Personal Agenda, Book Two – Page 14

The new label (parts one to four)

TUESDAY, 10 JUNE 2003

The new label (i)

[…]

The new label (ii)

In terms of what I do for a living, the amount of money I earn, and my tertiary qualifications, I could be considered for Membership of the Middle Class. In terms of the socio-economic circumstances in which our family found ourselves during my childhood in the mid to late eighties, I am Poor White. In terms of my hang-ups and insecurities, I’m Poor White. If I go back to South Africa now and accept a position as a high school teacher, I’ll be just a notch above the working class; in other words, Petit Bourgeois. If I go back to South Africa and struggle from month to month but keep my creative independence, I would be Poor White.

The new label (iii)

Question: Do I want to be a “poor white”?

Answer: It’s not a matter of where I want to be; it’s a matter of where I am. And what am I going to answer anyway? “I want to be middle-class”?

Class consciousness is like political consciousness – linked to your personal experiences. With political uprisings there are always people who ask, “What’s the big deal?” In the same way there must be many of my contemporaries who will wonder what exactly I’m going on about.

If I had spent the first fourteen years of my life in a “poor white” neighbourhood in a “poor white” house with “poor white” food on the table, “poor white” clothes on my back, and “poor white” vacations in the backyard, I might have had more of a feeling that I belonged somewhere. (Would it have made my life better? Not necessarily. The matter is after all more complex than just having a sense of belonging.)

What a middle-class home, middle-class clothes, middle-class food, middle-class holidays, and an idea of what the future may hold gave me until I was fourteen years old, was first-hand knowledge of the so-called bourgeoisie, as well as friends who grew up in the world of the middle class. The main blessing, however, that an initial middle-class life gave me was a relatively easy path to higher education, which gave me knowledge and skills and even experience of the Greater World.

Do I want to go back to South Africa to look for a two-bedroom house in a poor white neighbourhood? No. Do I want to go back to South Africa and position myself amongst a group of Poor Whites and shout, “I am one of you!”? Fuck that. Even Vladimir Lenin said, “Less windy talk about ‘proletarian culture’, and let’s first rid ourselves of a serf mentality. We could do with some bourgeois culture for a start.” (In his last speeches and writings he apparently emphasised proper training and education. It is also true that he had a bit of a romantic idea of people being content working ten hours a day in a factory as long as their party was in power. Maybe he thought everything would work out fine. Or maybe he didn’t care for individual well-being. Would he have seen personal happiness and fulfilment as decadent, capitalist values?)

The new label (iv)/Failure and class consciousness

How and where you fit in the world is, like class and political consciousness, something most people only start thinking about when they find themselves on the wrong side of the line. (“What line?” many will ask again, and think to themselves, “Jeez, this guy has a lot of issues!”)

For years I believed that I belonged in the middle – in the eighties in South Africa as a child, I believed all whites were middle-class people, but later also in terms of dress, language, future prospects, tertiary qualifications, hobbies and interests, and friends. Yet, for years I struggled with the belief that I was a failure in this particular class – the socio-economic domain where I was supposed to succeed.

That I have been living in the Far East for the last several years has only made it possible to conceal this “failure” to a degree. It was, however, most painfully noticeable during the periods when I lived in South Africa after I had graduated from university. I got away in 1995 with the fact that I was still registered for a tertiary course – I wasn’t an unemployed poor white, I was a “graduate student”. But from the very beginning of ’96 my actual status in the Great Hierarchy became clear to anyone who cared to look.

During the six months I lived and worked in Johannesburg in 1998 it was also clear to everyone, and a great embarrassment to myself, that I was definitely not “making” it in the Middle Class. However you looked at it, I was a failure in the class in which I worked, in which I socialised, and in which I resided – the servant’s quarters where I lived rent-free was after all in a middle-class neighbourhood.

