He was a tall and skinny, with shaggy hair and a deeply pockmarked face.
He stared at me in silence, long enough to make me uncomfortable, not smiling as you would to ingratiate yourself to a child. Then he lifted his chin briefly in greeting.
“Are you Jenny’s son?” he asked. “How old are you, three? Four?”
“Six,” I mumbled, shrinking away from him. His voice was raspy and gruff, and he spoke in staccato bursts, as if he had saved the words up in his mouth and spat then out all at once.
“I’mAhHin,yourKauFu,callmeUncleBen. Youlooklikeyourdad.”
I was not even aware that I even had another uncle on my mother’s side. Until then, I had only met Wilbur, the youngest sibling. He was goofy and always made me laugh. This uncle, however, made me nervous with his intense stare and jittery mannerisms. We were all at a family gathering at our house on Huan Jing, one of the days we honored our dead ancestors by having a feast after tending to their graves.
Ben was in his early twenties but looked much older. He leaned in and said, “Where’s the drinks?”
I frowned, then pointed to a table full of sodas in the kitchen.
“Not the cold drinks,” he said, “The other drinks, you know, Pe Jou (beer)…”
I stared blankly. What did I know? I was six.
My mother came out of nowhere to swoop me away. “Sai sou, sek faan! (Wash your hands, Come and eat) Mal go wash your hands.” As I walked to the bathroom, I glanced behind me and saw her glaring at Ben, who shrugged and ambled to the kitchen.
There’s one in every family – the cross we have to bear, the name that must not be spoken. He’s that drunk uncle, the brother who served time, or the born-again cousin who corners you between the punch and the cocktail sausages at the family Christmas party. Ben was all of those, and more.
He was the third child in a brood of eight on my mother’s side, five girls and three boys, the first of whom had died in infancy. When the family’s exasperation at his latest fuck up boiled over, they would sometimes wistfully joke that the wrong one had been taken early. Any role which required effort or long-term commitment ‑ the sober former alcoholic, the dutiful son, the family man, all of which he tried– was abandoned, sooner or later, in a moment of weakness that quickly spiraled out of control. And when he failed, he fell back on the old standbys – the addict, the petty thief, the deceitful conman. He drifted in and out of our family’s lives, popping up at the most inconvenient time; but really, with a bad penny, it’s never a good time. Whenever he showed up again, with new scars or bruises and tears, he would declare that this time, it would different, that he was a changed man. The family welcomed him back, not with open arms exactly, but a cold war trust-but-verify attitude. We watched cautiously as he said the right words, and did the right things, while we waited for the other shoe to drop, which it inevitably did. My Por-Por (maternal grandmother) would call my mother in tears, to tell her that he was gone again. Some minor incident, or perceived injustice, would crack his fragile self-control and send him on a monumental bender that ended only when he ran out of the money he had stolen from his mother, or cajoled out of sister number three, Cookie, his only ally.
Ben was the oldest son, by default, and the cultural and familial burden that he inherited, was a weight he was not inclined to bear. For the family, the why was not as important as the how, as in how to deal with the fallout of his next catastrophe.
When the Apartheid government began to crumble, in the 1980s, there was a huge influx into South Africa of Chinese from Hong Kong and the Mainland, some of whom were, shall we say, less than model citizens.
“Chinese nationals arrested for poaching abalone”, the newspaper would report, or “Asian man catches pigeons for dinner in Church Square”. The locally born, aware of their precarious position in society, who had carefully cultivated their image as a model minority, lamented their incoming brethren’s awful behavior, and conversations at parties would quickly turn to how these “Hong Kong Charlies” were giving us a bad name.
