Author: Brand Smit

WEDNESDAY, 13 OCTOBER 1999

I reckon it will cost me R111,296.29 to go back to South Africa, settle down, buy a car, have no outstanding debt, and lie around all day in a local park. On the other hand, I can get myself a fridge and a washing machine and stay here forever.

I can’t sleep at night. Or rather, I’ve become increasingly reluctant to go to bed. I get nightmares, then I get up at five in the morning, and then I oversleep.

My TV has just come into focus … on a Korean movie. I miss the food in Korea, and the winters. Maybe I’ll go back some day. Maybe I’ll go to New York next year … and Europe … and perhaps Southeast Asia. But first I have to get myself a fridge and a washing machine.

It snows in this movie. I miss it – the snow, the cold winters. In Taiwan, it’s warm year-round. I have a serious problem with this heat. And my apartment has practically no windows. I’ve always liked a place with lots of windows – large windows, lots of fresh air, perhaps every now and then a late-fall breeze gently wafting through … yes, I’ll be sitting in the corner of the balcony on a cane chair, and then I’ll drift off …

Just before the sky turns grey, with a cold wind picking up strength, I step inside. I pull on a sweater, and saunter into the kitchen. Settling on pancakes for dinner, I turn to the beverage corner to make a fresh pot of coffee – my mind in a different place.

After a few minutes, I make myself comfortable on a large sofa. I draw my notebook closer and glance over something I started writing earlier. Still considering where I’m going with the story, I stretch over to the CD rack and pull out something from the late sixties.

Then I hear a knock on the door.

She’s sorry to bother, she says, she just wants to return the book she borrowed the other day. She hesitates for a moment. The aroma of hot water dripping on freshly ground coffee percolates from the kitchen.

I thank her for the book and make a comment about pancakes and coffee and nights like these.

She smiles. “Why not?” she says.

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TUESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 1999

[From an e-mail to a friend]

“I’m okay, just a little dizzy. I had just gone to bed when I felt my insides stir. I thought it was either a heart attack or an earthquake.

It was quite frightening. It felt as if a very strong wind was blowing, but the curtain only moved slightly. The walls, and therefore the entire apartment, shook. I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the experience to end. Then I called my parents to say I had just survived my first earthquake. I was talking with my mother when the floor began to stir again.

It’s quite something to experience when the lounge where you’ve spent so many hours suddenly acts as if it were a ship.

My mother, of course, didn’t find it amusing at all. I told her she didn’t have to worry; it wasn’t that bad. It was only when [a friend from Johannesburg] called three hours later, and immediately after that my sister to ask if I was okay that I began to realise it was much worse in other places.

To make matters worse, this afternoon when I was standing in a class (on the third floor), there was another stirring. From then on, I’ve felt a little woozy.

My apartment is fortunately on the ground floor. I spoke with a woman who lives on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building, and she said the furniture moved, and some of their windows broke.

[…]

Anyways, thanks for the concern.”

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One of the more dramatic photos of the earthquake:

Read more about the earthquake of 21 September 1999.

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SATURDAY, 14 AUGUST 1999

# 13

Life is a struggle for a higher existence. Your daily life is a series of actions and choices that result in you either advancing to an improved existence, or where you go backwards. The concrete meaning of this higher existence varies from person to person. The process of defining your specific Higher Existence is part of your struggle.

# 14

Is it not true that a person, without necessarily thinking about it, is constantly changing things and trying to do things better once he or she discovers a particular way of doing things is causing them harm, or fails to bring them fulfilment, or is simply not good enough to bring an endeavour to successful completion? Of course, you get people who continually make the same mistakes. Their struggle will inevitably be much longer and much more difficult.

* * *

A man sits on his porch smoking a cigarette. He’s contemplating life and asks himself The Question. He has abandoned the doctrines of his youth, and now looks at his own life experiences and all the knowledge he has gained so far to see if that can offer him any answers. He will find it: in his own experience, the knowledge he has acquired, in himself, and in other people. For just as he searches, from the essence of his nature and driven by his instincts, so others are searching, as well.

