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2. Here be Dragons
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Here be Dragons I grew up in Bertrams, in the east of Johannesburg, in the 1970s and 80s. I am the third of four children. We lived in a semi-detached house along a wide road that pulled apart the suburb for the cars advancing towards the shopping centre and highway exchange that over the next three decades would become the massive mall of Eastgate and the throbbing clot of the N3 interchange. This was a so-called grey area, where Chinese people were mostly ignored for living in these spaces that were still legally reserved for whites in apartheid South Africa. No one cared really that a few Chinese lived here because these were not the fancy suburbs where people worried about backwashing swimming pools or keeping appointments at the doggie parlour. Like dragons in fairytales, we were left to become the demons of people’s theories, mysteries and loathing. As long as we stayed in our lairs and did not breathe out fire, we were pretty much left alone. Of course, I did not know then that things like pool maintenance separated and defined people. I did not know that being Chinese made me different, like I did not know what fahfee would come to mean for my family, and especially for my father. 2 4 This gambling game practised in hidden places was never spoken about openly to outsiders. Fahfee was always sullied, polluted somehow. It was associated with the working class, with transacting with the poorest of the poor. And so fahfee was something people skirted around even to community insiders and completely so to outsiders. It remained a practice of humiliation and secrecy, which turned into a practice of shame and stigma. I did not know these things in the 1980s when I was growing up as we were a part of living these shadows and scars. We were a society full of cleavages; we shared a country, but we were not a nation. Separated in delineated living spaces, we stayed in our boxes of stereotypes, convenient prejudices and simmering tensions. I was blissfully unaware of all this as a child, a bit like the small fertile patch in our garden that showed happy oblivion or maybe it was quiet rebellion, growing with abandon against expectation and convention. Where there should have been hydrangeas and pansies, the small patch of soil became a vegetable haven of downy winter melons, smooth green Chinese spinach and eruptions of spring onion – the vegetables you could not find in a local greengrocer in South Africa in the 1980s, but which were the staples on a Chinese family’s daily menu. Most Chinese we knew used whatever land was around them to grow food. No one really moaned about the fluttering strips of plastic bags that stood in for scarecrows because this was a crumbling bit of suburbia. Further down the road lived a Chinese woman and her adult son. She raised chickens on the small property and sometimes we walked down to her corner house to buy a freshly slain bird. The old aunty disappeared behind the backyard door, closed it and told us to wait. There was a muffled squawking, the sound of someone moving quickly. We sat in the kitchen in silence, imagining the poor chickens darting across their small pen hoping not to be the unlucky one. She reappeared some minutes later with a limp bird, some of its white feathers wet where the first blood of its death had been rinsed off. The chicken was placed into a double-bagged, blue-grey plastic bag and we walked home with its still-warm body knocking against our legs, ready to be paired with our winter melons on the dinner table. Outside the stout walls of our house an oak tree’s trunk burst out of the grey pavement. It was the pavement where the old brown Cortina was parked, because there was no garage or driveway. There was no grass UFRIEDA HO 5 around the old giant, just a scattering of its leaves and acorns; the rest was tarred. I liked to collect the little nuts, pop off their hats and peel off their hard casings until my fingernails were split and sore. The pain was worth it to treat the squirrels that I believed lived in our neighbour’s tree. My older sister Yolanda (I called her Kaa Jeh or Kaatch) convinced me that my furry friends did appreciate my efforts, so I happily...