All Under Heaven — The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa (review)

Within the last decades of the 20th Century, with minority studies having been established as an independent field of study, overseas Chinese studies also eventually emerged as a field in its own right. Chinese minorities became the focus of historical, sociological, economic and other academic analysis and, in some cases, were regarded as barometers in revised interpretations of their respective host societies. This was particularly true in Western countries, such as the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe, where Chinese minorities had been ignored, or at best relegated to the periphery of the general discourse. Numerous factors played a role in the emergence of the new interest and focus on the overseas Chinese, one of which was related to the changing political environment in China, as well as within the host countries themselves. Not only were the overseas Chinese studied as communities within their own right, but they were also incorporated into the core histories of the respective host countries.

While the scope and depth of academic scrutiny of the overseas Chinese continued to escalate, other works on the subject of Chinese overseas had also emerged. Besides community histories, there were memoirs, autobiographies and historic novels, in which Chinese authors recounted details of experiences in China and abroad, often spanning two to three generations as well as two or more continents. One of the first to attain widespread recognition was Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior published in 1976 and winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. Another publication to receive popular attention was Amy Tan's 1989 fiction novel The Joy Luck Club that was made into a movie in 1993. And in 1991, another widely acclaimed book, Wild Swans — Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang, was heralded as a "family memoir that [had] the breadth of the most enduring social history" and named the winner of the NCR Book Award.

In South Africa, specific studies of the small overseas Chinese community were slow to emerge and remained relatively limited. The racially discriminatory legacy of apartheid was indeed a factor that accounted for many minorities lying low — and as was the case with the South African Chinese — maintaining a low profile was often a way to avoid negative political and other repercussions. In the late 1980s, however, as grand apartheid began to decline, the Transvaal Chinese Association launched the South African Chinese History Project. Almost a decade later, the book Colour, Confusion and Concessions by Dianne Man and Melanie Yap, was published presenting a thorough account of the history of the Chinese people of South Africa. In line with the historically marginalized position of the South African Chinese, the book did not receive the recognition it deserved. It was only a decade after the creation of the new democratic dispensation in South Africa in 1994 that the time seemed ripe for the reception of a book that took a closer look at the position and place of this very small and apparently invisible community. It was in this context that Darryl Accone's All Under Heaven — The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa appeared and was well received, being nominated as one of the finalists for the nationally acclaimed Alan Paton Award.

Accone's work is an epic semi-autobiographical tale that weaves together the 20th-century history and experiences of two families, two continents and two cultures over three generations. It is a microcosmic historic account of the hard reality of the extreme discrimination the Chinese suffered in both segregationist and apartheid South Africa, which ultimately kept them in what Accone terms an "inescapable limbo" (p. 168). It is interesting, yet tragic, to note that as we move into the 21st century this apt portrayal of the Chinese position in South Africa persists.

Accone's detailed accounts are tangibly vivid whether he is tracing the journey of his maternal great grandfather from Sha Kiu village...