The Chinese Shop

Merika felt freedom and joy while she watched Chinese karate movies. Her soul vanished into the world of the monks training at their bronze gilded temples, the bonsai gardens, the sweeping rice fields, the big wall of China and the distant snow-capped mountains; she often screamed with laughter for the funny-sounding dubbing of the actor’s voices. The bitter irony is that this haven existed because of a handout from the apartheid-privileged white farm owner, Jan Basson, who passed on his ancient television set to his housekeeper and their neighbour, who consequently owned the only TV at the labourers’ houses.

Their two-roomed worker homes stood far, far away from his Victorian-styled mansion. All her life, she witnessed his forceful exploitations. He paid them a pittance wage, which circulated back into his store’s cash register in Blommerus, Northen Cape. It was the only provision store in the small town and nearby the farm. On their stolen ancestral lands, he miscounted their long hours of back-breaking labour on his family-inherited vineyard estate. Land taken from them because of laws that destroyed cultures, languages, communities, and families. He lavished in slavery-earned wealth. So, he guarded any competition with military precision.

Many days, inside his store, she hurled coins into the register’s drawer, then forcefully sighed out all her anger and frustration towards the open door, where the sun broiled the dirt street’s red earth. Antique, green-roofed houses spread both ways in front of the horizon, where the heavens touched the south of the country. Many kilometres away lay Cape Town where her brothers experienced some type of freedom. Their letters described the majestic Table Mountain, with its cloud tablecloth, looming over the uniformly coloured Cape Flats townships, where crowded segregated trains and buses ferried them towards a factory to also work for low race-based wages. Her parents and grandmother flatly refused to have her leave home to join them, which led to her pacing kilometres for a few rands during the week and Saturdays.

This morning, she is late for work. She felt bewildered and disorientated.

‘Damn God!’ she swore. Her fingers grasped her short bushy hair. Her tightly knotted plaits had loosened when she had battled to escape from a nightmare. It now resembled shaggy spikes. In her dream about the farm school, canings on her cold fingers had intensified with her heartbeats. She had wrenched away. Then a hurricane wind pulled her into a black vacuum, which spewed her onto red dunes, where mutilated skeletons of her Khoe-Khoe ancestors bleached underneath the scorching sun. A familiar-looking corpse caused her to use age-old mourning rites. She had wailed. She had torn her hair. These images flashed inside her mind, until her grandmother’s voice broke her thoughts.

‘Did you swear?’  asked Anna, from where her small thin frame stooped over the paraffin stove, her gnarled fingers grasping a tainted copper egg-lifter, over the buckled aluminium black-coated pan. ‘Do not use our Lord’s name in vain!’ 

Your God, not mine, she thought. Because Christian life is hell! She half-sneered slightly. Her grandmother’s nasal Khoe-Khoe accented voice penetrated like a steel needle and cleared her fuzzy mind. She combed a hair-section, then viewed the Chinese face on the movie poster, next to the mirror, whose half-smile resembled hers. Our slanted eyes and cheekbones match, she thought. But God, why not that straight hair? A few brushings and I could have been done.! I am so late! 

 Thoughts of the canings from the farmer’s spinster daughter, who still iron-fisted ruled the school – as her father did with his workers – filled her mind. After years away from school, the woman’s commands of neatness, which meant hair as flat as her own straight hair, and punctuality remained entrenched inside Merika. A late opening of the store will somehow reach the farmer’s ears. But she still needed to eat her morning meal. The smell of roosterbrood broke her thoughts: its familiar roasted flour aroma created a calmness which settled inside her. 

She glanced towards the white-scrubbed wooden table, where they lay covered with a cloth. Behind it, her grandmother pointed her gnarled harsh-skinned finger towards a laundry-filled chipped white enamel basin. 

‘No soap and no sugar, ‘Anna lamented. ‘How must I get these clothes clean?’

‘Ask your God.’ she responded. The minute the words slipped out; she clasped her mouth. She jerked her face towards her grandmother to face the stern response. Then she froze. But Anna stared straight ahead; her thin lips tightened; her wrinkles furrowed deeper. Why not make use of his credit book? she questioned. Basson already enslaved you forever with religion. He forbids differences and newness to death.’ 

