Harry's Tales: A Big Small World
Harry Wroth has a surprise encounter with the Chongs.
During World War II we lived just off the east end of Keurboom Road in a suburb known by various names depending on your view of life. You lived in Claremont, Newlands or Rondebosch, depending on your view of life.
On the Belvedere Road corner was a Chinese-owned grocery store belonging to a Mr Y.K. Chong. His entire family contributed to its success. The pseudo-food rationing due to the War meant that the shop dealt out the cheese, butter, sugar and so forth, in slivers to known customers, as and when the products were available. Rice was unobtainable.
My Mom used to buy on the weekly book and I remember once just after the War being sent to buy a tin of whole fruit apricot jam which had recently re-appeared on the marketplace. There was no self-serve in those days and Mr Chong served from behind a high glass counter. I asked him for the jam. Looking through his thick heavy spectacles, he wrote on the duplicate slip - 1 Apricot. I reminded him of my Mom's request for whole fruit and Mr Chong added - 1 Apricot(hole).
Mr Chong often visited his home town in China and I think he must have passed through Canada en route home. This Canadian passage bore fruit in South Africa as Mr Chong built what I think, was the first self-serve general dealer store almost adjoining his existing store. This too, was an immediate success and to pursue this technique of selling he obtained permission from the Cape Town City Council to erect and operate a much larger self serve venture in Wynberg. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd vetoed the idea and the Department of Interior blocked the project on racial grounds.
Some thirty-odd years later, when I was a tour guide, I had to collect one tourist at a boarding house in Summerstrand and three other tourists from the Summerstrand Hotel to take them on a city tour of Port Elizabeth. The group of three were named Chong and it emerged that all of them were Canadians. One of them lived on Victoria Island and the others in Vancouver.
It transpired that one of my guests was the son of the late Mr Y.K. Chong. My Dad had fixed his delivery bicycle during the War years when no spares or tyres and tubes were obtainable. He said he possessed some 5000 Founder Shares of Pick and Pay which were given to him by his father who was disenamoured by the then South African government policy and had emigrated to Canada. Mr Chong Jnr was in the real estate business in Vancouver.
The late Mr Chong's wish was to own property and live in Bishopscourt Estate. Perhaps his son or grandson will.
