Image courtesy of Dianne Leong Man
CHINESE WITSIES
&
Bonds boundaries
In a year marking 20 years of diplomatic ties between China and South Africa, UFRIEDA HO looks back on steps in the longer journey of Chinese South Africans at Wits
T
he first steps I took onto Wits campus were probably skipping and running – with my mother trying to keep pace. I imagine her penetrating voice catching up to me, my brother and my two sisters. Stern shouts in Cantonese telling us to stop running, shooing us from the edge of the pools at the fountains under the Macrone Mall as we kids raced up the stairs towards the Great Hall. Here we’d stop, draw breath and wait. We’d be waiting for something quite special: a bride in blinding white, sequinned flowers maybe on her gown, turning Joburg’s golden afternoon light into starbursts. As part of her auspicious entourage, we had arrived at the Great Hall steps to immortalise her happy day
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in photos. In my growing-up years in the 1980s I repeated this ritual a few times – finding myself on the same steps, straightening a corsage on a dress, fixing my hair into place and being told to say “cheese” or “siew” (“smile” in Cantonese) as part of a bridal party. Wedding photos on the Great Hall steps became an entrenched phenomenon for many families in the Chinese community. Sunday was the day almost all Chinese weddings took place, mostly to accommodate the many shopkeepers and fahfee men and women who couldn’t afford to take a Saturday off work. The grand Great Hall steps were backdrops of aspiration and things lofty – as well as a perfectly pragmatic option for a tiered group pic. As the photos survive in frames and yellowed, sticky