She eyed Anna. Why do you believe everything he utters? she questioned silently. His beliefs of building this economy through keeping business inside the country means nothing, she concluded. Anna supported his view despite the low wage he paid them. So, with this obedience for her boss, Merika’s own lifegoals disintegrated with his offer to her for a job in his store. She gave in to the insistence from her elders since their trauma sucked them away from their indigenous ways of wisdom and coerced them to meek reasonings. She also felt forced to accept his offer, so she could assist her family. Thoughts of this influence on decisions about her life sparked deep anger inside her.

To her weary eyes, the colours of the movie poster had faded. The green and red blotched. They had grey spots. Then only black and only white showed. The world it had created disintegrated each morning.

She reconsidered her grandmother’s laundry problem: she could not, did not, would never offer a solution. Eating pap without sugar happened regularly, until cash resurfaced with pay-day, when Basson’s overpriced supplies swallowed each cent again. She ate the bitter morning meal until then.

Anna disliked credit. ‘Never use what you do not have,’ she often cautioned. ‘Stay without, or borrow and replace, which I will not do either.’

Will she wait until pay day to do laundry?? she wondered. But she said, ‘why not take a bar of soap from Basson’s place when you help out Aunt Rosie with theirs?’

‘Steal?’ Anna yelled. Her voice raised. She glared at her. ‘Never speak about theft! Not here or ever, because I will never steal, and neither should you!’

Rather, do not recover our money, you mean, our stolen wealth, she raged silently. She knew her case remained worthless to a mind incorruptible in defence of a slave-master. The laundry dilemma stressed her, especially at work. Why do they cling to Christian moral values feeding their state of slavery and poverty, and watch their masters cash in without a blink of decency? she anguished. Her visionary reality of life in China, the poster’s face inspired every morning, offered imaginary relief. Her days drifted by with conflicting emotions and thoughts.

–

The remote town’s lifestyle stuck them inside a time warp. No fresh faces; white, brown, pink, or purple. Until an Asian foreigner, Mr. Wang, supported by the government’s seventies economics strategy, entered the small town’s picture. She had heard about the latter from her brother, after she had written to him about the newcomer. He proudly boasted how he now had access to newspapers, never available to him before, in the political field of the union. So, she learnt that the government had decided to give new Chinese immigrants assistance to start businesses all over the country, which would help curb economic growth from their oppressed citizens. 

This bitter-sweet news hurled her mind into a maelstrom. Especially, when she learnt that the new family would settle opposite the store. She barraged questions through the store’s open door towards the vacant house. She watched as transformations happened there. White painted walls, shutter framed windows, a shrubbed exquisite garden and a pebbled curved pathway towards the brass knocker door of an Oriental home transformed the look of the street within weeks. Yet, nobody pitched after the completion of the renovations. 

And Basson drilled them. He commanded no contact with the Chinese family, not inside their home or their store. But her heart’s desire raged on. She longed to touch a Chinese hand, eat their food, learn their manners, see their clothes, know their religion and culture, that the poster-picture had ingrained into her life. Basson’s restraints, or his daughter’s cane, would never squash her dream, not today, tomorrow, or ever, she promised herself.

The magic happened early the next Monday morning. It caused a sparkle in her eyes. A furniture-loaded truck spun red dust towards her at the doorway as it grinded to halt. A jean-clad floral-shirted Asian young woman emerged behind the truck; two older Chinese persons followed her dust-spreading stride. They disappeared into the darkness of the house. Except for the uncovered hair of the young woman, a long black ponytail, which swayed with her brisk steps, she did not recognise anything remotely Chinese. Not clothes, not courtesy greetings, neither friendly nods nor smiles to nearby onlookers.

 She swallowed. A tightness, heaviness, settled into her stomach. The Chinese’s open door now webbed her peace space into an emotional jail. The furniture and boxes blocked the view of the inside of the house. The truck’s roar drowned the voice of any of the family members still outside. Then the closed door’s brass knocker’s swing was all that was visible to her. For that day, neither the door nor the shutters opened when in her sight. And neither did it for the curious local onlookers who dawdled past occasionally. She noticed the drawn ejected face of one man. She wondered what his expectations were of this family. Same as mine? she wondered. This thought clamped her stomach. Late afternoon, she locked up, her expectations and mood zeroed to nought.

