Tag: exile

The question remains …

WEDNESDAY, 18 JUNE 2003

I want to go back to South Africa. If it’s within the next six months, great. If it only happens three years from now, then I accept it. However, it’s important to know where you’re going. And to know this, and to know why you want to go there, it is important to know where you come from.

I know the answers to these questions. I know them a lot better now than six, and three, and two months ago. I thus know where I’m going, where I want to be – not only in terms of geographical location, but also in terms of the Great Hierarchy, and why specifically I want to be there.

I still have a question, though: What do you do when you’re alone?

Most people want to be surrounded by family and friends and be close to a person with whom they have an intimate relationship. I am no different. But what do you do if you find yourself in a situation where your immediate family are thousands of kilometres away, where you have increasingly alienated yourself from people you used to call friends, and no one is waiting for you at home with whom you could enjoy a cup of tea and discuss the day’s events? Perhaps this situation is the result of circumstances beyond your control, or maybe you yourself are fully responsible for it. (If the latter is the case, it doesn’t mean it’s not for good reasons.)

The question remains: What do you do if it is only you, and you don’t want it to irreparably cripple your moral or your mental health?

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Pale-beard on the Trans-Mongolia

FRIDAY, 13 JUNE 2003

What would an exile piece be if I don’t spoil it with some or other plan that is totally unworkable?

I was thinking of everything that was said in the last few days and weeks, and I thought: Well, back I shall go, armed with the fantastic piece of insight that I shouldn’t expect an invitation to a middle-class tea party. As I’ve previously mentioned, I don’t intend to hang around in backyard sheds again, and if I am forced to go to dinner with people at a fancy restaurant, I will absolutely insist on paying for my own garlic bread and cheap beer.

The bureaucratic decisions of exactly when and where depend, as always, on the amount of local currency that I would be able to brandish on the day of my arrival.

Furthermore, to be a “poor white” is one thing; to be a “poor white” who still drags around student loans like so many sins of an irresponsible youth is something else. That is just looking for trouble, and you don’t even need to recite the dogma of personal politics for support.

Except for this responsibility that has to be carried to its very end, there are other matters to consider. One of these is age. If I, say at the end of next year (2004), again roll up my bedding and pack my boxes, I will be a few months older than 33. Fair enough, one will have embedded in your mind important insights about your own life. But such a person might be tempted to wish he could have had these answers to some important questions a few years ago (inexcusably greedy, I know).

What will make a man feel better, however, if you stare the fact in the face that you will hit sixty if you take an overextended nap one afternoon, is experiences. To know you didn’t spend eight years in the Far East, but the only pictures that adorn your refrigerator are those of you sitting at your computer – that you had to take yourself, and dozens of photos of how your living room had changed over the years.

What experiences would I like to throw on the scale that age so disgustingly forces to one side?

To be precise, a nearly 15,000-kilometer train journey that will start in Hong Kong and end in London. Cities that hold honorary positions on many travellers’ Where’s Where will be checked off. Except for the beginning and the end, there are places like Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, Ulaanbaatar, Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, if possible, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam –to name just a few possibilities.

There are the pictures – that will stay in your head until you are senile one day – of vast plains, mountains, rivers, and small towns. Then there are the Chinese cities where revolutions where settled, Russian cities where revolutions began and ended, Eastern European cities … where one can take photos of yourself in front of beautiful old buildings, and Western European cities that everyone ought to see at least once in their lives. And at the end of this train trip awaits your older sister in London with (hopefully) the first new-born in the family in almost 26 years.

Eventually you arrive back in South Africa with a shabby beard to show that you didn’t have to shave for two months, and hundreds of photos you can hang on your wall in the shed in the backyard. Then you can … wait, shed in the backyard?!

Essential to mention is that you will once again have to go back to Taiwan to go collect rent money for a two bedroom apartment for when you eventually will return to the Republic of your birth forever – and hopefully this time you save enough money to also be able to afford a few luxuries such as a radio, a fan for the summer, and of course a fridge for the photos. After this renewed period of necessary exile, you will again be a year or three older, the beard will be getting paler, and although you’d be able to recite Tang Dynasty poetry in your sleep, you will probably yearn to rather be telling stories to your own children – who would not even have been born yet.

Which brings me to the end of yet another part of this piece of writing. I have to go to bed so I can get up before lunch to pay the travel agent a visit. I am after all a man who is going back to South Africa in two weeks’ time – for three weeks.

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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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Go back to South Africa … come back to Taiwan

TUESDAY, 6 MAY 2003

Leave Taiwan on 4 September 2003. By October I’m in Bronkhorstspruit – in a cheap apartment. By March 2004, I’m back in Taiwan.

MONDAY, 12 MAY 2003

Why do I want to go back to South Africa? Because I’m tired, and for the sake of my struggle I need to struggle there for a while.