From the moment I arrived in Taiwan, I could once again camouflage this failure. Starting from January 2000, however, many other South Africans also came to Taiwan, who had either previously been successful in the Middle Class, or fully expected to be successful if and when they returned to South Africa. I once again found myself in social circles where I believed I had to disguise that I had been a middle-class failure in 1998, and would again be if I returned at any time during the last three-and-a-half years (since 2000).

About this hiding and pretending that I am something that I actually am not, I can solemnly make the following statement: No more. (Or like Roberto Duran muttered in 1980 in his fight against Sugar Ray Leonard, “No más, no más.”)

I will climb on a roof and shout: “I am Poor White! I harbour no middle-class ambitions anymore! And I refuse to continue to pretend that I am a child of the middle class! My parents are artisans who constantly shuttle between the lower middle class and the class of Poor Whites! I am a writer, and Poor White! This, you hypocritical bastards, is the reality! This is my reality, and this has been my reality for twenty years!”

And while I’m on the roof, I would take the opportunity to also shout at the other Poor Whites: “Fuck you too with your serf mentality! I refuse to fall back into a poverty state of mind where I encamp with other poor fools and hurl mud at those who possess more than I do … who have a car and a nice house, and who can afford overseas holidays! Good for them! May they be happy! Which one of you doesn’t want these things for yourselves and for your children?! I’m not one of them, but I am also not one of you! I’m in a class of my own!”

And then the Poor Whites on the pavement will shout back: “Yeah, and you can also sod off with your fancy college degrees and your fancy Japanese camera …”

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In the name of the father

SUNDAY, 8 JUNE 2003

The Current Economic System of the Modern Industrialised World demands victims on a daily basis. Many adults end up as failures in an environment where they, too, wanted to lift their heads and say: “Take me seriously. I also deserve to be treated with respect.”

If you fail as an adult in this world, and you don’t get back on your feet, you will suffer for the rest of your life under financial pressure, and endure disappointments, instances where you must abandon your dignity, hardships which will necessarily be your fate if you don’t have enough money, humiliation, and pride that has to be swallowed.

I realised this thing – that the world gets the better of some adults, that they struggle for all they’re worth, but once the game has turned against you, you will probably never again be on the winning side. I didn’t realise this last year, or in Korea, or when I was at university and my awareness of the world became more sophisticated. I realised it long before I was old enough to understand it properly.

From then on my trousers trembled at the thought that my turn would also come to climb into the ring against the big boys. The same men who floored tough guys and who pushed their wives out of the ring when they wanted to help. My turn would come, I always knew; the day when my name would be called, when the men would look up to see what this “Brand Smit” guy looks like. And when they see it is I, they will look at each other, raise their eyebrows, and smile. Because they will know: “This guy shouldn’t give us too many problems.”

I am the only son among three children. My mother always thought I was a little “special” (in a good sense, but it’s also true that my parents wanted me to be tested at one point for mental retardation), and I was always interested in things of a spiritual nature. Maybe it isn’t that much of a surprise that the idea occurred to me that it may not be “my lot in life” to find work after university, and get married and have children … and then make one mistake and then everything is fucked up for everyone for the rest of their lives.

“Maybe I should be a writer,” I thought. “Isn’t it true that I believe I have a special calling I have to perform!” Meantime I’m just screwed up because nobody told Sonny, that’s not how it always goes in the Big People’s World …

So it came that I’ve been hiding for fourteen years in the Adult World – to which I belong by default because enough time has passed since my birth.

The Bible says that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Bruce Springsteen says, “They ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you.” Which is nice and dandy when you end up a millionaire rock star, but what do you do if you’re an unpublished writer in self-imposed exile, and you want to go home?

In the name of the father
Thus will I approach the world

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Soldier in a larger war

SATURDAY, 7 JUNE 2003

Maybe I should retire from this game while I’m still young enough and still have a few things that count in my favour. Maybe I should admit that I’ve surpassed my expectations.

