by Ufrieda Ho
It was better to hold on to what little they had, to work harder, save
harder and close in on the battle for economic freedom, rather than to
take the fight to the political front. They would keep their concessions, the
freedom fighters could keep their struggle.
Growing up in the post-apartheid era, I was sometimes uncomfortable
with the absence of the Chinese in dismantling apartheid. Why were
there not more Chinese names lined up in melancholic pride along the
small plaques at Freedom Park in Pretoria, remembering the fallen of the
struggle? Why were the few stories that were on record, or told by those
who were in the struggle, about small roles of hiding comrades or driving
people to banned protests or lining up in sober pickets at places like Wits
University where sedate objection to apartheid hardly matched the anguish
and coalface terror of those running for their lives, those forced into exile
and those sent to prison?
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The answers did come as I understood more about this state of in-
betweenness, this small site of not belonging, so small it was almost
invisible. I realised more and more that for the majority of Chinese, people
like my mother and father, the mothers and fathers of my school friends
and the relatives all around me, maintaining the fog of invisibility was the
struggle they knew best. They could look on evil and not fight it in the
instinctive way of a struggle fighter because they had little expectation of a
good, easy life in Africa. They were never completely from here and even
when they were born on this African soil, their umbilical cord was fixed to
a placenta of a faraway mainland. They lived with the hardships and the
wrongdoings, including racial oppression and the wickedness of apartheid,
because they had never dared to hope too much for anything more.
The Chinese had traditionally not fitted in anywhere in racial
mainstreams. Many early Chinese identified with China more than
South Africa. And economic pursuit rather than political reform through
struggle were what mattered to a community with immigrant roots. Like
so many migrants, and specifically in racially divided South Africa, the
Chinese never had the roots that knot and twist deep into the soil of a
place and become an extension of identity. That goal of making good on
the gift of life was to work hard, not draw too much attention to yourself,
live frugally, save enough to build a home and to send something back
to the family members in China. The first dream always would be about
returning to the homeland, the motherland, reuniting with the filial piety
of a grown child submitting still to a parent.
My parents did make it back to China, but they returned as visitors,
more than twenty years after they first left. It was always a big deal to be
able to make that costly journey back home but more importantly the
journey back across the Indian Ocean, now on an aeroplane, was to be
able to see family again and to be able to reassure them that they were
fine, that there was enough money to make South Africa home, that the
children were growing and going to school and that everybody was in
good health.
The first time my dad went back to China he made the trip without my
mom. I remember he came back with a little photo album of shots someone
had helped him take. The rolls were already printed and inserted into small
giveaway albums. My dad was finally the tourist. He was expected just to
have fun, just to indulge in the frivolity of posing next to an impressive
pagoda temple and also to stand for a family picture with relatives
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he had not seen for decades. Dad also had a touristy decorative plate
made; it featured two old women in traditional Mongolian outfits as his
tour group had made it further up north.
‘All the pretty, young girls were taken so I ended up with these two old
ladies,’ he laughed at the picture, this prize of making it back, showing
him with his arms around the shrunken, smiling grannies.
By the late 1970s and the 80s, the Chinese were granted the demeaning
concession of acquiring permission from would-be white neighbours to live
among them. They could attend white Catholic schools if they converted
to Catholicism and some Chinese went to white universities on the quota
system available to Chinese, Indians and coloureds.
The concessions, though, were nobody’s free lunch. The Chinese had
eaten of the poison fruits; it was a bite of the tainted apple that would stay
stuck in the Chinese people’s throats as the political seesaw started to sway.
But in the 1980s, the option to stay in a white neighbourhood, even if you
had to go cap in hand to ask for it, was a plum opportunity for a family.
It was either that or live in an under-serviced township or in a grey area
where the grassy pavements and verges grew into thick, weedy curtains
before the council put them on the cutting rotation or where neighbours
on drunken New Year’s Eves pulled out guns and fired into the air at the
stroke of midnight.
Even if you had to be ‘good’ by someone else’s standards – not throw
loud parties, not fight with the wife too loudly or not let the dog escape
out of the front gate – it was all part of the price to pay to live in a better
suburb, to make sure your children could have something better.
It was an unfortunate pay-off, but one about taking opportunities where
you found them, choosing different aspirations and most importantly
about looking out for your family first. A friend who happens to be white
once said to me he could not understand the fuss about my being Chinese.
