My life: Ufrieda Ho

I was born in Joburg, the big city of gold in the 1970s. My parents had arrived separately from Guangdong: my dad in the late 50s, as a stowaway, and my mother in the early 60s. My dad had been orphaned and China was in freefall. He just wanted to get to anywhere the "golden mountains" had been established - San Francisco, Melbourne, Joburg. In South Africa, my parents bought fake papers and changed their identities - they became "paper sons and daughters". My parents were introduced and liked each another enough to marry. I'm the third of four children.

Growing up, I'd never heard of Nelson Mandela. I didn't realise there were restrictions on the Chinese - where you could live, what school you attended. At school, we weren't allowed to talk about politics. The first time I got an inkling of what democracy might be was in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protests happened. There were about 25,000 Chinese in Joburg at that time and the government hadn't known what to do with us, so they'd funded a Chinese school. My sister was a university student. She and other Chinese students in Joburg made a mock goddess of democracy, and my sister sent the school cassettes of the freedom songs protesters were singing in Beijing. My first understanding of political protest came from China - not from what was going on in South Africa.

My dad was a fah-fee man, working in the black townships. Fah-fee is a form of illegal gambling, a type of lottery, linked to superstition and luck. Every form we filled in at school, under father's occupation we wrote "shopkeeper". At breakfast, my dad would ask us, "What did you dream?" Because a cat might mean a number, which could be lucky that day. My dad worked for somebody else - he just collected the money. There was so much poverty that even winning a small amount of money was a fortune for some people. Hitting the fah-fee jackpot was the difference between eating meat that week (or not).

To this day, there's never been an end story to the hijacking that killed my father. We don't know whether it was a deal that went wrong, or if one of the bettors felt cheated. It could have been part of the violence that was sweeping the townships in the early 90s. My dad was this yellow man who didn't fit in and he dies one year before we go to the polls. It was tragic he never got to vote, although he wasn't sure about Mandela. He'd say, "I don't know about having a black leader."

On the day of (South Africa's) first democratic election, in 1994, I was working as a journalist at a community newspaper. People were hosting prayer days, holding hands in the street. There was hope but, at the same time, bombs were going off. People were stockpiling food. Everyone was anxious. Then that day was just amazing. I got dressed up - I used to be a goth, so I wore a black dress, Docs, even a hat. We got to the voting station and there were too many people. So we came back and voted the next day. It was an amazing moment for democracy. My grandma never had to eat her kippers in a can. Mandela turned out to be a giant among us.

In 1995, I joined The Star - the country's biggest national daily. That's where I met Shaun. He's a South African white guy. That was a disappointment for my mother, and my race was difficult for his dad, because I was on the wrong side of white. We never got married, but if he was Chinese we might have done all that. Now we live together and he eats all the weird Chinese food my mother cooks. It's been a lesson on how you break down those boundaries.