LITMIR.BIZ

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school from Grade 1. There were probably more complications that I’m not even aware of and I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it must have been having to learn a new language to do all of your school subjects in, but in the end they were accepted at Eunice. My sister, together with most of our cousins, finished Matric with multiple distinctions.

      As for me, I got lucky. Towards the end of my sister’s Grade 1 year, in 1992, she came home with a letter from the school asking all parents with little girls turning five to enrol them at Eunice as they were starting their own pre-primary the following year. I was only four but Eunice’s new pre-primary was happy for me to attend. My mama then asked them to keep me back after a year so I could be in Grade 1 with other little girls of the same age. I remember I was disappointed and I didn’t really understand why I was singled out. All I remember is having to make new friends, and some kids told me I must have failed because I was stupid.

      The first time I experienced bullying at school was in my second year of pre-primary. There was a blonde girl, I remember her face, she was tall and only spoke Afrikaans. I don’t remember actually being friends with her or even having interacted with her before but for some reason she took exception to me. During breaktime one day she pushed my face down onto some tree stumps. They were thick and woody and their rough exterior gave me a gaping hole on my forehead. My friends took me to the teacher, blood running down my face. I remember crying, more from shock, I think, than pain. Normally, I didn’t respond badly to pain. I was a klutzy kid and hurt myself quite often. I generally had streaks of antiseptic red Mercurochrome decorating my exposed skin from the times I’d trip over my own feet, mostly on level bricked surfaces on the walk to school. Physical bumps and scrapes usually heal and the scars fade away. It’s the emotional scars that stick around for years, sometimes for ever. Those are the scars you have to confront at some point in your life if you want to move forward.

      The most painful early memory I carry isn’t because of tripping or being pushed into a jagged log, but it also goes back to primary school. I was five.

      Mama would pack our lunches for school when we were young and most often this included the food we ate at home. I used to love discovering what mama had put in my lunch box: different styles of baozi and mantou (steamed buns), fàn tuán (glutinous rice balls with filling – often pork floss, some crunchy Chinese breakfast fried dough and pickled mustard leaves), flavoured rice crackers, or dried and flavoured seaweed. One of my favourites was kimbap.

      Kimbap is a Korean food, which is made using a combination of seasoned glutinous and sushi rice, rolled up in nori (the dried seaweed paper, the same that wraps around sushi rolls), with a filling of cucumber, cooked carrot, pickled yellow daikon and pork floss or sometimes ham. I loved these snacks and I loved watching mama make them. I’d wait patiently, close by, for her to slice them. Then I’d quickly steal the ugly edges off the plate – although I never truly needed to, as she was happy to rid herself of them in favour of a polished presentation. While this remains a happy memory, kimbap became tainted for me in Grade 1.

      Perhaps kids in pre-school are less judgemental, or just unaware, but it was when primary school came along that things changed drastically.

      There were three East Asian kids in Grade 1, but they split us up into three different classes, so in my class I was the only one. I didn’t meet the others until eventually two of us were placed in the same class. It was the strangest experience and the one that gave birth to my coping mechanism – anger.

      It was 1995. Breaktime. I brought out my lunch box and as soon as I opened it, I was excited. I could smell the fishiness of the nori, the sharp acidity of the pickle and the sweetness of the pork floss. But I wasn’t the only one who could smell it. The (mostly white) kids sitting around me recoiled at the scent, then peered over my shoulder into my lunch box. This was followed by a chorus of ‘Eeeeuw’ and comments like ‘That looks gross’ and ‘Why does it smell?’ and ‘My dad told me you people eat dogs – is that dog?’

      I didn’t eat my lunch, I was too angry. I put my lunch box back in my bag and went to cry in the bathroom. I didn’t understand what had happened. I was just angry. I was far too young to process what was actually going on. Although I didn’t know why, I knew that I already stood out. This was another thing I didn’t want to stand out for.

      One thing I can attribute to the lunch box moment was that it seeded the beginning of my love-hate relationship with my culture’s food. This psychological see-saw led to my desire to reclaim the cultural identity for which society had shamed me.

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      Over the past few years I came to the realisation that I was not prepared to live in a space like South Africa. Most of my black friends told me that their parents and elders had warned them about the racism they would face in white-dominant spaces, whether it was school, college or the workplace. Their parents said it was too soon post apartheid for white mentality to have forgotten their deeply rooted superiority complex. Their parents knew this was something their children would be facing, but they also instilled in them that they should never forget that the hatred and fear they would encounter was unjustified. These kids came armed with the knowledge and the validation to know that they were worthy, no matter what the racists said.

      For my part, I couldn’t blame my parents. They had no idea themselves that the good schools they chose for us to attend were riddled with all types of racism, intentional and unintentional. I wasn’t a bad student and I tried really hard not to stand out in a negative way. I avoided being late. I would do my homework timeously, if I could manage it with all my extra-murals. I didn’t backchat unless provoked beyond my breaking point. I was voted class captain and vice-captain for a term almost every year of my school life. I was voted a prefect in Grade 7, and I was on the RCL (representative council of learners) in both Grade 10 and Grade 12. I was well liked, even though I sometimes sneaked onto the hockey fields to smoke cigarettes with my friends – the teachers and students knew about this but chose to overlook it due to my all-round good behaviour. That was probably the only naughty thing I partook in regularly: I was a smoker from the age of sixteen. I enjoyed the way cigarettes made me feel when I was anxious, and I smoked on the sly.

      But even though I was generally liked, there were countless times where I was discriminated against. It became more regular in high school, which I entered in 2002. I would find myself being kicked out of class for odd reasons; in Matric my prized art source book was confiscated for months because I’d used the hardcover book to press on; I’d be the one who was yelled at for someone else whispering to me. I was never given a chance to explain. When white Afrikaans girls did the same things or behaved even worse than I could ever imagine myself behaving, they would get away with it, or their behaviour would just get a giggle from the teachers. (All through school all of our teachers were white; our first and only black teacher, for Sotho, was in high school.) I know I am generalising and no, not all teachers were like that, but there were certain teachers at school who didn’t even try to let go of their apartheid mentality post its abolishment.

      The way they treated the black girls was appalling. I remember having my ponytail that my mama tied for me getting pulled down in Grade 1 but that was nothing in comparison to the flak the black girls would get for their ‘untidy’ hair. I remember hearing the k-bomb being uttered by teachers, and when everyone in the class was rowdy and black girls were speaking their native tongues – they’d be the only ones to be reprimanded: ‘Take that talk back to the township where it belongs!’ There was a sense of superiority these teachers held, and they reinforced it with the black pupils. Many of the white kids around us weren’t this way; some were unaware of their casual racism but they didn’t hate their peers of colour – which reminds me of the many times other students would tell me that I’m just ‘white with squinty eyes’. As a compliment. Only a handful were blatantly open about their racism. It was obvious that they were taught racism at home but they were never reprimanded at school. They said and did things which if reported today would get them expelled from school, even isolated from their own communities. But the 90s and early 2000s was a different time.

      Not only was I ill-prepared for the racism and discrimination I encountered at school – I wasn’t even aware such terminology or experiences existed. I don’t believe any immigrant of colour back then knew.

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