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63 In the City of Gold My father, Ah Kee, had already clocked up a few years in another part of the province by the time my gran and mom made their trip south to this mountain of gold, this Gum Saan. For my father there would be no gold, no promise of grand opportunity and also no turning back. I never asked my father how he felt about coming out to South Africa. I wonder what went through his mind when the decision to leave Shun Tak for South Africa was made for him. How alone he must have felt, hiding on the ship, as the giant vessel separated from the dock and the only home he had known. My Ah Ba had to make the journey to South Africa on his own. He had never even left his village before. He had no guardian, no parent. There was nobody to reassure him, to distract him from his fears with a joke or a story. It might have been a small consolation to know that he was heading to a part of the world where two of his older brothers had moved in the last few years. He would have hoped for a reunion; maybe he daydreamt a little about what it might feel like to be the baby brother, to know the security and protection of having two big brothers when he landed. 6 64 But by the time my mother and father’s separate worlds started to collide with my mom’s arrival in South Africa, my father had already grown up very quickly. Gone was the timid teenager; gone, too, were his daydreams and holding on to old hopes. His China, like the fickle mists that wrap the verdant mountains of the mighty middle kingdom, was becoming more and more of an unsure memory. When my dad left China, he was the village orphan and he was only a teenager, maybe seventeen, eighteen or nineteen. As with my mother, I cannot be sure of the exact dates or ages involved. Much was lost in the illiteracy of my dad’s village life and it was only when I grew up that I understood how the superstitions and customs of a very different social structure could distort things like someone’s age or birth date. To begin with, there were very few written records from the villages that my family came from. There was that confusion between the lunar calendar and its Western counterpart. It meant important dates on the lunar calendar fell on a different day each year. Even oral histories conflicted and it just left more questions unanswered. In the villages people used to have many children because they knew several would die, and sometimes the young dead were ignored because there was no luxury in remembering for too long. Because of the high infant mortality in the rural villages, children were sometimes given nicknames such as ‘dog’ or ‘pig’; it was a way to ward off evil spirits, my mother would tell us, when I laughed as a child about an Uncle Dog, as his nickname stuck even years later. Calling a child ‘dog’ would confuse the evil spirits that came in the shadows to claim infant souls. Another practice that was equally baffling for me to understand was the tradition of adding extra years to the age of someone once they died. It was an extra year for the death, then one for the heavens and one for the earth. I was bewildered by these practices while growing up and even sometimes as an adult, but I have come to realise that superstition and seemingly bizarre practices are all completely logical, practical even. They make sense of life’s cruelties by transcending the realm of plausible reasoning; here they cannot be questioned. They comfort bruised hearts when no healing will come. For me, straddling two worlds of such difference makes me learn to lay down differences, side by side, letting them be separated but joined like a scar that knits together split flesh but leaves behind a dividing line that does not fade. UFRIEDA HO 65 Still, it was like a sting to my heart that I had so many puzzle pieces of my dad’s life and that so much was lost to the obscurity of superstition. I was frustrated with my father, too, for not having answers for me, even when I asked him. But my disappointment and sadness that the...

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