Ufrieda Ho is an award-winning journalist and one of the daughters of Ho Sing Kee. In this wonderfully textured memoir she explores her family’s history and arrival in South Africa. Ufrieda describes growing up with her siblings in a world in which she is too white for some and too black for others, and the question of “who belongs” haunts this evocative account.
Listed in: Literary Collections | African · Fiction · South Africa · Women Authors · African Literature
Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
By Ufrieda Ho
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone.
