Paper Sons and Daughters

by Ufrieda Ho

  do an experiential year of training as part of our qualifications and I had

  managed to get a job at a community newspaper in Edenvale that was not

  too far from my home.

  My family and friends rallied around to help me get my driver’s licence

  that I was required to have for the job. While I was at the residence, my

  friends turned their beat-up Datsuns and old bakkies into my fleet of cars

  with the learner driver’s ‘L’ stuck on them. When I learnt to alley dock,

  as the K-53 test required, my friends lined up as poles as I navigated past

  their legs. They let me drive on the quiet streets of Pretoria to test my

  clutch control and to see whether I was checking all my blind spots and

  mirrors properly.

  My dad took his turn to teach me how to drive at home. He was a good,

  confident driver but I think even he was shaky about getting through to

  me to co-ordinate my body enough not to stall and to figure out when

  you changed gears before the engine started to squeal for it. At least,

  unlike Kelvin, my father never sat in the passenger seat with his hand

  on the handbrake, just in case. Kelvin’s style of teaching did little for my

  confidence and each time I would return from the driving lesson with my

  nerves as raw as theirs.

  Even though everyone tried to be patient with me, handing over a set

  of car keys to me was like looking over a cliff with a frayed bit of rope

  as a bungee cord. One time, after a Sunday afternoon of driving up and

  down the streets of the city with the big homemade ‘L’ sign on the car, we

  finally made it home. I remember dad, who had volunteered to give me the

  lesson, walking into the house and going straight for the back rest of the

  sofa. He held on to the textured fabric for a while, like he had to steady

  himself before taking a few more steps. I think he thought then he would

  be driving me around for many more years because it would be unlikely

  I would ever get the thumbs-up from the clipboard cops at the testing

  station.

  But teaching their children to drive is what dads do, even fahfee men

  who have little free time. Dads have to let their daughters burn some rubber

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  unintentionally and stall more than drive. It seemed like just a few short

  years earlier when he had taught me how to ride a bicycle without training

  wheels in the old Bez Valley park near our house. I could only balance for

  a few metres at a time, then I would squeeze too hard on the brakes and

  fall to the side of the bike, refusing to try again.

  Dad would urge me on. He even ran alongside me, holding the back

  of the seat as I pedalled and as my grip on the brake eased up a bit. ‘Keep

  pedalling, keep pedalling, chai, chai,’ he said, until the day I turned my

  head to see that I had cleared a whole stretch of park and dad was now

  standing still, waving me on.

  I started work as a reporter just a few days after my final exams. I

  arrived in the Edenvale office of the newspaper that had advertising

  representatives and a tea lady, all in an office small enough for me to hear

  the receptionist singsong her standard greeting every few minutes when

  the phone rang.

  But I still did not have a driver’s licence.

  Embarrassed to have to ask for anything on my first day at work, I had

  to approach my editor for a morning off the following week. He raised an

  eyebrow.

  ‘It is for my driver’s test,’ I told him (my fourth attempt).

  ‘What, you don’t have a driver’s licence! Well, you better get it,’ was

  what he said after agreeing to my request.

  I did, thankfully, and much to the relief of my family who was fed up

  with carting me around.

  At the Edenvale community paper, I was given the crime beat and the

  responsibility of covering local council news for the town of Bedfordview.

  And, of course, being a community newspaper it involved covering all the

  general reporting expected on a small local paper. One of the first stories I

  had to cover was a children’s art competition, followed by a Barbie show,

  with a tall blonde dressed up to be the toy doll in real life. I went along

  with my notebook and took the photographs, remembering the tight

  cropping we were taught and remembering to ask people to spell their

  names always. Importantly, it was remembering that a rosette on a child’s

  drawing was more than a silly first prize, it was a big deal for that child

  and everyone connected to the making of that crayon image.

  My grandfather loaned me his tomato-red Mazda that he only really

  needed at weekends to get to church and mostly he preferred the minibus

  shuttle anyway because glaucoma had caught up with his eyes and he did

  not like to guess at robot colours and people crossing the streets.

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  I was grateful for the old car that my grandfather secured with a

  padlocked length of chain from the brake to the steering wheel. It was a

  second-hand car and the red on the bonnet did not match the rest of the

  car. It broke down often and over time I learnt its little quirks, like how

  to get the windscreen wiper going if you manually gave it a shove to get it

  into action. It was why I sometimes arrived at an assignment with a wet

  right arm, as I had leaned out of the window to yank the wiper just once

  before it squeaked into action and sloshed the raindrops to the sides so I

  could drive off.