By the end of this year I will have lived in the Far East for seven years. I can speak and read a little Chinese, and in a few months’ time I will do so even better. I’ve gained some life experience and seen places and did things I never dreamed I would. I have wrung a collection of poetry from my soul, and a biographical-type book on my four years in Taiwan (or my first four years). And I have improved my relationship with my creditors to such an extent that they, ironically, think of me as a responsible adult.

Maybe this is my peak. Maybe nothing from this point on will ever be as good as it is right now. Maybe I will look back three or five or fifteen years from now and say, “Damn, that was where I again saw a sign for an exit where I could have turned back to the place I had deliberately driven past.” Maybe I should go home, and like a second team player on his way back to the locker room tap the real heroes on their shoulders and say, “There you go, guys! Best of luck!”

Am I like the pretender to the world heavyweight title who, in all honesty, should never have come so far? And now on the eve of his title fight realises he has fooled everyone? And he knows what perhaps one or two people in the crowd also suspect – that he is going to fall, on his face, in the first round.

Or maybe I’m the real thing. Maybe there really is something I want to say …

Then again, what is it that I try to express? Is it not true that all the statements I make and all the arguments I try to articulate have already been made and put into words? Is it not true that there are other people who say exactly the same things? Is it not true that what I want to say is not quite as new and profound as I sometimes think it is? Is it not true that I am not exactly the Keeper of some Secret? And is it not at the end true what that other guy in the Chuck Norris movie says – that the world doesn’t want to be saved? Is it not true the world just wants to be entertained a little bit, and every now and then wants to be encouraged, but left alone the rest of the time?

Or am I a soldier, like Chuck Norris in the said movie, who responds to the person who believes the world doesn’t want to be saved with a defiant, “Not my world”? Is it a struggle, and should I wake up and realise I am right, and I’ve been on the right track for a few years now? That this is not some silly game where the middle class are the Monopoly Masters? That I am indeed a soldier in a struggle where the entire middle-class world is but the latest battlefield?

It does, however, remind me of the Matrix where the main characters fly through the telephone lines and then in a simulated reality slam fists with the bad guys. If you die in the simulated world, it’s the end for you. Your physical body breathes its last in actual reality. So it is with The World of Money, and Good Jobs and Buying a Home and Getting Married and Having Children and Being Responsible. Ultimately it’s not about these things. These things are only part of a larger reality. But if you fail in your battles in this world, then it’s also tickets for you in the Greater War.

Am I a Participant in a Greater Struggle?

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Vision of the future, possibility one

SATURDAY, 24 MAY 2003

Brand Smit lives in 273 Blue Stone Road. 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 works at a local newspaper as a sub-editor. They bought the house in Blue Stone three years ago from a work contact of Elsa’s brother (just before little Ben’s birth). It’s a nice house with a small garden and a tree in the backyard. Brand often says he bought the house because there wasn’t too much lawn to mow. Then Elsa would add, “And you liked the study.”

Last December the family went to Sodwana, and Brand swore never again. The children fell ill from drinking the tap water, and he and Elsa did not have a single night’s rest for a full week. Brand initially said they were going to stay home this December, but he and Elsa have talked about it again. They now plan to visit family of Elsa’s on the West Coast.

Every now and then Brand talks about his years in Asia. Elsa always listens patiently. Sometimes, like last April, someone whom he had befriended in Taiwan would pay them a visit. They would talk late into the night about this and that, about typhoons, pollution, epidemics, English classes, and Chinese.

Brand still remembers a few Chinese words, and he reckons if he ever had to go back to Taiwan or China, he would again pick up the language. In the bathroom (the one next to the guestroom) hangs a scroll of bamboo paper with large Chinese characters. If a guest uses the bathroom, Brand always hopes they ask him what the words mean. He usually goes on about it until Elsa reminds him that not everyone is interested in Oriental languages.

Brand turned forty last year, and as a gift to himself bought a book on Confucius. The book is on a side table in the living room next to his chair, but he has only read the first few pages.

