Description
Book SynopsisUfrieda 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.
Trade Review“
Paper Sons echoes the domestic realism in Amy Tan’s best-selling
The Joy Luck Club; we taste the food and we are educated in all things Chinese such as the observance of rituals. For the Ho family, the strong adherence to ancient traditions gives meaning and comfort when the silence of stigma proves too oppressive.” * Words Etc *
“In the years since apartheid ended, many of South Africa’s formerly hidden histories are being uncovered. These are the stories of communities who were forced to evade the public gaze; living lives, in Ufrieda Ho’s words, of ‘shadows and scars’. In
Paper Sons and Daughters, Ho unfolds the story of her family and, more broadly, of the Chinese community in South Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century. It’s a deeply moving narrative, filled with love, pain and a delicate wistfulness.”
“The best writing is personal and this story does just that, telling the tale of growing up of Chinese, not welcomed but tolerated in officially white areas. But for all the political headlines, this book is also humorously personal.” * Business Day *
“The prose that leaps off the pages of
Paper Sons and Daughters is vivid. It turns on sad generational stories lived through tradition and superstition. It plays on the hardship of the family who came to South Africa as stowaways in the 1950s, in order to forge new identities with the false papers that bought them new names…. Its immense rewards include the surprises, and the colour with which she paints the life of a family choosing to fly beneath the radar of apartheid’s madness, without complaint. Such insularity was typical of the Chinese community, the target of Orientalism in a racist state.” * Sunday Independent Review *
“Ufrieda Ho is a Chinese woman first and a journalist second. Combining her heritage and a love of words, she has written a powerful and lyrical memoir of her family’s experience in South Africa, which makes her first book a fascinating read.” * The [Natal] Witness *
