Category: Personal Agenda, Book Two

SATURDAY, 14 JUNE 2003

On Friday, 13 June, I couldn’t get past the password on my computer, because the a, the Backspace and the Caps Lock keys decided without warning to go on early retirement. It didn’t take me long to wise up about a few things:

1. The development was highly disturbing.

2. People put their hopes for happiness on something that’s part of their daily lives. Sometimes they know what it is, and sometimes they only discover what it was when it’s gone. For some people it is an intimate relationship with another person. For someone else, it’s taking care of a family. For others, it’s the fact that they have a lot of money. And sometimes it’s all of the above. For me it is writing. In practical terms it means typing the password on my computer every day and working on a project.

3. If I’m a soldier, my computer is my weapon.

4. The thought occurred to me that I might just have to buy a new computer.

For the record, the reason I bought a notebook computer in June 2000 was because it was portable back to South Africa. It was insurance: If I ended up in servant’s quarters again, at least I would have my own computer. A desktop PC – big box with a big screen – meant that I had to remain here for long enough to be okay with writing it off when the time came to pack my backpack again.

And now? Has a dysfunctional a key forced me to address the Big Question earlier than I had planned? Will I stay in Taiwan long enough to justify buying a new computer – and probably not the portable kind?

I also wonder, just in passing, if I’m not still a little naïve about what awaits me, a certifiable poor white, in South Africa.

Thus a thought came to me as I was looking at computers this evening: Stay here for long enough to enable myself to eventually afford an apartment in South Africa – of course in a neighbourhood and in an architectural style appropriate for a self-respecting poor white intellectual.

To be honest, similar ideas had been jumping around in my head before the a became a Caps Lock. Early in the morning I had already thought, “now in July for three weeks with the family, then next March. And if you don’t return to South Africa at the end of next year, also next December with the family somewhere on a beach.” (If business goes well enough for the family.)

Time will of course be getting on, and my Chinese will eventually reach a point where one could make money with it in South Africa. So much more time is also so much more time for the publication of textbooks and writing inspired by a life in the Far East. And there’s of course the old-age insurance of 15,000-kilometre railway journeys, a few weeks in Japan, a few weeks in China, and even a visit to New York.

But on a much simpler level, this point: To own my own house or apartment in South Africa.

What’s the alternative? I return to South Africa before the end of this year. From March 2004 I barbeque every weekend at my younger sister’s (as long as I can afford my own boerewors and garlic bread); I continue paying down my student loans for another three or four years, and rent an apartment in Bronkhorstspruit for the rest of my life. This while I listen to other people’s stories of journeys over Russian mountains and Chinese deserts, and trips to Japan and New York, and Paris and Amsterdam, at barbecues where my garlic bread’s flavour is getting weaker and weaker, and as I get older by the day, with my enthusiasm for doing battle with my keyboard decreasing dangerously fast.

But at least I’ll get to see my family more often, right?

No one said this would be easy. But I’m a soldier in the Poor White Battalion, fighting in the front trenches in the Battle for the Soul.

And you win as long as you remain standing.

______________________

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2003

The question of the day: Do my ambitions surpass my financial capabilities? Answer: Not as long as I stay in Taiwan.

You move in the direction of making calculations. You say: Okay, I am this old, and I’ve done this and that. I own a toaster and a nice laundry basket. My health is here and there, and I have so many years to go before I strike forty, or fifty.

You also look at what you don’t have. You look at what you don’t own – maybe a house or a caravan, or a microwave oven; things that have always been out of your financial reach. And you look at what you haven’t done; things that are important for reasons only you can explain. This last point is the one I want to address for the moment.

The thing is, you get older by the year, and you start thinking about insurance for the day that will come sooner or later if you are … lucky. And the big question, which you try to evade until you realise you can’t ignore it any longer, is whether you at least enjoyed some of your life while you were looking for all the pieces of the puzzle, for all the answers, all the tags you wanted to hang around experiences, and incidents, and desires.

In answering this question one usually finds it almost impossible to lie – the truth tends to reflect even from under the darkest sunglasses.

I have chosen to hang the tag of “Things I Really Enjoy Doing” around travel experiences. The pleasure of arriving in a place for the first time and taking pictures of yourself in places you’ve previously only seen in movies or on CNN. It carries the type of weight I want to throw on the other end of the scale that age causes to lean so heavily to one side.

There are other things, but it mostly involves emotions that sometimes get out of hand. To have a family – to be married and have children … is a pleasant enough thought. But it’s something that will make this discussion much more complex, and that brings its own uncertainties.

Another thought sometimes infiltrates my grey matter despite noble resistance: Are the odds completely against us in this life? Or is life not about math and science? Is it, as I have been suspecting for several years, a struggle that you win as long as you remain standing?

______________________

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2003

Brand Smit lives in Blue Stone Mansions number 711. He is married to Elsa Kleynhans (now June it was seven years). They have two children: Marie is five and a half, and Ben is three. Brand is a writer. Apart from his two collections of poetry there are also a few books about his years in the Far East. He also writes articles and short essays for magazines. Elsa is a teacher at a local primary school. Together, they earn enough to keep body and soul together.