Prior to the new arrivals, which stoked these ironically nativist resentments, the Chinese community in South Africa was tiny (less than 15 000 in a population of 35 million) and closely knit. It was quite possible for us to have personally met every single Chinese person who lived in our town; know who they were married or related to, how many siblings they had, which ones were ill or had fallen on hard times, even how they liked their tea. When older members met children or anyone they didn’t immediately recognize, they asked – Whose child are you? And then began a game of six degrees until they had nailed down the parentage and ancestral line and they could say – “Oh, you’re so and so’s nephew/brother-in-law/cousin. I knew your parents/granduncle/sister in school! Tell them I said hello and asked after their health.”
So, it was particularly mortifying for us one day in the 1970’s when I was about 18 or 19, when that article appeared in The Vinculum – the newsletter of the Chinese Catholic Society. It warned readers that an unidentified Chinese con man was making his way around the country. He was a thin man possibly in in his mid 30’s, though it was hard to tell. He had short greying hair and a face pitted with acne scars. His modus operandi was to case the neighborhood for Chinese homes, then knock on doors with a story about his mother being ill and needing funds to travel to visit her on her death bed. He sometimes offered to do odd jobs, like repairing watches, or fixing cars in return for a few Rands to help him on his way. Being Chinese himself, and professing to be a member of a Christian fellowship, he convinced a number of trusting citizens to give him money or to allow him to repair their cars, for less than half what they would pay at the auto shop, only to disappear with their watches, or cars, ostensibly for a test drive, to the nearest chop shop. He was successful precisely because the community was so small. He could have been a distant relation by marriage or blood to anyone he approached. The last thing the community needed was to have a predator on the loose, who just happened to be one of our own. What if the cops arrested him? What a black eye that would be to our model citizen image. As “Honorary Whites”, we were well aware that our small crumbs of privilege could be revoked at any time.
The Vinculum had barely been tossed across the table, when my mother initiated the Ben protocol and started the telephone chain.
“Ai Yaa,” said Auntie number one, (Margaret), the eldest and most old school Chinese of the siblings.
“Oh, no!” said number four (Mimi).
“Oh, God!” said number five (Nancy).
“Ja, that’s him!” said my Uncle Wilbur, laughing in a shake-my-head, can-you-believe-this-guy kind of way.
“Maybe it’s someone else,” said Por-Por, my ever-optimistic grandma. I imagined her slumped at the kitchen table next to the coal stove with her head in her hand. A large, coarse woman from peasant stock in rural China, a stroke had left her partially paralyzed. Her left shoe always wore out first, because she dragged her foot along the ground. She had never been graceful (her nickname was Ngao Por – “Old Cow Woman”), but now she lumbered about her small house like a drunken hippopotamus, often waiting at that same kitchen table most nights in the hopes that her lost son would miraculously return.
“Oh, ma,” my mother said with the kind of sigh that only the truly long suffering can achieve, “Who else could it be?”
Aunt number one and my mother, Jenny (number two), had married young and left the family home. Cookie (number three) also left to live with cousins on the other side of the city. That left Ben at the top of the pecking order at home. Without the moderating influence of his older sisters, the family dynamics changed for the worse. By all accounts, he had a mean streak from an early age, bullying his younger siblings and terrorizing them when he drove them to and from school, by braking sharply without warning, or pretending to drive into oncoming traffic. Many times, he just never showed up, leaving them stranded at the Pretoria Chinese School.
But it was when he was sent to Johannesburg, the big city fifty miles away to attend trade school, that his wheels really fell off. After a year of lackluster results, he began cutting classes. He missed the first day of his second year at school, then the entire third week and after that, he never looked back. He discovered alcohol, then dagga(marijuana) and harder drugs in quick succession. The people he had been living with reported on his absences to the family occasionally, but after a while, they washed their hands of him and rented out his room to someone else. At first the family would be frantic with worry, sending cousins to look for him and return him to the fold. But they were also dealing with the terminal illness of my grandfather and scrabbling just to survive in the township. His disappearances became so frequent that they stopped looking, and simply waited instead for bad news. With all the siblings having to leave school early, and either working part or full time just to pay medical bills and to keep the family off the streets, nobody had the time to deal with Ben’s shit. At some point the wounds he inflicted on them scabbed over until they had formed a hard callous of indifference. If he showed up, he showed up.
