The Village
Two villages
Ask a Hakka elder where the family comes from and the answer is never a country. It is a village.
I am Melanie Radloff Minnaar 朱山梅 (朱云兴), and my village is written in our clan book as 梅南罗田下村: Luotianxia, in the hills of Meixian in northern Guangdong. These hills are the heartland of the Hakka, the "guest families".
There is another village, too: the people and kitchens that raised me. A great-grandfather born in Mauritius. A German settler's daughter from Keiskammahoek. English families who sailed to the Eastern Cape. And the family restaurants of East London, where I grew up. This page is about both villages.
The Zhu line
A good place to live
Our surname is 朱, Zhu, which our family papers write as Chu. In the Ming dynasty, a man named Zhu Yun left the nearby village of Zengtian and settled in Luotianxia. The clan book gives his reasons: layered hills, high peaks, a winding stream. It was a fine place to live. A school there was later named after him.
The book mentions the ancestral house only once, in a note that a reburial was made behind it, facing south-east. I have no photograph of it yet.
Older stories
Like most clans, ours tells a grander story about how it began, through Jiangxi and Fujian to the Song-dynasty scholar Zhu Xi. It is a story we hold dear rather than one anyone can prove. The firmer ground begins with Zhu Yu, who settled in Xingning and founded the Meixian house. From there the family moved village by village until it reached the hills Zhu Yun chose.
Crossing the water
From the 1870s, Hakka families from around Meixian left for Mauritius and South Africa. The clan book lists men of our village in both places.
My great-grandfather 耀宏, Yaohong, remembered as Ah Fen, was born in Mauritius in 1879. He made his home in East London and died there, in Quigney, in 1962. His eldest son, my grandfather Herman, was born at Keiskammahoek in 1910 and married my grandmother, Sin Yuk Koo (1910–1989). Herman's fourth son was my father, Ted, born in East London in 1943. He died there in 2013. Both are printed by name in the 1996 clan book, two men of East London written into a register kept for a village in Meixian.
The other branches
A German name
Ah Fen Leetion married Wilhelmina Carolina Albertina Radloff, born at Keiskammahoek in 1888 to German settlers from Pomerania. Their sons were registered under her surname, and that is how a Zhu family became the Radloffs of East London. Her father, Christian Friedrich Ferdinand Radloff, was born in Stettin in 1843. Family tradition carries the name back through the Pomeranian villages of Cartzig and Damerow to an Erdmann Radloff, who died in 1670.
My mother's side
The Wicks family came from Kent and Norfolk. Robert Wicks, born in Maidstone in 1795, brought his family to the Eastern Cape. By 1825 a child had been born to them in Grahamstown, and that same year Robert died at sea aboard the Bridekerk, between Port Frances and Port Elizabeth.
His great-granddaughter Elizabeth Emily Wicks married George Kingson at the magistrate's office in East London in 1903. George was a Hakka emigrant from Kaying, the old name for Meixian. Their daughter, Emily Mary Kingson, was born that October. In 1923 she married Sung Geun Lee, whose family name became Sing Gen, at St Peter's Anglican Church in East London. Their son, George Ernest Sing Gen (1926–1980), married Lily Tang (1926–1988). They were my mother's parents. My two sides lead back to the same hills.
Through the Wicks we also join old Cape Dutch families, the van den Bergs among them. One family story ties them to a noble van den Bergh line. We tell it more for its romance than its dates.
Love and the law
On both sides of my family, a European woman chose a Chinese husband and was disowned by her own people for it. On my father's side it was Wilhelmina Radloff, who married Ah Fen Leetion. On my mother's side it was Elizabeth Wicks, who married George Kingson. Both marriages were made before apartheid. After 1948 the law itself would have kept them apart.
The Population Registration Act of 1950 sorted every South African by race. Chinese people were placed in the "Coloured" group, and from 1959 "Chinese" was a subgroup of it. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 banned marriage between white people and everyone else, and the Immorality Act made love across the colour line a crime. Had Wilhelmina and Ah Fen, or Elizabeth and George, met after 1949, they could not have married.
The Group Areas Act of 1950 hit Chinese families hardest, because it threatened their living. The community was too small to be given areas of its own, so families lived and traded in "white" areas on permits, granted one by one and dependent on the neighbours not objecting. Until the mid-1970s they could not own property there.
Then there was the "honorary white" label. Japanese visitors were officially granted white privileges. Chinese South Africans never were, though by the 1970s many were treated as if they had been. That ambiguity was not equality, and most never saw themselves as white. The marriage bans fell in June 1985, permits for property ended that year, and Chinese South Africans voted for the first time in 1994.