* * *

I don’t want all my convictions and faith in myself to be just what it is because it’s plugged into my Taiwan experience. [Thinking of myself as an electrical appliance, and my Taiwan experience as the source of electricity. I can therefore only exist as this person because of the power of this one source.] But what happens if these things are not plugged into some reality – either Taiwan, or verifiable success as a writer, or money, or something else? The person experiences a traumatic conflict between his internal reality (belief in himself) and external reality (how others view him). This leads to alienation of the person from his environment, and possibly anti-social behaviour, which can lead to the Psychological Wellness Police “arresting” the person and restricting his movement and actions to an institution, and more specifically to a room to which only they have the keys.

* * *

It is therefore of the utmost importance to connect my internal reality to an external reality that can be seen and acknowledged by others, and which can then, at least to a sufficient minimum degree, confirm my internal reality.

* * *

Rewind … tired? Yes, tired of not sharing my life with my family. And tired of being a stranger in a strange place. But I want to come back? Yes, when I’m ready to pay the price again.

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Exile thirteen

Let it be said, as I mentioned earlier, that one gets tired, not old. And so it happened to me in Taiwan. For four years I’ve been writing “exile” essays, and until recently I even considered changing the title. Because – am I really still in self-imposed exile after 47 months? Why did I not, after coming to the realisation in ’95 that I couldn’t stand the smell of academic books any longer, start looking for a job like many of my contemporaries, and busied myself with what could be described as a more conventional post-university existence? Why did I go to a land I couldn’t even initially find on a map, to do a job for which I had no experience, to lay my head – who knew where?

* * *

For weeks, the rebels battled against the government forces, against the status quo. Documents were shredded one evening on a massive scale in dimly lit offices in the capital. There were rumours of rebels in the suburbs, of heavily armed men having barbeques in the front gardens of frightened citizens.

Then came a counterattack, on Monday morning, on a flank of the rebel army. Two groups that had to support one another started bickering amongst themselves, and the government cleverly exploited the situation. A ceasefire was called, and the government and the rebels talked. The government explained that the two sides were fighting for the same ideal. They should work together, was the often-repeated sentiment.

By the weekend there was renewed fighting in the gardens. By Sunday, the government was virtually on its knees.

Late Sunday night the government launched a desperate propaganda attack. They let the people know if they accepted the current system for the time being the government was prepared to make a concession: the temporary reunion of relatives who became separated during the Exile.

The rebels lost support, for the first time in three weeks. The government talked with the rebel leaders again. The latter insisted they had enough supplies and ammunition to continue the struggle indefinitely but conceded that the men were tired. And, they let it be known, if the people wanted things that way, there probably should be more talking, for now. From their side, the government acknowledged that there was support for the ideology of the rebels even in the government’s own ranks.

It was decided that things could be reformed in such a way – if the rebels were to retreat – that society would look quite different in the near future.

That was Monday afternoon. Tuesday people went back to work, children returned to school, and money changed hands in the market again.

By Wednesday, there was uneasiness in the air. A large group of people began camping out at the government offices Wednesday night. The government had announced the conclusion of the talks to the people, who – to the government’s disappointment – only accepted the results half-heartedly.

By Thursday morning there was enough of a commotion that the rebel leaders reloaded the guns. Again, both sides put the matter to the people. Manifests and plans were explained, reformulated, and changed in places so that the people could decide once and for all.

The people were tired. On the one hand there was the very real desire for change, and the attractive humanistic ideology of the rebels. The people were nevertheless well aware of the problems that revolution would bring – of this the rebel leaders made sure with clear examples from history. Sacrifices would have to be made – about this the people never had any doubt. They also remembered the previous attempt at change that collapsed after six months. But the harsh reality of the current system could not be ignored.

Likewise, the rebel leaders could not write off the troubles of their current campaign as easily surmountable barriers. They were indeed at a crossroads.

By Friday the rebel leaders explained to their fighters and to the people that the full implementation of their ideology would be impossible if the revolution were carried out at the present time, considering a) limited funds, which would have to be stretched to overthrow the status quo, and b) the decision of the leadership that long-term ideals should not be jeopardised for the sake of short-term benefits.

The heroic efforts of the rebels have shaken the government, and the people are restless. The government leaders know that their firm intention to reform the current system was an important factor in the outcome of this final battle.

The people are restless, and winds of change are blowing. Although the rebels will retreat for now, although the leaders and the foot soldiers will rest for the time being, the guns remain aimed at the institutions of government. Shimmering. Ready. The current system has been given notice.

(Saturday, 4 January 2003)

A comparison of Reformed Plans 1 & 2

[…]

(Tuesday, 7 January 2003)

Factor four, and the implications

Then I thought, okay, I’m a bit calmer now about the whole “plan” issue. On the way home a few days ago – as I was passing a man selling fresh orange juice from the back of a truck – I thought, actually, this place isn’t so bad. The sky is blue, the women good-looking, and you can buy fresh orange juice off a truck on the way home.

That afternoon on the way to the tennis court I took the idea further. I thought back to the whole story of a week ago when I thought if a man had arrived here with a four-year plan four years ago … and that it would be good, and that it’s not impossible to carry out my current plans, and in a way be executing a three-to-five-year plan. And then I thought of vacation, and of making a pilgrimage to the battlefields of the First World War.

Soon I was thinking again of my ideas for next year, and that I guess I should … uhm … and it’s already Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, 14/15 January 2003. Nice.

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