I sometimes heard my mother talking to her sisters and Uncle Wilbur in hushed tones about his latest shenanigans. Por-Por would sometimes walk a block over to our house to unload on Ah-Ma, my paternal grandmother, who lived with us. The two old ladies would cry and dab their eyes with crumpled white hankies. Sometimes they would just sit in silence and hold hands. If my mother wasn’t home, I would walk Por-Por back after tea, and she would clumsily press a coin or two into my hand at her front door, despite my protestations. “Be a good boy,” she said in Chinese, “Work hard at school.”
I was in my first year of high school when the law finally caught up with Ben. He was convicted of organizing a car theft ring, and served time in Pretoria Central Prison, when his friends fingered him as the mastermind behind the whole operation.
“Mastermind?” Uncle Wilbur scoffed. “Jesus, they give him way too much credit.” The sisters speculated that his “friends” must have ratted him out to save their own skins. That was easier to swallow than to believe he was some criminal genius. By this time, Ben had burned all the family bridges. No-one attended his trial, or even contributed to his legal defense. And when he was put away, no one visited him in Pretoria Central Prison, except for Auntie Cookie.
I had started college when he emerged a few years later, older, but not much wiser. He had learned new skills while in prison – auto repair, watch making. And he had a locksmith certificate. (Sidebar: Who the hell thought it was a good idea to teach convicted criminals how to pick locks?) By this time, Uncle Wilbur had emigrated. He was tired of toiling in a system that would allow him to qualify as an advanced auto mechanic but withheld the official certificate which would give him the same pay as his White colleagues. He also moved to Canada so that he could marry his Jewish wife, Jackie, (something else that was forbidden under South African law). As a parting gift, he left me his baby blue Volkswagen Beetle.
One of the first things that Ben did when he got home, was to replace the standard three-quarter inch exhaust pipes with a massive chrome Monza exhaust, without my asking for it. I came home one day to find him outside the house revving the engine, which sounded like a Porsche on steroids with its full-throated growl.
“Hi, Mal. Check this. Look what I got for you.”
“Wow,” was all I could say. I didn’t know how to react. “How much was it? I don’t have money to pay for that.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” he waved me off. “I got it as scrap when I fixed a buddy’s car. It only took me a few hours to install.
“Thanks a lot, Kau Fu,” I told him as I shook his hand, and I meant it.
He behaved himself for a while after that, setting up a watch repair business, and doing auto repair and panel beating on the side, all from his back yard at my Po-Po’s house.
He had a sponsor at the AA and joined the Chinese Christian Fellowship. He even converted my grandmother, who didn’t quite understand the English services, but dutifully participated with him. The Fellowship tried to dissuade her from combining Christian beliefs with her Taoist ancestor worshiping rituals. She nodded politely as they explained why the beliefs could not be reconciled, but then went on burning incense on a chest of drawers in her living room in front of a crucifix of Jesus, a statue of Buddha, and a black and white photograph of her departed husband.
A few months after he had gifted me with the new exhaust, Ben showed up outside our front door late one weeknight. My parents had gone out to dinner for their anniversary, and I was home alone with my brother.
“Hey, Mal, you want to go for a ride?” His eyes were blood-shot, and I could smell the alcohol and weed on his breath.
“Umm, no thanks. I’ve got Dion at home and my parents will be home soon.”
“C’mon, just for a few hours. I’ve got some girls in the car. One of them is looking for a date.” He looked back at the car and waved. I saw two women in the back seat, smiling and waving at me.
I hesitated, but then I said “No, really, I have get up early in the morning to go back to school.”
“Don’t be such a goody-goody,” he said, “Are you a virgin? These girls will put out, I guarantee. C’mon, it’s just for a few hours.”