The restaurants
My mother's family cooked for East London. The Sing Gen family came to the city from Hong Kong more than a century ago. My great-uncle, the late Chef Cecil Sing Gen, was born in China in 1933 and raised by my great-grandparents as their son. For more than twenty years he cooked Hong Kong chicken at the Bamboo Inn.
The dish looks like honey-glazed chicken under a sticky, dark syrup. It is salty and sweet, smoky from soy, and crisp at the edges. Its secret is the sauce. East London credits it to Cecil. Gqeberha tells its own origin story, and nobody has settled the argument.
After the Bamboo Inn, Cecil opened his own place, Sing Gen's Corner, on Recreation Road, East London. Later he would cook in one more family kitchen.
Across town in Berea stands Wong's Corner, my aunt and uncle's family business, which turned 100 in September 2026. It began as a general dealer. The Jade Garden restaurant opened there around 1986, alongside a takeaway, and Cecil came out of retirement to spend a couple of years as its head chef. He handed the recipe on to the family before he retired again. In 2003 the sauce was still mixed at home and sent to the kitchen in sealed batches, and people drove from Cape Town and Durban for it. Today the site is the takeaway and Jade Garden Fusion, run by the next generation.
I grew up holding my mother's apron strings, in the kitchens of my grandmothers, Sin Yuk and Lily, and in these restaurants. Cecil's sauce is still a family secret. My own version, Mzansi Sticky Honey-Garlic Chicken, is in my book: soy, honey and garlic, roasted to a glossy, savoury-sweet skin.
Customs
A name for every generation
In many Hakka families, the boys of one generation share a character in their names, and the next generation takes the next character. Our clan book prints no poem for that sequence, so our poem is the names themselves: 耀, "radiance", for Ah Fen, 金, "gold", for Herman, and 贤, "worthy", for my father.
The clan book
A 族谱, a clan book, is the clan's own record of its men, written father to son back to the founding ancestor. Many were destroyed in twentieth-century China. From the 1980s clans rebuilt them, helped by overseas Chinese searching for their roots. Ours has a page on the Zhu clan association in Mauritius.
Food at the festivals
At Lunar New Year, the Hakka areas of Guangdong put two dishes on the table: 酿豆腐, tofu stuffed with pork, and 梅菜扣肉, pork belly steamed over preserved mustard greens. The pork belly in my book is a different Hakka classic: Pan Ngiuk Braised Belly Pork 客家焖五花肉, red-braised in soy until tender. At tomb-sweeping time, Hakka families "hang paper", 挂纸. They clean the graves, press yellow paper onto them and offer meat, fruit and rice cakes.
Come to the table
Chopsticks, Pots & Wooden Spoons is home cooking from a South African Hakka kitchen in East London, with German and British roots and Italian food from my partner's table beside it. Hakka Stuffed Tofu 酿豆腐 is in it, and so is Mzansi Sticky Honey-Garlic Chicken, my take on Cecil's. It brings the whole village to one table.
Sources
Mail & Guardian, "Hong Kong chicken: The secret is in the sauce", 15 April 2003. https://mg.co.za/news/south-africa/2003-04-15-hong-kong-chicken-the-secret-is-in-the-sauce/
Anna Trapido, "Hong Kong Chicken – PE's perfect poultry", Daily Maverick, 19 July 2024. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-07-19-hong-kong-chicken-pes-perfect-poultry/
Yvonne Erasmus and Yoon Jung Park, "Racial classification, redress and citizenship: the case of the Chinese South Africans", Transformation 68 (2008). http://transformationjournal.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/T68_Part6.pdf
Yoon Jung Park, "Living In Between: The Chinese in South Africa", Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/living-between-chinese-south-africa
Yoon Jung Park, "From Second-Class Citizens to 'Honorary White'", in Chinese South African Identities (PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand). https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/dc84ef08-48d6-459f-ba71-91b5f9bd6b35/content
Yoon Jung Park, A Matter of Honour: Being Chinese in South Africa (Jacana, 2008).
Immorality and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Amendment Act 72 of 1985, South African Government. https://www.gov.za/documents/immorality-and-prohibition-mixed-marriages-amendment-act-19-jun-1985-0000
Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report, Vol. 1, Ch. 13 (apartheid legislation). https://sabctrc.saha.org.za/reports/volume1/chapter13/subsection5.htm
Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong Man, Colour, Confusion and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa (Hong Kong University Press, 1996).