Mr Kuan has worked on most of the Seven Seas, but his biggest struggle is earning a living on land. He spoke to Lance Witten for #TheDignityProject.

Cape Town – “I’m not a chatterbox, I just don’t have a letterbox,” says Mr Kuan in our first interview. He has a toothless grin and a weathered face thanks to his 47 years on the street.

“If you use my name, my family, who sit behind computers now, will know who I am and I don’t want to embarrass them,” he says, replying to our earlier question whether he would be okay with us using his name.

“But if you say, ‘Mr Kuan’, the people on the street will know who I am.”

It’s a name he picked up in decades of service on long-distance fishing vessels.

“‘Kuan’ means you’re the ou… the dik ding,” he says with a gummy grin.

It’s a word he’s picked up on his travels. And the travels are no local sojourn, either.

He’s been to Brazil, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, China and Japan. Scholarship? No. He has worked on fishing vessels, and in the ’90s decided that life was not for him.

Since 1992, Mr Kuan has been collecting scrap and recyclables, trying to scrape together enough cash to pay for a meal. Recently, he’s been working for an NGO, managing its storeroom, but in the week we met him he had just resigned. A symptom, his “handler” says, of his many years on the street.

He ran away from domestic abuse when he was seven. His sisters were given the opportunity to succeed, while he had to stay home and tend the fires, boil water and make sure they had a good life.

“We had different fathers. I was dark, so I was oppressed. I couldn’t do my homework. I failed. I failed. Over and over again. I passed some standards (grades), but I failed.”

In the ’80s he found work as a seaman on a fishing vessel.

“Things were different then. You could just go to the harbour and get a job. They were looking for people. The city was different too.

“Ask these guys ‘how long are you on the street?’ Six months these guys are there, and they think they know these streets.”

He asks if we know which streets ran through where the Golden Acre now stands. “You know Castle Street used to run through there and Parliament Street from the other way.”

As a Capetonian, I’m embarrassed. More so by the fact that as a kid I walked these streets with my mother and her sister. We took buses from the southern suburbs and did shopping, paid accounts and ate at Captain Dorego’s in the Golden Acre.

“These guys are on the streets six months and they think they know what’s what.

“I’m here 47 years, on and off.”

Working on a fishing trawler, catching tuna mostly, Mr Kuan travelled around the southern hemisphere and South East Asia as part of a Far East crew.

“I’ve been to Brazil. Flew back on an aeroplane. Went to Thailand.

“When we make port, the guys want to get drinks and, you know,” he winks, and gestures with his elbow.

Brothels are big business for travelling sailors, he says, “if you don’t catch my drift.”

He’s been to Taiwan, and once, making port in Singapore, left the crew behind so he could explore the city.

It all changed for him in 1983. There was a fishing accident.

“On the sea, there’s no hospital. There’s no OK Bazaar (a popular retailer in the ’80s). I got a hook stuck here,” he says, gesturing to a decades-old scar on the middle finger of his left hand.

A stray hook – one used to bait tuna, about the size of a man’s hand, he says – went flying on a loose line being dredged up. It caught and the point protruded out of the other side of the finger.

“‘You must just cut it out, just cut it, there’s no time for painkillers’,” I said.

“You’re bleeding. The scars, you live with.”

Later that year, his mother was diagnosed with cancer.

“I came back. All the abuse,” he raises his fists and makes a punching motion, “that’s still my mother.”

His fishing accident happened in Mauritius and when his mom was diagnosed with cancer, his mind was made up. He came home.

“I’ve got strength left in me, but the people look at you and they think you can’t do the work.

“They look down on you because you look a certain way. If you’ve got a little bit of power, you can work. They don’t see that. They take your power.”

So, he returned to the high seas.

“But I left in 1992. Because of what happened last year (1991).”

His crew had berthed in Thailand. Another South African had had a fight with the captain over his allowance. The Chinese and Thai sailors had received 500 baht, but he had only got 400 as a seaman.

Mr Kuan was a bosun, and his colleague had asked him to plead with the captain on his behalf for more money “so he could drink and get a woman”.

“I said he needed to behave himself. We’re in a foreign country. You can’t mess around here.”

The seaman was attacked for showing up drunk for night watch and beaten within an inch of his life.

Later that year, Mr Kuan says, he was attacked by two other South Africans on board.

“I was sitting there (in the hold), blood dripping into my gumboots. They were half-full of blood by the time we made port. We were off Walvisbaai at the time. Why couldn’t they fly me home from there?

“All the years, job is done, you’re in Brazil or wherever, they fly you home, but now I could barely walk when I came home.”

Mr Kuan has a strapped right knee. There is a brace protruding from underneath his worn chinos, bleached white by the Cape Town sun. He makes reference to the knee while we ask him to rest his elbows on them for pictures. “This one is big and uncomfortable,” he says, but even after further questioning, won’t say why.

In 1991, he was stabbed in the back by a colleague. That was the end of his career as a deep sea fisherman.

“Now, every day is a skarrel (effort to get by). I used to collect old newspapers and cardboard. You know! There by the fancy shops, they chuck out cardboard which you can take to scrap. But if it rains, the yard won’t take wet cardboard.

“So you get maybe 30, maybe 40 kilos of scrap and one yard doesn’t want it. They only pay over R10. You bring R10 worth of stuff, and you only get R10.

“Less than that, they don’t pay. But they don’t want your scrap, you must take that 30, 40, 50 kilos somewhere else.”

He tells me there are initiatives that log recycling efforts, but they only pay out if the weight is right.

“It’s not their fault, they have computers, and they can’t pay out if the weight isn’t right. But they log it.”

Mr Kuan lives under a bridge in the city. He wakes up at 4am to pack up his bedding and hide it so others won’t steal it and trade it for cash.

“No! You can’t trust anybody. They will take your stuff and then you come back and they don’t know what happened. Nobody looks out for anybody. We’re on our own.”

Asked if he is bothered by law enforcement, he says the greatest threat is from other homeless people.

“I go now (at 3pm), check if my stuff is dry, sort myself out. There’s places to shower, but mostly, there’s a hydrant close by and we use that to get clean. Just splash, wash, you know? You can’t come to work and you stink.”

Mr Kuan says he’ll return to his job at the NGO, having spoken to his administrator, but he doesn’t want to be exploited.

He wants South Africa to be kinder to its citizens. “What is South Africa doing for South Africans?

“We are her people. We walk her streets. What is this country doing for us?”

Cape Argus