‘It is like you are Italian or Greek or something,’ he said, exasperated
because none of it made any sense to him. As a friend, he saw me as the
friend, not the person with history’s complexity that becomes embedded
in your skin colour. But I had to laugh a little, too, at his oversimplified
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version of where he placed me. If he could contain me somehow, then the
nuance and subtleties did not have to keep bubbling messily over the top.
It was the same when I lived in my all-white residence as a student with
its majority of Afrikaans-speaking girls. One night we were all up to a bit
of mischief, as was the usual craziness of student life. A senior who was
part of our group let out an ironic giggle and said ‘ gedra jouself soos ’n wit
mens’ (behave yourself like a white person) as we hurled another cup of old
yoghurt, specially prepared on a sun-soaked window ledge for days, from
our first floor balcony on to some unsuspecting drunken person dragging
himself back up to the residence steps. I was part of this joke as the stinky
dairy missiles went flying. It was meant as a remark of acceptance and
inclusion. She did not see me as anything other than her residence-mate
after having lived with me for two years. I laughed, but at the same time I
did not feel included – I was not a white person.
The Chinese community juggled its multip
le identities to fit in as I expect
I still do. I laugh at jokes, I smile to myself, I say nothing; sometimes I feel
I should have an abridged history of the Chinese in South Africa tucked
into a back pocket, just to set the record straight for the umpteenth time.
For example, I have a special nod for people’s sentences that start with
‘But you Chinese people . . .’ and it is filled in with everything from ‘like
to eat dogs’, ‘are good at maths’ and so on. I have even listened to things
like ‘hey, I saw your “sister” yesterday’; but while I am thinking they mean
Yolanda or Unisda, they go on to say, ‘I met this woman, and she looked
so much like you, she was visiting from Korea.’
The Chinese were caught again in this no-man’s-land many years later as
the new South Africa was born. Once again they did not fit in to other
people’s fables or made-up facts about Chinese South Africans.
As a young reporter, I got a job at The Star in Sauer Street, Johannesburg.
I waited for a bus every afternoon to get back home to Judith’s Paarl. On
Fridays we usually knocked off a little after lunchtime and I waited as
usual for the bus to arrive around the side of the old Library Gardens.
Propped up against the building, with the impressive facade and moulded
sculptures of Spinoza and gargoyles, I watched the minute hand tick along
on my watch, willing the bus to arrive on time.
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I looked up to see a slim swathe of red moving along Market Street,
growing like a steady bleed, then getting louder with chanting and with
pounding feet. It was a group of hawkers in red union T-shirts making
their way up the street in protest. I stayed where I was, mildly intrigued by
yet another Friday afternoon protest. But the crowd did not move past me.
They stopped and screamed directly at me: ‘Go back to China, go back
to China’. This group of hawkers was angry that the growing presence of
new Chinese hawkers in the late 1990s spelt doom for their own businesses
of street trading in the inner city. They did not ask about whether I was
paying tax to the current government or what my passport said about my
nationality; all they could identify with was my skin colour.
I was a little shaken by being the target of their aggression, but thankfully
the group moved on. Then the bus arrived and I went home.
On the journey home, I could not stop thinking about ‘going back’.
They assumed that I was from somewhere else, the only clue being that I
had a different skin colour to theirs.
A few years later I visited Hong Kong. My sister Yolanda had fallen for
a guy from Hong Kong and their long-distance relationship had eventually
ended up with her moving to the fragrant city, strangely creating a loop
back to the motherland for the Ho family. I was visiting my sister there.
An unusually chatty taxi driver quizzed me about my accent when I
spoke to him in Cantonese. He had a brash manner, quite typical of Hong
Kong taxi drivers, where Ps and Qs, polish and political correctness have
no place.
I liked him, actually, as he delivered his cheeky presumptions loudly
from the front seat. But his final conclusion was that I was a bamboo
child, he told me. I was not sure what he meant. And he said: ‘You are like
bamboo, you look yellow on the outside but your insides are white.’ I also
hear the banana analogy applied often.
I wanted to start explaining: there are few Chinese in South Africa, I am
a South African by birth and I fall into a Western and an African way of
life simultaneously, but it was too much effort to make him understand on
the short drive. In the end I just agreed with him. He was probably right
but for reasons that he could not know.
What I did think about was that this was my reception to ‘going back’.
