Tag: cape town

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HURDLES TO A NEW HOME: A CHINESE ADOLESCENT ARRIVES IN SOUTH AFRICA – Part II

Posted on by Claire van den Heever

Wang’s mother was able to marry her way to permanent residence, but she and her son had to jump through a few hoops to gain him the right to live in South Africa.

It all started with an adjustment to Wang’s high school grades to meet the requirements for admission into a foreign university, but that part was easy. “You just tell your Chinese high school you are going to a foreign university and they will let you adjust your marks. There’s no cost, they’re advertising you,” explains Wang. Every Chinese high school has an “honorary list” of alumni who get into foreign universities. It’s symbolic capital for the school.

Continue reading “HURDLES TO A NEW HOME: A CHINESE ADOLESCENT ARRIVES IN SOUTH AFRICA – Part II” →

Window onto a Chinese adolescent's life in South Africa

Hurdles to a new home: a Chinese adolescent arrives in South Africa

Posted on by Claire van den Heever

“I didn’t get admission into a very good university in China, so my mom suggested I study here in South Africa instead,” Wang tells me over a cup of green tea. “In China, even if you go to a good university, after graduating you still just get a job where you only earn 3000 yuan [approximately US$ 470] a month.”

Whether you’re moving to another country for work, studies, or to be closer to family, bureaucratic hurdles are inevitable. Wang wasn’t even sure he wanted the new life in South Africa that his parents had planned for him, but that didn’t make the accompanying bureaucratic hurdles any easier to avoid.

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Lingling’s Chinese New Year

Posted on by Claire van den Heever

Twenty-four year-old He Lingling just spent her second Chinese New Year away from China. It was also her second Spring Festival in her temporary home in Cape Town, where she has been working as a teacher at the Confucius Institute at the University of Cape Town for the past year and a half. Although she badly misses her family and her hometown in a small town in Sichuan at this time of year, she has also found a sense of belonging among new friends and colleagues in a Cape Town suburb, her home away from home.

I asked Lingling what she misses most about Chinese New Year, and what her last two holidays in Cape Town have been like.

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Ms Fang in her Chinese curio shop in Cape Town

Ms. Fang’s Chinese New Year: Story of a middle-aged woman in Cape Town

Posted on by Claire van den Heever

Isabella Fang is showing off a range of festive red and gold envelopes adorned with the character fu – or “wealth” – in her Chinese curio shop on Cape Town’s Atlantic coast. It is the day before Chinese New Year’s eve, or Spring Festival, when red envelopes (hong bao) filled with money are traditionally given as gifts to children and older relatives.

An estimated 385 million people are returning to their hometowns in China this year from wherever in the world they are working or studying, making it the largest human migration in the world.

Continue reading “Ms. Fang’s Chinese New Year: Story of a middle-aged woman in Cape Town” →