Elon Musk is one of the most famous people in the world, is considered an inspiring cultural icon, and his business projects have brought him billions of dollars. He was born in the same year, in the same month, in the same week, in the same city as me.
Dexter Holland from The Offspring is a successful pop star. In 2017, he also received his PHD in Molecular Biology. He also started his own business selling hot sauces – made according to his own recipes. He also has a pilot’s license.
The guy from Pizza Rock arrived in Taiwan in 2000 – one year after me. He’s been all over Taiwan – in his own words, he has traversed every road, highway, and dirt road in the mountains. In 2011 (same year as me) he got married. He and his wife decided they wanted to start a business. They had no experience with restaurants but decided to start a pizza place. Went to Italy for a few weeks, ate lots of pizza, asked questions, and learned what to do. Back in Taiwan, he made his first pizza in a little Costco oven. The night before the Grand Opening, he reckoned it might be a good idea to see how the commercial oven delivered earlier in the day works. The first attempt was a total failure. Still, the next day they opened, and everything worked out well. They recently opened their 27th restaurant on the island. Three years before he opened his first restaurant, he also started a popular website with dozens of interesting articles about Taiwan.
Me?
I wanted to work out who I am or should be. I wanted to work out what the story is with religion, and with ethics without religion. I wanted to work out how one experiences meaning in your life. I wanted to work out what one has to do to be happy; that is, what people who experience happiness in their lives do right that people who don’t experience happiness in their lives don’t do or do wrong. I am satisfied with the answers I have worked out. Because I’ve carefully taken notes of the process, I have hundreds of pieces of publishable text – which I have already made available in various formats for other people to read. Sometimes other people read it. I further reckon that failures and successes of the last decade or two, as well as thoughts on other topics, have given me enough material for at least a couple more collections.
I am not a world-famous pop star. No one is going to Mars one day thanks to my hard work and ingenuity. I don’t have a PHD; I don’t have a pilot’s license, and I’ve never invented any sauce recipes. Nor have I started a successful business in my more than two decades in Taiwan that provides hundreds of people with jobs and thousands of people with delicious food. Like the guy from Pizza Rock, I also have a Taiwanese themed website. But there’s not much of value on it, and it receives little traffic.
Oh yes, after three attempts I also recently managed to get a scooter license. And – I make my own granola every week.
A few pages ago I solemnly said GOODBYE. Now I’m sitting here behind my computer, wiping the sweat from my brow in salute to the reader who has made it this far.
The first part of this final INTRODUCTION starts with a piece that I wrote as people were filing into drinking establishments for New Year’s parties (2003/2004). In the second part I refer to a few dreams that have gotten stuck in my memory over the years. The last part is taken up by administration for the third part of this literary project.
I. What I planned for this year/What I plan for this year
It is Wednesday, 31 December 2003, 25 minutes past 11 at night. There are 35 minutes left of this year. Because it has become a habit to write something at this hour, because it is usually a good idea, and because I’m not in the mood to pay a fortune to get drunk with a bunch of strangers, I am sitting where I’ve spent most of my time this year: behind my computer, writing.
As the title [of this part of the “Introduction”] indicates, I decided not to write about trains, women, teaching English, or the fact that you can buy cheap alcohol at the 7-Eleven on New Year’s Eve. This piece will cover plans.
There were plans at the end of last year, and there were plans at the beginning of this year. There were plans in May, and there were plans in July. There were also plans in August, September, October, November, and December. And then, as befits a New Year’s Eve, there are plans tonight.
My plan at the beginning of this year was to lift my exile and return to South Africa at the end of February [2003]. That was what I now call a “liberal plan”. I didn’t have enough money, and I didn’t really know what I would do in South Africa. I did like the “revolutionary” nature of it, though. Because the plan was a bit crazy, it set off a reaction I now call the “conservative response”. I (once again) thought, “Actually this place isn’t so bad,” and that staying in Taiwan until the end of 2003 would probably have a positive effect on my financial well-being and professional development.
By May, I had come up with the idea that I was never going to make enough money here in Taiwan, or with English teaching. “I need to do business!” I cried out. And went off on a coughing fit brought on by five years in a windowless apartment.
By June I was fed up. I propelled myself forward on the ink fumes from my notebook in which I furiously offered up notes and poems as compensations for all that wasn’t good in my life.