One of the girls leaned over to the front seat and started pressing on the horn.
“You’d better go,” I said, “They’re going to wake the neighbors.”
“Fuck it, I didn’t think you’d be such a pussy,” he said turning away. “Don’t expect me to do you any more favors.”
I didn’t say a word to my parents, but somehow my mom found out, marched me right over to Po-Po’s house and had a screaming match with Ben.
“I don’t care what you do to yourself, “she said waving her fingers in his face. “You can ruin your own life. Stay away from my son!”
“He’s not a child, Jenny. Stop treating him like a little kid. I just thought he could use a little fun.”
“Fun? Fun? You call drugs and prostitutes fun?”
I could see my Por-Por peeking outside from behind the living room curtain.
Mom drew herself up to her full five foot one.
“Don’t you ever come around to my house again, you hear?
Ben smirked but said nothing. He lit a cigarette and walked back into the house. Por-Por waved to me sadly as we turned to go home. Ever since her stroke, she’d developed a facial tic, pursing her lips in a lopsided pout that made it difficult to see if she was smiling or frowning.
A few hours later that same day, mom had gone out on an errand with Dion, leaving me at home alone. Ben’s car pulled up outside in a cloud of dust. He parked next to my Dad’s new ice white Mazda 626, which he had left for me to drive, while he took my Beetle in for a service.
I met him outside. “Are you crazy? What are you doing here?” I said. “If mom finds you here after what she said…”
“Where is she?” His eyes were red-rimmed, and he had a bottle of beer in his hand. “Where is that fucking bitch? She thinks she can talk to me like that?”
“Whoa, whoa. Don’t speak about her like that. You’re drunk. Why don’t you just calm the fuck down and go home. You can speak to her when you’re sober.”
He waved the bottle around. “You and your whole fucking family think you’re so great, don’t you? Think you’re better than me. I know you talk behind my back.”
He was getting redder and redder. Spittle flew from his lips as he started to slur his words. His normal staccato speech was almost incomprehensible. “Fargyou,you barstards. Yourdadisablerryfaargingbarstardandyourmother’safaargingcuntwhore.”
I had been slightly sympathetic till then, but he had crossed a line. I started walking towards him. He saw me coming and threw the beer bottle at the Mazda. Somehow it bounced off the bumper without breaking. He cursed and aimed a kick at the front passenger door. It buckled and left a scratch. He kicked it once more, then got into his car and drove away before I could reach him. I looked at the ugly dent in our brand-new car, the first new car we had ever owned, and the sight filled me with rage. My father’s new car. He was such a pacifist that his nickname was Gandhi. These were the people my worthless, drug addled uncle had trashed. My mother, everyone’s caretaker, and my father, the gentle rock.
I jumped into the damaged car and drove off after him. I pulled up outside my Por-Por’s house and had the door open even before I had come to a dead stop. My fists balled, I ran to the front gate and screamed his name.
Por-Por opened the front door and lumbered out unsteadily, favoring her right leg. She waved her left hand from side to side, no, no, no, while putting her right in front of her mouth in an exaggerated “shush” motion. “Ho sum ti, la.” (Please, have pity).
My heart was still racing, but my anger slipped away as she pleaded with me. She had always been a comical figure to me, with her clumsy gait and her mangled pronunciations. But as her eyes moistened and she pulled her mouth into that little moue, I felt a glimmer of sympathy for the countless tears she had shed for her wayward son. I turned without a word, slowly got back into the car, and drove away.
And that was the end of that period of normal for him. He disappeared soon afterwards, after ripping off some of his Christian brethren. Some months later, the Vinculum article came out.
When next he showed up a few years later, we had moved away from the old neighborhood to a better home in the east of Pretoria. I had already moved out and was doing my post graduate law degree in Johannesburg, although I came home every weekend. By this time, my Por-Por was living with my parents, spending her days sitting at our kitchen table, bickering with my grand uncle, who also lived with us, or falling asleep in the living room watching TV shows she didn’t understand.