  The policemen I met at the four police stations that made up part of my

  beat thought it hysterical that I bothered to lock the car that I stuck bumper

  stickers on. There was one sticker that said ‘No to Animal Vivisection’

  and another about clean air and clean rivers. They said that if my car got

  stolen they would replace it. The also made jokes about the car being held

  together by its bumper stickers.

  ‘Do you leave your car outside at night, Ufrieda?’ asked one of these

  cop contacts one day.

  ‘Yes, why?’ I asked.

  ‘You must be careful,’ he warned, ‘the mosquitoes could puncture those

  tyres.’ He would burst out laughing and even I had to smile about the

  beat-up car that I loved so dearly.

  But even as I loved the car, my Ah Goung loved it more. Once or twice

  when he did need the car, he would drop me off, or wait for me at an

  interview, then pick me up afterwards.

  One rainy day, we were together on one of these first assignments of

  mine and the Mazda cut out. It started to rain but we got out and flipped

  up the bonnet. My grandfather fiddled a little, but there was nothing

  obvious to him or to me that was wrong with the car.

  As the rain came down harder, I went to retrieve an umbrella from the

  car. My grandfather was always prepared and the car was an extension of

  a storage space for all the emergencies you could think of. But instead of

  an umbrella, Ah Goung took out a Checkers plastic bag, unfolded it neatly

  and placed it over his head with the handles drooping around his ears. As

  the raindrops fell, the centre of his plastic hood started to sag, leaving the

  corners
of the bag looking like bright yellow Batman ears. I urged him

  under the umbrella and he dismissed me.

  ‘Shush, this is fine,’ he said.

  ‘But please, Ah Goung, you are going to get sick and then what?’ I tried

  to scare him a little.

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  He still ignored me. Eventually another car stopped. It happened to

  be a Chinese man who greeted us warmly, calling my grandfather the

  respectful Ah Buk, uncle, and I called him Ah Gor, my brother. Then he

  started to do fiddly things to the car. I died of embarrassment at my Batman

  grandfather with his plastic bag hat. This was how I was going to start my

  journalism career, I thought, in the rain, with a car that was going nowhere

  and my grandfather with a canary-yellow plastic bag on his head. But in

  my other life, I was still the granddaughter of this frugal, practical man,

  whose Batman ears may just have been what caught enough attention for

  someone to stop and help.

  Work was a window into a strange new world for me. I was allowed

  into strangers’ homes as I interviewed them and took photographs. It

  involved everything from telling the stories of those fighting the council

  over illegal dumping near their homes, to letting surviving family members

  devastated by a violent crime speak about their loved ones or telling me

  about celebrating 50 years of marriage. These were homes without the

  Chinese altars for the ancestors or the fai cheun, the four-character lucky

  poems that are so typical of Chinese homes. There were people who

  lived in shacks where swept dirt stood in for carpets and where sunlight

  never penetrated once a makeshift door was closed. I also entered into

  mansions that had staircases leading storeys and storeys upwards to where

  chandeliers dripped from the ceilings. None of them was the home of the

  fahfee man or the Chinese shopkeeper that I knew so well.

  My job was letting me see a world very unlike the one I grew up in.

  There were so many ways to live a life, so many variations on family, on

  relationships, on success and failure and on what people held close to their

  hearts. I was happy to be working at the little knock-and-drop that was

  always jammed full of advertisements and inserts. My job meant I was

  actually getting a pay cheque, too. Even though it was still a study year,

  we had to complete a training year to qualify. The newspaper paid me a

  junior reporter’s salary and expected me to deliver like any rookie on the

  beat, not a student.

  After a few months, I decided I wanted to pay my father back for that

  year’s fees that he had already paid upfront. I was living at home, driving

  my Ah Goung’s car, and apart from keeping his car running I really did not

  have many expenses and I wanted to be able to give back to my father.

  I handed over a wad of money to my dad one day. He refused to take the

  money. He said it was his duty as my father to provide for my education.

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  ‘Just keep on working hard, do your best at work and learn everything

  you can, then I will be a satisfied father,’ he said to me.

  Proving yourself in my parents’ books meant doing more than what

  was required of you. ‘Sweep the floor if your boss asks you to, do not say

  it is not your job and do not put on a sour face when you do it. Help your

  colleagues, help them carry the load and be ready to learn from them.’ It

  was the kind of advice that my mom and dad always gave to us. Do more,

  moan less and the hard work will pay off. It was also about working with

  dignity. ‘You can be the street sweeper or the president, it does not matter

  as long as you have pride in your work and you do it with dignity,’ was

  another of my dad’s oft-repeated sayings.

  I was happy for his advice; I was happy that my dad saw more dignity

  in sweeping a floor well than in complaining about a raise or stomping all

  over others to get to the top.