–

The following day, the door across the street opened and unlocked her trapped hopes. A tired old, wrinkled Chinese face came into her view. The distance between them disappeared. His eyes bored into hers. 

Does my heaven mean another hell? she questioned. The old man slipped back inside; the door slammed; the brass knocker quivered madly. But despite this, she still frequented the store’s doorway. Her hopes for close contact remained revived, just like it seemed for yesterday’s passer-by, who occasionally lingered to eye that door. 

She looked out, until Basson arrived before locking up time. ‘Listen good,’ he half-barked in a gravel-laced voice. ‘I say this again, once they open the shop, and even now, you stay away!’ His thick fingers quivered as he pointed towards the house. His watch squeezed tighter onto the golden hairs of his wrist.

 Just like her boss, Anna dispatched the same command to her that evening. But questions about the newcomers rained from her, which Merika let fly past her, unanswered. ‘You must stay away!’ her grandmother ended off. Her tone sounded like a carbon-copy of her master.

Merika’s anger about this spurred her into action. The following morning, before opening the store, she marched to the empty plot next to the Chinese house, where jasmine bushes spread its fragrance towards her. She peered at the Chinese world of pebble stone paving and neatly trimmed flowering bushes – like in the movies. She stooped when the back door inched open. She peered over the fence. She watched the young girl step out, who stretched her arms and inhaled deeply, then she looked towards the fence.

This fragrance must lure them out often, Merika thought. She felt conspicuous. The hair on top of her head bristled. It felt as if the girl’s gaze burnt it. She recalled the old man’s look. Her rebellious confidence sagged. My presence seemed bad-mannered and intrusive, she realised. But this is my chance, her mind cried. Will she behave like a real Chinese person?

But her body objected to these silly thoughts. Cringing pain stabbed everywhere inside her chest and stomach. She hoisted herself onto the top edge of the hedge. The branches creaked. The girl jerked around to face her. Both of their lips froze.

The girl’s blank stare sliced her heart. The look remained in those eyes until the door closed. She repeatedly swallowed away the knobs of discomfort. The icy dismissal had cut her deep. Her daily experiences of the country’s lawful white’s separation had buried such emotions inside a deeper space all along; this rejection and no acknowledgement pained her into a state of concealed embarrassment.

Her mind reasoned with her heart: They might only be private, shy. But why are they unfriendly? Basson is so brutally rude, but his type of behaviour has been sanctioned by the government for centuries. Are these Chinese not from a world free of our sufferings? Like in a paradise? 

Her questions triggered more questions. The space inside the store became a mental and emotional maelstrom with no escape route. Because, with every heartbeat, the centre of her private paradise world faced her from the opened door of the store, across the road. Because a movie played off behind that closed door on top of the red earth. A Chinese family woke, dressed, ate, spoke, and prayed: rooms portrayed a bed, a meal, sounds, even though every face remained as blank as those behind the apartheid fence. And their shop never materialised. 

–

To her weary eyes, the colours of the movie poster had faded. The green and red blotched. They had grey spots. Then only black and only white showed. The world it had created disintegrated each morning. She brushed her hair, brushed, brushed, and stared at the picture. The smile on the Asian face had dwindled with the loss of pigments. Each afternoon, Anna asked:

‘Did the Chinese store open yet?’

‘Why not ask your master?’ she answered each time.

‘Yes, I will. He, alone, will know.’

One morning, she eyed the poster. Enough is enough, she decided. She tore it off. She rushed out. Her hand felt empty. She looked at the page. The poster face shone in the early morning sun, the smile, and her dreams were gone. Never, ever, forever will any of my worlds exist on paper again, she concluded. She ignited it with steady fingers. The paper burnt on the dusty red sand. Smoke curled. Flames turned red and green – the ashes smouldered black. A fiery wind swept them away towards the unknown.

–

This novella was an outstanding piece submitted to the First Global China-Africa Writing Competition (2024) held by CASIN (China-Africa Shanghai International Network). The Elephant is granted rights to publish this work first by both CASIN and the author herself.