He still writes, but most of the time it’s just material for the newspaper. He once wrote an article for a national magazine and was very excited about what he felt might become a new source of regular income. That was three years ago.

Brand loves his wife, and he’s devoted to his children. He hopes Marie will become an architect or a vet. Although it’s still too 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 responds with, “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. A writer, or perhaps a psychologist.

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Brand Smit and a salaried position

SATURDAY, 24 MAY 2003

I don’t think I can stay in Taiwan another year. It’s not that I’m suddenly tired of the place. It’s not that I don’t know I can go on vacation next month, come back, quit the kindergarten job, focus on my Chinese and my teaching material for six months, and get another apartment. It’s not that I don’t know I can go on holiday next February for two months and come back and get another job.

What is at stake is blood: My family. My parents are not getting any younger. My youngest sister, with whom I’ve always had a close relationship, has been married a few years, and I have only visited her and my brother-in-law once. My older sister lives in England. I would also like to visit her, but that I haven’t been able to do it yet is at least not something I feel guilty about because she, like me, left our home country.

Another thing: The news recently broke that my older sister is pregnant with her first child. My younger sister can also get pregnant any time. Where does this leave me? The “uncle” who lives in the Far East, who comes to visit perhaps once a year? And when my older sister and her new family visit South Africa, chances are that I’d be sitting on the other side of the planet. It’s not good enough.

One thing that has been confirmed more than a few times the last few years in my observation of Taiwanese people and their culture is how important family is. I see grandfathers walking down the street in the late afternoon who know they will see their grandchildren again that evening, like every evening. I see parents who pick up their own children and their nephews and nieces from the same kindergarten. This – this is the life I want! A life of community, where I can visit my parents regularly, and where I can barbecue on the weekends with my sister and her husband. And if they have children, to see how they immediately recognise me, rushing over to tell me a story like a child only does to someone who’s not a stranger. And who knows, if things work out that way, then I’ll also see how my own children someday behave in the same way with my sister and my brother-in-law. Then there’s my older sister and her husband. Okay, England is a bit far for a weekly barbecue, but it’s still a hell of a lot closer dan the Farthest East!

A question popped out of my mouth like a flag attached to a spring the moment these thoughts registered as a new development: How am I going to do it?

Like different ingredients always coalesce at a particular moment to produce something great, I was reading a George Orwell book titled, Coming Up for Air. The protagonist goes on for the first hundred pages or so about England in the twenties and having a job that gives you just enough money so that the children never know you are never going to have a lot of money, with the wife always complaining about settling accounts, and so on. I thought by myself, half dreaming: “Hmm … a job, hey?”

To hold what can more or less qualify as a permanent job in South Africa is usually for me nothing more than a somewhat amusing theoretical possibility. I will now and then have a fleeting daydream about it. But it is also something that I fear because of my problem with authority figures, and because I’m deathly afraid of wasting my days in a perpetual struggle to accumulate enough money. And if it’s not an office job, then any of a thousand other jobs where you have to say, “Yes Boss” and “It’s true, I badly messed up. I promise I will never do it again.” And then you go home at night not wanting to talk to anyone or wanting to scream at everyone.

Why would George Orwell of all people make the idea of a job sound so pleasant to me? His main character believes in similar things as I recite to myself every day as a personal dogma. Maybe it wasn’t the idea of a stable job in the first place, but the idea of people around you, a wife and children, and places you know. And maybe it was also because I closely associate the concept of a permanent position – so central to a life of middle-class semi-security – to all the things I’ve been yearning for these last several years.

This connection between what I fear and what I desire has been holding me captive in an undesirable situation. I want the good things that you usually get if you have a so-called job, without actually going so far as to deny my own beliefs and attempting to obtain a permanent position – or at least something that looks like a regular job on paper.

Is that not why I am sitting alone in my apartment in the Farthest East for the thousandth Saturday night, while my family is laying out the meat for tonight’s barbecue on another continent? Because it has become doctrine that Brand Smit would never be able to endure a salaried position.

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