  Most of all, I was thrilled to be working, my writing was being published,

  people were reading my articles and responding and even though I was

  still a student I was indeed starting my journalism career. I had an editor

  who believed you earned a byline, you did not get it just because you typed

  a few sentences on a computer screen. But soon, in that small office, I was

  getting my byline on the big stories and I was pulling my weight. And now

  I had a salary and I had some money that I wanted to give back to my

  parents.

  My father still refused the money I had offered to him, but I insisted.

  ‘Take it, dad,’ I said. ‘Take the money and go bet on something or

  whatever.’

  I wanted him to be able to do something absolutely frivolous with the

  money and enjoy it even if it was on gambling. Maybe especially if it

  was gambling because it was the guilty pleasure he enjoyed so much. He

  finally relented, happy, I hope, to recognise that he had a child becoming

  an adult. He had worked hard enough.

  A few nights later my dad was dead.

  My father was shot somewhere in Boksburg on Johannesburg’s East Rand.

  He was on a fahfee round and he was with two other colleagues, wrapping

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  up the banks before heading back to Gou Sok’s house. My father was in

  the driver’s seat that cool April night. He had a younger colleague who

  had done most of the driving in the few years since he had started working

  for Gou Sok. That day, though, my dad volunteered to drive because the

  younger man had obviously had a rough night and my dad pitied his

  youthful excess. The gunman came up to the driver’s window and the one

  shot he fired into my dad’s face killed him instantly.

  He may have been a soft crime target for the car or the cash they

  associated with the fahfee men. My dad’s shooting may have been a

  revenge killing of some aggrieved gambler or maybe it was part of how

  violence was starting to become a way to settle things, that dark shadow

  that is a seductively convenient solution in South Africa. Those of us who

  loved him had no answers; we never will.

  The news came to our house like a dark cloud moving over the tin roof

  and it began with a ringing phone. I was working that night, covering a

  council meeting that was one of my monthly night-time jobs. When my

  dad was shot, I was sitting in my little press gallery seat in the Bedfordview

  town council’s chambers. The mayor would walk in with his chain and his

  robe and we would all rise until he took his seat at his special, raised seat.

  There was a lot of ritual and ceremony, then the toing and froing would

  start as we worked through an agenda and each councillor muscled for his

  or her personal wants and desires for the small East Rand town.

  While the storm tore into my family home as the news came from

  someone with the telephone message, I was still sipping on a drink and

  snacking on the food that was always the way monthly council meetings

  ended.

  After the meeting, I drove Ah Goung’s Mazda back home and turned

  into our street as the night’s quiet deepened. I u
sually parked the car in a

  neighbourhood garage. The old lady, who lived a few houses from us, let

  us use her parking spot for a few rand a month. We could not park on the

  street; we had already woken up one morning some years earlier to see

  an empty space where our second-hand car was the night before. I could

  see Unisda walking up the street to meet me from our house. She did this

  sometimes so I did not take much notice of her as I started wrapping the

  metal chain-link around the two gates to padlock the gate for the night.

  Unisda walked slowly like she could not bring her feet to me. Her arms

  were folded and she was gripping her forearms, hugging herself tightly.

  Maybe she thought she could squeeze away the news she was about to

  give me.

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  I started chatting immediately as she got within earshot. I was nattering

  about my day and the council meeting.

  ‘Ngaan, dad has been shot,’ she stopped me.

  I looked at her for a few seconds; the words sank in, but they did not

  make sense.

  ‘Oh no, no, where is he? Is he alright? Oh my God, no,’ I was pleading.

  I could not imagine that my dad, my precious, precious father, could be

  dead, surely he was only hurt and the doctors would be able to make him

  better again. The seconds she did not confirm his death dragged out in

  slow motion for me. She had made a mistake; it was Unisda’s idea of a

  cruel, cruel joke; this was just a nightmare and I was going to wake up.

  ‘He has been killed, he is dead, Ah Ngaan.’

  My silent scream ripped through the night. Nothing came out of my

  mouth but my body was trembling; my skin instantly felt like it did not

  belong to my body as the tingle of tragedy crawled all over me. My head

  was spinning. I ran back to the house with Unisda following my pace.

  Even before I made it inside the front door, the weeping and the desperate

  sobs from inside the house rushed at my solar plexus and I knew then that

  a part of the sun would never rise for any of us ever again.

  My dad did not live long enough for his 60th birthday – that would have

  come just two months later in June. Years earlier, we as a family had settled

  on 26 June as my dad’s birthday. Of course, we had no way of knowing for

  sure, it was just following the data made up for this paper son.