We kept quiet as the horses sprang free
from the starting gates. It was exciting stuff for dad so we held our breath
as the commentator rattled off one very long sentence, only taking a breath
as the winning horse galloped past the camera and slowed down to a trot
&n
bsp; after a few paces.
On one occasion, dad made a family outing of going down to the horse
track at Turffontein. We arrived and found a grassy, shaded spot outside
the track on which to set up our picnic blanket. Dad left us to go and place
his bets. We lounged around eating our snacks and listening to the radio
that was on inside the car.
When dad returned to our picnic spot we told him the radio in the car
had stopped working. He was already edgy as he turned the key in the
ignition; clearly the ponies had not been kind that day. The car’s battery
was stubbornly uncooperative and because we were in a secluded spot it
was not easy to find someone to help jump-start the car. Dad stormed off
to find help.
It was a disaster of a day out. Even the novelty of a picnic of red
jelly inside the shells of scooped-out oranges, which Yolanda had made
especially, along with other itsy-bitsy picnic foods, quickly vanished. We
never went to the track again with dad after that.
Dad also placed bets with a Chinese man who had a sideline business
as a bookie. The Chinese bookie was a regular drop-in visitor but he rarely
stepped inside the house. ‘Oh, don’t worry about opening the gate,’ he
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would say, each time we invited him in, even though we knew he always
declined. It was an expected exchange marked by good manners and
pleasantries.
Then he passed a nondescript brown envelope to us. Written on the
envelope would be my father’s name in Chinese and a figure. Sometimes
the envelope would be bulky and we knew that my dad had won money
on the horses. Other times the envelope would be empty and the number
written on the front was what my father owed the bookie.
I occasionally thought of hiding these empty envelopes when they were
delivered week after week and I knew that receiving them would make
my dad unhappy. But he would get doubly mad because the bookie would
issue a second empty envelope and the shame of having to be asked twice
would be worse. Instead, we received the envelope, greeted the uncle and
said goodbye properly, then placed the empty envelope where my dad
would see it when he got home later.
We propped up mail and other important things for my dad’s notice
against a 3-D picture of a Chinese pagoda that my mom displayed on
the mantelpiece. On the other end of the mantelpiece was another 3-D
picture of a doll-like Hansel and Gretel standing outside their magical
gingerbread house with wafer biscuits for tiles and candy-striped lollipops
for flowers.
Sometimes I swopped the pictures around, hoping that the smiling
children standing outside their gingerbread house of deliciousness would
lessen the blow for dad when the envelopes kept arriving empty and the
ponies were not running the way he wanted.
Dad carried on playing and sometimes we even played along with
him when there were big horse-racing meets. He got each of us to bet on
our favourite horse. We crowded dad and his spread-out newspaper to
scrutinise the colourful pictures of the jockeys. We did not read any of
the text that came with each photo. We did not understand favourites,
odds, places and all the other jargon of horse racing. Instead, we chose
our horses by the colours and designs of the jockey’s outfits. It had to be
something pink or something flash that caught our eyes and we would
point that horse out as our choice. Choosing in the random way we did
was close enough to how gamblers mostly make up their minds anyway.
Decisions are based on chance and fate, and the irrational and illogical are
turned into imagined strategy.
It did not matter that they were usually no-hopers; my father made the
bets for us anyway. Sometimes he said we had made a good choice and
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then after the big race he would come home and hand one of us a R10 note
or even a R20 note because our horse had crossed the line first.
Mah juk was another happy merger of the social and the thrill of gambling
for many men and women like my dad. It was also a party favourite for
many Chinese families. Mah juk is not like a spontaneous round or two of
the board game 30 Seconds after dinner. Mah juk at a party is second only
in importance to the food that is served.
A couple of square tables are set up. Each is draped with brown paper
as the four players at each table settle down to build up a double deck
of the special tiles, building pairs, building sets, like a kind of rummy, I
believe.
