All Under Heaven
by Darryl Accone
(David Philip)
“A heavenly lingering crisp flavour” is how a certain Chinese oolong tea is described in this family memoir — a phrase that captures well the pleasure to be had from this book.
In a country as densely populated with immigrants as South Africa, there are countless records of how and why the original settlers ended up here. But very little is known about Chinese settlers in this country, and All Under Heaven fills this gap.
Accone begins his account of his family’s story in 1911 when his great-grandfather, Langshi, accompanied by his son, Ah Kwok, began the journey to Namfeechow (South Africa). In an extraordinarily poetic evocation of that moment he recreates how father and son set out from their village on foot and carrying their trunks, on the road to Canton (now Gwangzhou). Walking with them for the first 10 li of the journey, and “savouring every step”, was Tian, Ah Kwok’s grandfather, “a wispy presence”, “dressed in his best white silk jacket and trousers”.
The parting was poignant and difficult, but their hopes were high for this undertaking, and they did not expect their separation to be as long as it eventually turned out. Langshi was going to Johannesburg at the request of the Chinese community there, to practice as a medical herbalist, and the intention was to return with enough money for Ah Kwok to sit the examinations for admission to the imperial administration.
Accone lingers over this parting and journey, so that the reader has a real sense of the land and the life they were leaving. As they walk Ah Kwok thinks about the friends he is leaving with whom he used to catch snakes. And in his thoughts about Tian, Accone skilfully mingles farming and mythology into a subtle and graceful portrait of the old man: “Tian’s hands, [were] as rough and hardened as the bark of a old ginko tree … so big they reminded Ah Kwok of the mountains in the story of the Stone Monkey, mighty peaks … that were Buddha’s fingers and the mist-shrouded valleys below were his palms.”
Although both sides of Accone’s ancestry are traced, the main thread of the story follows the life of Ah Kwok, renamed Ah Leong in South Africa. From the outset, Ah Leong has to work in various shops, and becomes a successful trader.
The story carefully documents incidents and stories handed down from parents and grandparents, supplemented often by a collection of newspaper cuttings made by Jewel, Accone’s mother. A clear family tree makes it easy to keep track of the various strands of the story, and a selection of old photgraphs is end-lessly fascinating, going back as far as the ancestors in China.
From the kind of snippets that are passed on in all families Accone has fashioned imagined scenes, full of detail and dialogue, entirely convincing in their depiction of character and circumstance.
One such incident is the meeting of Cornelia van Brandis and Chok Foon Martin, told with the formality and beauty of a ritual. Cornelia, unusually adventurous and curious for a young white Lutheran girl in Johannesburg in the 1920s, with a male cousin, “ventured to the western edges of Ferreira’s Camp, the oldest part of the city of gold, for a glimpse of the Chinese and their mysterious ways.”
One of the shops they go into is Martin’s and they are persuaded to have tea with him (the Chinese oolong), an encounter that leads to a happy marriage and seven children. It also leads to great difficulties as Cornelia and Martin experience bitter prejudice and rejection from both the Chinese and white communities.
Much more than just an account of family and the interface of culture, All Under Heaven also provides considerable insight into the historical contexts in which these lives were lived. For example, Ah Leong’s grandmother, wife of the wispy Tian, was still awaiting the return of her son when the Japanese invaded China in World War II; terrible as that was, she was ultimately harmed more by her own people.
In South Africa, the prevailing racism was worsened by apartheid legislation, and the effect on Chinese families was considerable. For example, Ah Leong and his wife Gertie lived for many years sandwiched between Sophiatown and Coronationville, where they survived an attempt by the Ossewa Brandwag to oust them.
This is a book to buy, read and treasure as it opens up ground that is simultaneously familiar and quite unknown. It is this delicious, sometimes confounding paradox that makes this book such a pleasure.
All Under Heaven adds the previously unnoticed, muted but rich, thread of Chinese life in South Africa to our better-known history. Somehow the phrase that comes to mind is, “Ah, bliss.”