My mom answered the doorbell to find Ben standing there, looking sober and healthy. A coloured (mixed race) woman was standing next to him in a bright yellow dress and Sunday shoes.
“Yow Ha,” he said calling mom formally by her Chinese name, “I’d like to introduce you to my fiancé, Hilary. We’re getting married.”
“How do you do,” mom said, nonplussed. “Um, won’t you come in?”
Hilary bobbed her head and said, “Pleased to meet you.” And that was the last thing I heard her say except for “please” and “thank you” when we offered her tea and biscuits. When she smiled, she covered her mouth to hide her missing front teeth.
Ben told us he had met Hilary when he joined another branch of the Christian Fellowship in Johannesburg. Luckily for him, the Pretoria Fellowship was a forgiving bunch and he had begun to make efforts to pay them back for everything he had stolen. He had come to ask a huge favor of my parents. Could he have his wedding reception at our house? It was the only place with a backyard large enough to fit his friends and Hilary’s relatives. My father said yes without hesitation, but my mother had her misgivings. Did he mean his Fellowship friends, or his car thief associates and drinking buddies? But it made my Por-Por happy, not necessarily that he was marrying a Coloured woman, but that he was marrying at all, which she took as a sign of his intent to join normal society. To our knowledge, he had never had so much as a romantic interest. Prostitutes, yes. Girlfriends, no. Mom eventually gave in and tried to be happy for him. But she stationed her sisters and brothers in law near the drinks tables and the buffet spread, and kept a jaundiced eye on Ben, both to make sure he did not drink any alcohol, and to keep track of the silverware.
“Mal, you know I’ve been saved?” Ben said, cornering me in the kitchen. “Praise the Lord! He led me out of sin, and he brought me to Hilary.” He looked over at her, sitting in the corner talking quietly with her mother. “Isn’t she wonderful?” he said, with such puppy dog adoration, that I had to smile, “She’s the love of my life.”
“I’m glad for you, Kau Fu,” I said. “I hope you’ll be very happy.”
“Ja, I don’t need that demon drink anymore. I’m high on God.” He pointed a finger to the sky. “My Hils will keep me on the right path.”
He was the last to leave at 2 am, his arm around his new wife, smiling, and sober. He even helped to clean up and made sure to shake everyone’s hand before he left.
“Well, that was …unexpected,” said my dad. “You see, Jen. Everyone can change.”
“We’ll see, “said mom, counting her serving spoons.
We didn’t see or hear from him for a good long while after that. Cookie was the only sibling he spoke to regularly, and she reported back to the family on his comings and goings. He seemed to have gone straight. We suspected Por-Por was in contact with him as well, but she did not speak of him; never mentioned his name. No news is good news, right?
Then the other shoe dropped.
One day, Hilary showed up at our door, with her brother and mother and a little girl in tow. She looked to be about 4 years old, had a long face with a high forehead and sad almond eyes. She was his spitting image.
“Is this…” mom began.
Hilary nodded. “Yes, this is our daughter, mine and Benny’s. Say hello to Auntie Jenny, Jasmine.”
The little girl could barely look up. Just as Hilary did when she first met us, she bobbed her head and said “H’lo, Auntie,” before hiding her face in her mother’s dress.
“We’re looking for Benny,” Hilary said after sitting down to tea. The shy, quiet woman we met a few years ago was gone. This Hilary had a hard set to her mouth and a sadness in her eyes that I recognized right away.
“I’m sorry Hilary, we haven’t seen him since your wedding,” my mother said. She turned to Por-Por, who was sitting silently staring at Jasmine. “Ma, have you heard from him?” She shook her head but didn’t speak. She reached into her pocket and offered the little girl a Rolo toffee.