Unlike most Chinese children, I never learnt to play and neither did
any of my siblings. It was something my mother was particularly proud
of. ‘I do not want you to grow up broken gamblers,’ she said each time we
asked to be taught how to play. My dad obliged her and he never taught
us either, even though we asked regularly and insistently.
Instead, the mah juk sets we had were used to build towers and to make
boxy animals from the decorated tiles.
Mom firmly believed that in our family the gambling gene skipped our
generation. Maybe she was right; I have never had the desire to buy a
Lotto ticket or to chase the supposed thrill that comes with a casino win.
The sound of coins hitting metal basins, ringing alarms and flashing lights
only remind me of how uncomfortable plush seats eventually became in
the darkness of casinos like Sun City when we waited for dad as children.
The flashing lights and mechanical ringing of someone’s win would startle
us awake from our already interrupted sleep. Then we would try to stay
awake a little longer, fighting our eyelids that dropped like lead weights.
We were not supposed to sleep on these seats and a security guard would
walk by every now and again to make sure my mother nudged us awake.
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I never wondered much about how gambling ran through my father’s life,
a thread of obsession that sewed up his life from work to down-time and
even socialising with his friends. It was normal, the everyday of our lives.
This normal included my frequent trips with dad to Ma Lay Gum,
the name local Chinese gave to Chinatown in downtown Commissioner
Street. Today the locals call it First Chinatown, to distinguish it from the
city’s later Chinatown of newer migrants in Cyrildene. The old name, I
am told, came from when the top end of Fordsburg was part of the Malay
quarter. The Chinese were here, too, and they set up the old Cantonese
Club and established a little Chinatown of a few streets under the gaze
of the blue building that was the notorious John Vorster Square police
station, where people the apartheid government despised slipped on bars
of soap or threw themselves out of windows.
I would go downtown with dad to do the family shopping for our sacks
of rice, the long grain fragrant variety, not the parboiled, never properly
fluffed-up stuff on supermarket shelves. There were the wrapped parcels
of dried sheets of bean curd that you could add to vegetarian stir-fries,
>
bottles and bottles of soya sauce and fresh spinach, all dark green and
spotted with specks of soil.
With my dad there were also treats to take home along with the staples
my mom expected for the pantry. Dad chatted to the shop owners as they
prepared his order, gathering from a tower of bamboo steamers soft buns
filled with honey-roasted pork, char siu, and sweet lotus bean paste. There
were also bite-sized dim sum and chicken drumsticks covered in a crispy
batter.
Then we headed to what was probably the most important part of
our downtown shopping trip. Our destination was one of the oldest and
smallest shops in the strip of stores and restaurants along Commissioner
Street. It was a small provisions store in which everything was imported
from China by the old uncle who ran it. I swung my legs on his old wooden
stools waiting for dad and the Ah Buk to finish their catch up. Boxes filled
with egg noodles, bottles of black bean paste, Chinese bowls and pairs
of chopsticks were packed right up to the ceiling. His miniature window
display had porcelain figurines of Chinese ladies in flowing dresses,
laughing Buddhas and ornaments depicting scenes of pagodas and rickety
bridges all cut from cork. Ah Buk always treated me to sweets, the saang
jah beang that are little discs of sweetened dried fruit rolled up one on top
of the other. I loved that in one stack you felt like you had a roll of sweets
to last you the whole day, or at least the whole trip home. He often passed
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me a few extra rolls to give to Yolanda, Kelvin and Unisda. He knew us
all through the years.
Once I was sorted out with sweets, my dad and the Ah Buk would
vanish temporarily to the back section of the tiny shop. My dad would
walk out with a wrapped and sealed parcel under his one arm and a plastic
bag bulging with odd shapes in the other. As I got older, I realised that
the purchase was the printed stacks of fahfee paper, wrapped up so that
cops who may stop the car would at first glance not know what they were
looking at. The odd bulges in the plastic bags were the little wallets that
would be numbered and distributed to dad’s betters.
This was the norm of shopping with my dad. Also usual were the