No one possesses perfect knowledge, but listen to a hundred people, and you will receive a hundred pieces of information that form part of the whole. Many pieces of knowledge will overlap, and there are many people who simply recite what they have been taught. Then there are libraries filled with books written by people generations or centuries ago who had some degree of knowledge of the Truth, even though this knowledge has become obscure or has even been lost and forgotten.

Sometimes you’ll find someone – through a personal encounter, or by reading a story or an article or a news bulletin, or by watching a movie or listening to someone’s music – who has contemplated his or her own experiences for long enough to have obtained what can be called More Profound Knowledge. In the same way, if he is sincere in his search, the man on the porch will also find peace about the meaning of his particular life.

# 15

I do not know about “God”. This does not mean I do not believe in “God”. All I’m saying is that everything I thought I knew about “God” has been given to me by people. At one stage in my life, it became clear that many of these people were either not worthy of my trust in what they had to say, or that they had simply told me what had been told to them, which they had decided to believe for their own personal reasons.

Fact is, I have never seen “God” – if “God” can be seen in the conventional understanding of the word, so I have to settle for other people’s opinions or doctrines about “God”. The problem? These people have also never seen “God”! They simply believe what they have been taught to believe. Or they base their belief on a combination of what they’ve been taught and their own experiences – which still means this person’s truth is subjective.

Another thing: knowledge – or “truth” – that is carried over from one generation to the next does not even always remain the same! Cultural practices change; the world in which we live sometimes undergoes profound change; when these things happen, subtle alterations are made to doctrines and personal beliefs.

So I’m not saying I do not believe in “God”, I’m just saying I do not know about “God”. I know what others think they know, but I cannot believe in something just because others believe in it. I must seek the truth on my own time and in my own way.

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# 11

SUNDAY, 4 JULY 1999

Why is identity so important? You are an individual entity with an awareness of its own self. To be part of any community, you need to know yourself. You have to make choices in a variety of situations, and you should at least have somewhat of an idea why you make those specific decisions. This decision-making process affects your personality, and your personality is an essential part of this process. The development of a pattern is also revealed. Tomorrow you have to make the same type of decisions, or you have to make similar choices. So as to not completely estrange yourself from other people, there must be some degree of consistency between you-of-yesterday and you-of-today.

Identity is also a useful tool in the process of distinguishing between yourself and your environment. You are, after all, not a tree, and you’re not a dog or a garbage truck. You must know how and where you fit in your immediate environment, and in the greater reality, otherwise you won’t know what steps you need to take for the sake of self-preservation and survival.

Consider the situation in a theatre – people in the audience and the actors on stage. The individual members of the audience know the rules of the situation. They know the limits they can go to, and they know their place in the immediate vicinity (the theatre where the play will be performed). They won’t, for example, put their person in danger or put themselves in an embarrassing situation by jumping on stage and start slapping the actors (unless it’s an awful piece and you feel you’ve wasted your money).

To experience a sensation that you belong in a certain place or among a certain group of people means that your identity is most likely acceptable to others in the area. To feel that you belong somewhere also makes you feel safe, and it gives you a sense of self-worth.

On a more personal note, if it is so important for the individual’s well-being to feel that he belongs somewhere, I am doing myself great harm by keeping myself from fulfilling this need. In other words, if the conscious withholding of life-sustaining elements – such as to disrupt the flow of oxygen (by gassing yourself) or blood (by cutting your wrists) – amounts to suicide, then I am slowly choking myself to death, so to speak.

# 12

SUNDAY, 11 JULY 1999

A few points:

1) Working hard and knowing there’s cash in the pipeline promotes a sense of well-being. It also makes you unaware of certain things, or it reduces your awareness of it.

2) Rome was not built in a day. If you buy a house, you don’t automatically get closets full of bedding and piles of ornaments and children and a dog and a lawnmower. What will ultimately be a warm and pleasant home is built over a long period of time.

3) Success does not necessarily follow a chronological order of events. In many cases it is two steps forward and one and three-quarter steps back. But in the end you have visited all the important places on the journey, and when you open your eyes one day, you find yourself in a more pleasant situation.