Ben had been missing for three months after sporadic backsliding. The last they had heard, he had been raising hell in shebeens (illegal bars) in Eesterus, a Coloured township on the eastern edge of Pretoria.
“I’m very sorry, Hilary. We were all hoping he had changed, but it seems we were wrong again,” said mom. “He sometimes disappears for months before anyone hears from him.”
“Well I just want him to own up to his responsibility to his child,” said Hilary. They got up after a few more minutes of desultory conversation, leaving half-drunk cups of tea on the dining room table. Mom gave her 300 Rands and a promise to ask around for Ben. “It’s not much,” she said, “I wish we could help more.” Jasmine waved to us from the rear window as they drove away.
I never saw Ben again. In 1990, I emigrated, first to Canada, and later to the USA. I had children of my own and only occasionally thought about my uncle. Mom would tell me in long distance phone calls that she suspected that Por-Por had let Ben in to the house while they were out, because dad’s power tools had mysteriously disappeared from the garage.
I had been living in California for some years, when my mother called me to report that Ben had died. Several months previously, a Catholic priest had called her from Addington Hospital in Durban, a coastal city 400 miles away from his last known sighting in Johannesburg. Ben had advanced Leukemia and was asking for his family. The sisters took turns driving down to the coast to visit him for the last time. In the non-confrontational Chinese way, they spoke only of his illness and his treatment, speaking nothing of the past. A few weeks later, he passed away. Uncle Wilbur flew out from Vancouver and drove down with my mother for the funeral. They were surprised to see a sizeable number of Indians mourners there. Apparently, he had been taken in by a Hindu family and spent his last years cooking for them. They said he had been an integral part of their community. They spoke of him as a gentle soul, a loving and giving man. When mom and Wilbur reported this surprising side of Ben to the family, Auntie Mimi said, “Are you sure they buried the right guy?”
Near the end of his life, had he found his place in the world? Or did he just get tired of running away? Whichever it was, he seemed to have found peace and acceptance, not within the community he had been born to, but one that he had found for himself.
Ben did leave some loose ends. We lost contact with Hilary and her family. Nobody had thought to exchange telephone numbers or to ask for her address. For all they know, he is still alive and ducking his responsibilities.
When I visited Vancouver, I asked Uncle Wilbur, how he and the family had felt about his brother, the prodigal who had never returned. Weren’t they curious about what he was doing all those years away from them? Was there any residual anger, I wanted to know, any resentment for the hurt he had inflicted on his siblings and especially his mother, who had never lost hope?
He reflected for a long time before answering. No, he said eventually, they were long past that. They were just sad. After everything that he had put them through, all the lies and deceptions and disappointments, he was, in the end, still their brother. Whether the sadness was for his squandered opportunities, or for the family’s loss, he couldn’t say. After Por-Por, Ben was the first of them to go, not that surprisingly, given his dissolute lifestyle. But all of them were getting on. Margaret had cancer; Cookie was in a nursing home with dementia. With each passing day, they were getting older, and their time was coming too. They had accepted who he was. Life is short. Why waste it on anger and regret?
Blood ties are a mysterious thing. You don’t get to choose your family. Ben spent his life running away from his. But at the end of his days, facing the emptiness of eternity, he called out to them, and they had answered.
His body was cremated, and his ashes sent home to be laid to rest in a memorial wall at the Pretoria West crematorium on Rebecca Street, in the same cemetery where his parents were interred. Auntie Mimi joked that at least Por-Por would know where he was at night. When the family next visited the burial grounds on Seeu Ee, the day of grave cleaning, they found that along with the brass flower pots on my grandparents’ headstone, thieves had also stolen the simple copper plaque bearing Ben’s name and dates of birth and death. The family decided not to replace it, as theft of copper and other metals had become common in those quiet, unguarded places. They preferred instead to memorialize him, together with the rest of the departed family, at home. To the rest of the world, all that remained to mark his passing was a number on a neglected corner of a concrete wall, and a blank space where his name had been.