By July, I was determined that I was going to lift my exile in February 2004, and to haul a caravan into my family’s backyard in Bronkhorstspruit or Middelburg. Information was collected, pledges made, and dry twigs solemnly broken off from a tree in the garden – and planted in a vase back in Taiwan to remind myself of my promise just in case I forgot.
The tree on a farm outside Middelburg
August brought the brilliant plan to quit my job at the pre-school and make all the money I needed with “Business!” End of September saw me in a new apartment, finally, after nearly five years in Number Fifteen.
All the free time I saw stretched out in front of me every day eventually made one thing clear: I am, in the first and final place, a writer. The project entitled “Personal Agenda” was my main project from February onwards. It remained my main project throughout the year. It was also what I kept myself busy with in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings when I was actually supposed to do “Business!”
I did finally start working on a few ideas that could be classified as commercial projects and continued working on a few others I had placed on ice earlier. After some months I actually completed one project. My Chinese also benefited from more time I had at my disposal. I have generally felt happier over the past few months, as I was in the first half of 2001, when I also spent most of my time in my apartment, hard at work on my own projects.
It is Wednesday, 31 December 2003. It is two minutes to midnight. Two minutes before a new year. Two minutes left of a good year …
* * *
It’s Thursday, 1 January 2004. It is one minute after midnight. It’s the beginning of a new year. Fireworks rattle like machine guns in the distance. Water is dripping from my toilet. The computer’s fan is making a noise, and my fingers are dancing epileptically across the keyboard. Welcome to a new unit of time in our lives.
Wednesday, 7 January 2004
Here are my plans and intentions for the next three years:
[…]
That being said, I would love to lift my exile as I have always hoped it would happen – by transporting my possessions and my person back to the place from where I departed on 16 January 1999. How things will work out, is how they will work out. We make plans, and then there’s reality. But we must continue making plans, otherwise we might just end up waiting day and night for a bus that may only arrive in fifty years. We don’t determine everything that happens to us, but until things do happen, we need to keep ourselves busy productively. This way we can also influence what will happen to us, and maybe even when.
II. Three dreams
I was very young, maybe five or six. I dreamed my parents and my sister (my youngest sister wasn’t born yet) and I were driving in our station wagon through some city. It was evening. We had become aware of someone following us. Later we were in an apartment. Everyone but I was asleep. The people that had followed us tried to break into the apartment. I was the only one who could hold them back, but all I had to protect myself and everyone else in the apartment was a box of matches.
As a teenager I used to have a specific type of dream. I would be in danger. I knew someone could help me … if I could just give a good shout. The problem was, I could never produce any sound.
The third dream is still conjured up by my subconscious from time to time with different backstories. I’ll be among a large group of people – say at an outdoor wedding, and then I start walking off on my own. After a while, my steps would become longer. Eventually my steps would become stretched to the point where I would float in the air for a few seconds. I would be so chuffed with this ability that I’d purposely stretch my steps as far as I can. It usually doesn’t take long before my feet no longer touch the ground.
III. Administration
The introduction of the final part of this literary project is shorter and more modest than the introductions to BOOKS ONE and TWO. The content is also organised differently.
February yielded a plan. Chapter One follows the development of this plan over the course of just more than a week. Chapter Two contains a few notes from January and February. February was not only the battlefield of a plan, it also brought a new, temporary order to power. Chapter Three contains the official history of this Commercial Dictatorship. I also arrived at a certain insight during the first week of the new regime. Its development can be viewed in Chapter Four.