Don’t worry if you don’t always follow a well thought-out plan. Just starting somewhere and then moving from one completed task to the next is better than deferring action until a perfect plan has been formulated.

Lastly, if your mood is already on the pale side, make sure you at least have clean underwear.

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MONDAY, 21 JUNE 1999

Maybe I wasn’t made for foreign countries. Maybe I was destined to just be a regular guy who voted for the government and maintained a clean credit record. And who thought the new shopping mall was the greatest thing since lawnmowers. Instead, I’m sitting here in Chiang Kai-shek’s China, and I think it’s okay to eat dumplings on a Sunday night instead of leftover barbecue and potato salad. I pretend it’s a great job to watch children colour pictures of Mickey Mouse, while I ask them one by one, “What colour is this?” And then I pretend to get excited when they say “Yellow!” when it’s actually purple.

[…]

Steppenwolf. I’m still upset with the woman who absconded with my copy of [Hermann Hesse’s] Steppenwolf in Korea. I read it so carefully and underlined all the parts that were relevant to me. I thought, this was me, this Steppenwolf, the loner who thinks everyone who hangs out at bars and who tries to enjoy life is superficial.

[…]

I am tired of being alone. I don’t like to think of this actually, but what if I die, here in Taiwan? I live as if I have a million years to love people! As if all of this can wait until the whole of Asia’s children can speak fluent English!

Does it sound like I’m a little down in the dumps? Well, I once again had dumplings tonight. There are alternatives, but I can’t find barbecue and potato salad anywhere. So, whether it’s pizza, McDonald’s, or dumplings, it’s all the same.

I don’t belong here/in this land of strange words and sounds/I don’t belong here/in this land where I’m a stranger/so much to live for/so much to feel/so much yet to know …

* * *

Monday brought clarity. I can’t go back to South Africa because I’d be broke within a few months.

[…]

No, this second exile will last for three years, I decided. I will pay off my debt, buy myself some more electronics, and go to Europe next year.

* * *

I am a bit worried about myself. I have no motivation to do anything. I just want to spend the whole day in front of the TV and think of nothing. I don’t want to think about money, or how to make money. I don’t even want to think of the book I want to write.

[…]

[I had become a big escapist by my final year of high school.] I hated my immediate environment, but rather than making the best of it, I dreamed of better places. Or at least other places.

Maybe it was necessary, otherwise my life might have been robbed of the little adventure that I have been fortunate enough to experience. Hell, if I think about it, if I had been happy in Pretoria all those years ago [in 1991], I’d probably have been married by now, living in a house somewhere in the suburbs! I would have been cosying up to my wife right about now – or at least this time of the night – with my hand gently resting on her one breast. And tomorrow morning I would have gotten into my car, and with a mixture of morning traffic and light pop music in my ears I would have driven to some office building for my daily labour. Would I have been happy? Who knows. I would probably have felt that I belonged somewhere, and I would certainly still have dreamed. About what – I can’t say.

But now I’m sitting here in the Republic of Chiang. It’s three o’clock in the morning (Tuesday, this time), and I am trying to get my life in order on the computer I bought cash last week. Behind me, on the TV, images flash of a movie from Hong Kong. I have to go to sleep because although my first class only starts at four-thirty tomorrow afternoon, I want to get breakfast at McDonald’s. And they only serve breakfast until eleven o’clock.

* * *

Saturday, 26 June, just after lunch (I say with a spoonful of cereal in my mouth). I can’t go back to South Africa next year. I won’t have enough money, and faith alone will once again not be enough.

[…]

Money is the bottom-line. If I had enough money, the plan is good. If I don’t have enough money, and just a lot of faith and hope, the great disillusionment would always lurk on the horizon.

No, let’s be very serious about this. Once my debt is paid off, and I have enough money for at least one year of full-time study, fair and well. If not, it’s just not good enough. I’m sorry, but even the stupidest donkeys only hit their toes against the same stone so many times.

(Sunday, 20 June to Saturday, 26 June 1999)

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