Ufrieda Ho’s Memoir of Growing Up Chinese in South Africa: Paper Sons and Daughters
Ufrieda Ho’s Memoir of Growing Up Chinese in South Africa: Paper Sons and Daughters
by Tarryn on Feb 23rd, 2011
This March from Picador Africa: Paper Sons and Daughters
A stowaway hides for long weeks aboard a ship crossing the Indian Ocean. Leaving behind his village and his ancestors, he looks to the gold mountain in Johannesburg as an escape from his bleak life in devastated 1950s China.
In South Africa he will become a “paper son”, a literal translation of the phrase used to refer to the illegal immigrants who bought or borrowed new identities from more established Chinese families to avoid detection by the authorities.
He is full of quiet hope for what lies ahead as he sets foot in the Durban docks, but he will never lose the status of a second-class citizen. He is the geel gevaar, the yellow peril in apartheid South Africa, and he soon learns that the streets aren’t lined with gold. He can’t live where he chooses and won’t get the jobs reserved for whites. He becomes a fahfee man, the ‘ma-china’ of the black townships, running the illegal gambling game so perfectly suited to survival in the rot of South Africa’s policies of racial segregation.
He is always avoiding the police, always looking to maximise his winnings and always trying to ensure a better life for his wife and four children – until one night in April 1993 when tragedy strikes.
Winner of the 2007 Anthony Sampson Foundation Award for journalism, Ufrieda Ho is one of the daughters of this man, Ho Sing Kee. In this wonderfully textured memoir she explores her parents’ and grandparents’ arrival as illegal immigrants in South Africa, ready for a new life of putting “pap” on the menu and learning why “voetsek” doesn’t need much of an explanation.
Ufrieda describes growing up with her siblings in a world of chopsticks and braais, dragons of the East and springboks of the South, fahfee and the family’s Ford Cortina. It is a world in which she is too white for some and too black for others, and the question of “who belongs” haunts these evocative stories of being Chinese in South Africa.