“What I used to think was me/is just a fading memory/I looked it straight in the eye, and said goodbye/I’m up above it …” ~ Nine Inch Nails
I don’t have much of a choice other than to renew myself, do I? My dog is dead, and my friend and flatmate has decided to seek her salvation on a different continent. Some people first ignore me, then they decide they just want to be friends, and then finally they come to the insight that even that is too much for them. Other people play cat-and-mouse to show me who needs whom the most. The rest of my acquaintances avoid me for a variety of reasons – I never go on weekend trips, religious differences, and perhaps simply because I’m not fun enough to hang out with. My TV is broken. My computer is broken. My bicycle is only half of what it was a year ago. My scooter has been dripping oil on the porch for almost a year. My water bills haven’t been paid in months, and my scooter registration has never been paid. My student loans are also still outstanding. My apartment smells like a shack in the woods. Insects fly and walk all over the place like they own the joint because I killed the only predator, a giant spider. I don’t currently enjoy any female companionship because most South African women here are strictly group-oriented, and I walk in and out of places on my own. And Taiwanese women find me too bizarre – even for a foreigner. The old geezer who owns the school in the countryside where I teach twice a week thinks I’m a lousy employee because I cancelled a one-hour class because the train was late by half an hour, and I don’t want to start the class half an hour later because that would mean I would have to wait 45 minutes for a train back home. And the principal at the other school fails to understand why I have to leave two minutes before the scheduled end of my class on Mondays and Fridays, despite the fact that the owner said it was okay to leave five minutes early. In about ten days I’m going to South Africa for three weeks, but it already feels as if I am going to look, feel, sound and act like a failure, until I get on a plane back to Taiwan. In the meantime, the insects would have taken over my apartment as a new ecological system, my bike will be a rusty pile of junk, everything will be wet outside, and damp inside because of all the rain, and I will have nobody to call and say I’m back, let’s go have a cup of coffee. My computer will still be broken, and if I buy a new computer my savings will run out much faster, in which case I will probably, if I’m lucky, again have to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to four-year-olds who either want to scream or sleep.
There – there’s the reality of my life on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 at 10:22 in the morning – at home, because the train to Number Nine Crooked Village was delayed by 35 minutes. However, my dishes are clean (for the first time since late April), and the washing machine is giving my bed sheets a final spin. A nap, therefore, sounds like an excellent plan.
(Finished napping, 12:05)
It’s just as well. You can’t start a new life if the old one is still kicking. I’ve tried it before, it doesn’t work.
[…]
What’s next? I don’t know. Anyway, isn’t it a bit like asking about the sex of the expected child if you’re not even pregnant yet?
Fact: Not everyone always needs to work for other people.
Bad news: At this stage of my life, I need to work for other people.
Good news: My life is not of such a nature that I need to be a slave to a rich man sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.
Fact: I do need to work for someone for a few hours every day (or five days a week) who will make money from my effort.
Fact: Since 1991 I’ve had an almost uninterrupted series of relationships with some or other employer (I counted about seventeen “bosses”).
Fact: I accept that.
Old fact: Establish yourself as an expert in some area and build up a professional reputation.
Thus, fact: Improve your chances of making money in a way that fits your personality and that keeps your interest by establishing yourself as an expert in an area in which you are interested, and by building a professional reputation in a market where what you deliver has commercial value.
Enough facts. Time for another poem:
I’m still wearing the clothes of my former, discarded life the same ass itching to go somewhere else is still comfortably stuck to the same old chair
I made the noble claim at the beginning that this collection of material [1999 to 2003] is dedicated to a few special people. For the record I should add that I also compiled this book for myself – some administrative matters had to be completed before I could move to any other place on this planet. For years I threatened to gather all the pieces I wrote, and all the pieces I started but never finished, in one folder. Essays I wrote on the computer had to be printed out, e-mails I wrote had to be downloaded from the Hotmail server, and I wanted to type a few thoughts scribbled in notebooks and journals.
This project is at an elementary level good office administration – to check off items on a things-to-do list. But it has also become of existential importance for me to throw something on the table and say, “Behold – this is one of the things I did with my time.”
I also suspected that I may, in the broader picture that such a project presents of your life, discover old insights I have forgotten, or ideas that may derail existing plans.
At the end I succeeded to some extent in all of the above objectives.
The process of reading and processing material even delivered some other, unexpected fruits. I didn’t expect to see a golden thread weaving through four years of musings and ramblings, but I do see more reasons than ever why it was necessary to come to Taiwan, and why it was necessary to get stuck here for so long.
What do you do when you are done with a project like this? You can start by cleaning your apartment … pulling a broom across the porch for the first time in months … taking a stroll through a supermarket … but then what? Naturally you start working on another project, or you get back to the project that had been put on hold without warning several months ago.
Whatever I do next, I hope it will be possible to move away from these self-centred Matters of the Heart – at least when I write something. Questions shall certainly still hang in the air, and I will still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night muttering a provisional answer in the direction of the ceiling. But there are indeed other topics that can keep me busy: the health benefits of Asian food, the reasons why you should drink at least a few cups of green tea every day, and my theory of why Taiwanese people are such poor drivers.
If I am lucky, I will only occasionally wonder if all these alternative themes take me closer to a place I’ve always wanted to be.
