As “Asia” comes to be understood in increasingly transnational ways, the role of “overseas” communities (“overseas Indians,” “overseas Chinese”) has moved to the fore. Forging modes of belonging that exceed both nation and diaspora, these groups highlight as yet little-understood imaginaries.
South Africa has long been a destination for Asian migration (whether slaves, indentured laborers, or “free” migrants) and has become a site for thinking about the construction of “Asia” (and its parts) vis-à-vis “Africa.” Gandhi's experiments with creating a miniature “India” in South Africa provide one increasingly discussed example (although his alliance with the Chinese community under the label of “Asians” awaits full exploration).
Ufrieda Ho's Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing up Chinese in South Africa is an important book in this tradition of understanding “Asia” in relation to “Africa.”
The memoir joins a small body of writing on the Chinese community in South Africa, a group made up initially of 60,000 transitory indentured laborers who worked in the mines from 1904 to 1911 before being sent home. Alongside them was a “free” community of traders and workers who came on their own steam. Classified as “colored” under apartheid, and limited in where they could live and work, this community of 25,000 occupied the interstitial spaces of the South African racial order, existing uneasily between black township and white suburb. After the demise of apartheid, there has been a new wave of Chinese immigrants, numbering anywhere between 125,000 and 250,000.
Ho's maternal grandparents came from Guangdong, her grandfather traveling as a stowaway in the late 1940s to be followed eighteen years later by her grandmother and mother who had been working in Hong Kong. Her father, a Guangdong village orphan, was another stowaway to Naam Fey (southern darkness). After sketching out the trajectory of these two generations, the book focuses on Ho's childhood and early adulthood from the 1970s to the 1990s and provides a vivid portrayal of a South African Chinese household over these decades.
One governing metaphor of the story is fahfee, the Chinese-run illegal betting network that operated among black township dwellers. Like other Chinese men with limited education, Ho's father spent most of his working life as a fahfee operative, ju fah goung in Cantonese, ma-china in African township argot. As Ho explains, “Fahfee needed two groups on the edges of society, separate yet bound together, to connect momentarily in the collusion of circumventing the ways of the economic mainstream” (p. 133).
The memoir admirably captures a society structured into water-tight “racial” containers alongside the cautious creolization that happened at the boundaries. Ho's grandfather converts to Christianity after being miraculously saved in a flood. Barred from worshipping in the local white church, he joins a small African syncretist sect. An uncle in Mozambique maintains a second family with an African woman whom he subsequently abandons to return to Macau. The memoir tracks a series of such creolizing spaces: religion, traditional medicine, food, language. Chinese ideas of ancestors encounter African ancestral worldviews. Cantonese, Sesotho, isiZulu, and Afrikaans (itself a creole) infuse each other with phrases and phonemes.
Like many stories of transnational lineages, the memoir outlines the labor entailed in creating a sense of family. The title is drawn from jee jay (paper son), “a literal translation of the phrase used to refer to the people who bought or borrowed new identities from more established families” (p. 40). Ghost marriages fill empty lineage slots, and absent ancestors are lovingly constructed via objects, photographs, or stories.
The memoir ends as Ho's father is hijacked and killed in the township on the eve of the first democratic election in 1994. Ruled by bureaucratic pieces of paper all his life, and working with fahfee chits every day, Ho's father is robbed of a chance to make his mark on the ballot sheet and a new order of citizenship. Yet, as Ho indicates, even this citizenship is not straightforward. Post-apartheid, a growing nativist discourse defines minorities as less worthy citizens than “indigenous” communities while the perception of China as a new imperial power generates new forms of suspicion.
In a recent discussion of sinophone literatures, Shu-mei Shi has described the category as disruptive of both nation and diaspora.Footnote 1 While Anglophone, Ho's text is similarly troublesome, unsettling simple notions of a diasporic homeland even as it ruptures ideas of South African belonging. It problematizes questions of “settler” and “native” and disturbs an anti-apartheid narrative of the South African struggle as one entailing only “black” and “white,” thereby highlighting the multiple inheritances of the country. It provides a compelling story of sinophone-inflected traditions from a post-apartheid perspective.