Brand and Elsa rent the apartment in Blue Stone Mansions, but often speak of buying a house somewhere in the suburbs. They do, after all, have two children, and sometimes the apartment gets a little cramped for the four of them. Elsa would also like to have a garden, and Brand says he’d like to sit on a porch.

Last December the family went down to the West Coast (Elsa has family there), and Brand swore never again. Elsa’s brother is a local businessman, and, like before, they did not see eye to eye when it came to politics and religion. Brand initially said they should stay home this December, but he and Elsa have talked about it again. They now plan to spend a week or so at Sodwana with Brand’s younger sister and her husband (they still have to work out the finances).

Brand often talks about his years in Northeast Asia. Elsa listens patiently even though she knows all the stories by now. Sometimes someone he had befriended in Taiwan would come by. They would talk late into the night about incidents and people, and about typhoons, pollution, epidemics, English classes, and about Chinese. Brand’s Chinese is not too bad, and he uses every opportunity to practice it. Reading material is easy to get hold of (either on the Internet or at the Chinese supermarket), and he often browses through a Chinese magazine while Elsa is reading the latest YOU.

Brand turned forty last year, and he and Elsa thought it was a good time to buy a new computer. (Elsa’s one colleague’s husband runs a computer store, and he gave them a good price on a slightly older model.) Brand thought a computer to be a fitting gift to himself – it is after all his brush for the painter, his sword for the warrior, and his previous computer sporadically malfunctioned.

Brand follows a fixed daily schedule. He usually gets up before Elsa and the children, makes them breakfast, takes the children to their kindergarten, and drops Elsa off at the primary school. Then he might swing by the post office, and at ten o’clock or so he’s usually behind his computer. He tries writing a fixed number of articles and essays each month (his bread-and-butter), but his true love is still poetry. He is currently working on his fourth volume.

Brand loves his wife and is devoted to his children. He hopes Marie will become an architect or a vet, and although it’s a bit early to say, he believes little Ben may have it in him to become a writer. He says it to anyone who wants to hear, and looks embarrassed every time Elsa tells him, “Let the child become his own man.” All he then says before he starts talking about something else, is that he can see it in the boy’s eyes.

______________________

THURSDAY, 12 JUNE 2003

The World of the Working Adult is your destination if you are old enough to leave school and someone offers to pay you for your labour; also when you’re done with your tests and exams at a tertiary institution, or when you’re plain tired of learning, or when you have to start repaying your student loans.

Nineteen-ninety-six was the first year of my adult life that I was no longer a student. This was the first year I had to demonstrate where I was going to fit into the Great Hierarchy. The year started for me in a municipal apartment – without furniture, because I had sold all of it during the last few weeks of the previous year. From that very first month of my post-university adult life I couldn’t afford to pay the rent of a municipal apartment. By the middle of this month the electricity was cut off, so I couldn’t even celebrate this new phase of my existence with a cup of tea.

If you don’t start with some paid work after your tertiary education ends, and you live either in a municipal apartment without electricity, or with your parents for a few months, or in your older sister’s living room (not even in the middle of the living room, but behind the couch), you are a failure in the eyes of your friends, your family, other people who know you, and in the eyes of society at large.

To go abroad is – as it also was in the mid-nineties – a way to escape this negative view of your person. If you emigrated, or accepted a job in a foreign country where you received a formal work permit before you left, that would be one thing. You’re still in a formal work situation contemporaries in your own country will understand, and can identify with to some extent. If on the other hand you only pack a backpack or two suitcases, and you go to England for a year or two, or to Northeast Asia to work as an English teacher for a year or three, it is commonly expected that you will “return” at some point to begin a life in your own country as a Working Adult, and to take your Place in the Great Hierarchy.

My years in Korea and Taiwan fall in this second category of Going Abroad. The difference is that after seven years I still haven’t made my reappearance in the Republic to take my place in the sun. (There was the experimental return in 1998 which ended in a domestic servant’s room with pink walls, but that was over quickly enough.)

Now I know that I have been struggling for almost a decade to find an answer to a specific question: Where is my place in the Great Hierarchy?

My difficulty with this question can be attributed to a large extent to the fact that I don’t sit comfortably in middle-class company – because of the “poor white” years, and also because of my personal ideology of Creative Independence before Financial Comfort.

Without an answer to this question it has always been difficult to work out what kind of life I wanted to live as a Working Adult, with what type of work I’d be able to identify myself, where I would (like to) live, with whom I would socialise without feeling like a “failure”, and what kind of life I would be able to give a family.

An interesting situation developed in our family regarding this matter. My parents both came from rural areas and worked their way up to the Urban Middle Class. Things went wrong just when they reached the peak of their success in their mid-forties. From then on they were in and out of the Poor White Class (mostly in). My older sister mastered the game well and now enjoys a relatively comfortable Middle-class Existence as a reward. My younger sister, who was eight years old when she stumbled into the Poor White Class with the rest of the family, can together with her husband be classified with ease as Working Class – or Aspiring Middle Class.

Me? I’m a tough case. I had the opportunity to achieve membership of the Petite Bourgeoisie as a high school teacher. For ideological reasons, a problem with authority, a small degree of artistic talent, and too much ambition I politely declined the opportunity.

Where do I therefore fit in, in this great Socio-Economic and Cultural Hierarchy? I am nothing more than a Poor White Intellectual.

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