This China of my supposed belonging did not recognise my accent or my
frame of reference. It could not make room for the fact that I shared my
home country, my South Africa, with people with skins so pale you can
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see small veins line their faces or people who have skin tone the colour of
brewed tea or the colour of charcoal.
But I was getting used to feeling like I did not fit in or rather that other
people battled to fit me in. In my Chinese school everyone was just like me,
race did not matter. It was as a student in Pretoria in the early 1990s that I
got to see a very different world. I ended up in a residence with a majority
of Afrikaans girls who had come from far-flung small towns to the capital
city to be educated. Apartheid was about to expire, but it still managed a
few gasps and it managed this especially well in the residences, which still
did not admit black students.
I was only seventeen when I started at technikon and because I could
not drive legally and I had chosen to study journalism in Pretoria my
parents agreed that it would be best for me to live in residence rather
than commute from Johannesburg daily. They preferred a residence for
me because it was something vetted by the institution, the technikon, in
the same way that school regulated our social lives when we were growing
up.
At first, my application to residence was not successful. I did not have a
spot and I would have to wait to see what came up. It did not dawn on me
as a teenager in the 1990s that my being Chinese was an issue.
Yolanda and Kelvin had both been to Wits University and their
experience of mixing with students of other races seemed to be such fun.
They both had friends at residence and sometimes they envied their friends
who got to live away from home in the newfound freedom of on-campus
life.
I thought this was going to be my reality in Pretoria and I was excited
and grateful that my parents had agreed to pay for me not just to study,
but also to stay at residence, which would be a significant extra expense.
When I had not heard any news as each week passed before the
academic year started I just assumed it was a shortage of space and that
I was the unlucky student who did not get a place. Initiation week was
underway and I still did not know if I had been given a room at one of two
on-campus residences. Yolanda and I stopped at a CNA off Church Street
to buy a map book of the city one Friday afternoon when she picked me
up. We trawled the city, stopping at short-term accommodation, flats or
other student lodgings because it seemed unlikely I would get a room in
residence. Yolanda was given the task of doing the first recce of finding a
suitable place that was safe and affordable.
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I could not guess at the racial divisions on a Pretoria campus that was
still very white and very Afrikaans.
Then to our surprise and the relief of Yolanda and my dad who were
ferrying me to and from class most days, I did get a room to share as first-
years are expected to do.
With my few things bundled into the divided room of built-in desk and
shelves, bed and wardro
be, my family said goodbye and left me to settle
into this strange place that I was to call home. I was to share the room
with another first-year student, Bernadette.
I was nervous about meeting Bernadette. My closest friends were Chinese
girls and the Chinese people I had grown up with. I heard a key enter the
lock on the door, the handle was pushed down and in she walked.
Bernadette was an Afrikaans girl and she turned out to be a warm
bundle of energy with grey-blue eyes and short, dark-brown hair. She had
been told that I was Chinese and was asked if she would be okay sharing
her room with me. She absolutely loved the idea, she said, because she
loved Chinese food anyway and because I spoke English and she would
get to practise her English. Only then did I realise that for my application
the residence had to rethink their policies about letting a Chinese girl live
there even in the last days of apartheid.
Bernadette and I turned out to be great roommates, apart from me
being a night owl and her getting up when the sun was still new in the
sky. She helped me navigate the culture shock of Afrikaans residence life,
with its sakkie-sakkie dances, a half-sweep, half-shuffle movement that
went with just about any kind of music it seemed. For my part, I snuck
out plates of dinner from the canteen when she could not make dinnertime
because of an aerobics class or a date with a boyfriend she met after our
first few months as first-years. It was Bernadette who calmed me as I
cursed the initiation rituals like having to play dress-up at all hours of the
night. She would paint exaggerated lipstick circles on my cheeks when an
intercom announcement would wake us up from our sleep with giggling
seniors instructing the first-years to dress up as clowns and get down to
the recreation hall in ten minutes. Other times we dressed up as whores,
as church-going aunties and other times we had to make cups of Milo for
the men’s residence that we would serenade with whatever pop ballad the
seniors thought appropriate.
Mostly, the house committee members did not know how to deal with
me as the only Chinese first-year. We had a particularly wicked house
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committee member assigned to first-years. Wanda the wicked also did
not know exactly what to do with the Chinese girl from Joburg, so most