Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 30 AUGUST 2004

I can solemnly declare that my stomach is churning at the thought of once again, in four days’ time, exchanging this reality with my “real” life. I look forward to being back in my own home, in my personal headquarters – but that’s about all I am currently positive about.

What else is there to my life in Taiwan that I can look forward to? Deep fried on a Saturday evening? Cheap VCDs? Dates at the coffee shop? Lunch boxes with oily vegetables? My bicycle? All these things can be replaced with other, similar things right here in this place.

What I am looking forward to is spending time again in my own headquarters. I miss the comfort and familiarity of my own place.

I have been walking around for three weeks with the idea that I can find happiness here, in Bronkhorstspruit. What I need is money, a house, and a comrade who understands my cause. There is also the idea of the “island”* and the question of what mainland you’re connected to. Six months here, six months there …

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* [The concept of the “island” refers to the place you create for yourself. This home – house, apartment, or whatever – is then the island where you live. The “mainland” is the town or city where you will go when you need supplies, or when you need to spend some time in a spot other than your island.

The idea came to me when my sister, my brother-in-law and I made a brief visit to someone in the town of Vryheid in northern Kwazulu-Natal. This man lives in a fairly new part of town – I am not really a new part of town type of person, and this fairly new suburb is just outside Vryheid – and I have never been too keen on settling down in this particular town.

Still, the man’s house was warm and pleasant, and I realised that one’s home is like an island – when you are there, amongst your own stuff, and under your own palm tree, so to speak, it doesn’t matter that much if you don’t care for the nearest “mainland”.]

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TUESDAY, 24 AUGUST 2004

11:34

I am currently happy in Taiwan – although I am in Bronkhorstspruit at the moment. I believe I could be happy in Bronkhorstspruit. What is important is that all my possessions and my income-generating work are in Taiwan.

16:31

It is the seventeenth day of my holiday in South Africa. I have nine days left. Some thoughts on the issue of “return” have been jotted down. The matter is, as usual, somewhat annoying because … do I take some books back to Taiwan, do I leave them here seeing that I might soon return?

So I ask myself solemnly for some illumination on the subject. [Why do my notes sometimes look like prayer? And why do I sometimes kneel down when I write … just joking.]

It is Tuesday afternoon. I have just smoked a Nat Sherman under a tree, in the late winter sun, on a smallholding just outside Bronkhorstspruit. I am currently here, in South Africa. My older sister and her six month-old baby boy are sitting on the bed in the room across from me. She’s browsing through a magazine, and the little guy is making soft groaning sounds. My younger sister is sitting on the other side of the house in the office of my parents’ business. I am lying on the bed in the other spare room, on a yellow bedspread, making notes in my notebook.

But, I currently live in Taiwan. And yet I am currently in South Africa. What’s the problem?

The fact that I am here, in Bronkhorstspruit, with my family, is one hundred percent part of my life in Taiwan!

My main point about the issue has already been noted: I am currently happy in Taiwan. I have a good apartment there. I have a few friends. I have a job that provides me with a reasonably good income. I spend time every week on my personal literature, and I study Chinese (some weeks more than others, but still). It is a good life, judged by my own standards.

An ideal life would include my parents already being in financially comfortable retirement; my younger sister and her husband living in town, as they do now; my older sister and her family in Pretoria; and myself either residing in a pleasant home in Pretoria or in Bronkhorstspruit, with a pleasant and attractive woman. This is the ideal – with everyone healthy, everyone enjoying their jobs, and everyone generating sufficient capital to be able to afford a good life.

I don’t tend to look at present reality and exclaim, with a hint of bitterness, “That’s life!” But it is not as simple as me just shipping my things here and moving into a three bedroom house in Bronkhorstspruit. Doing so will, ironically, be selfish, if my path does cross with a woman with whom I want to spend my days on this planet, and even more so if we were to conceive children.

The life I now call my own, and from which I am creating a future, is the best chance I have, at this stage, to be who I am and do what I do; and then, if it is on the proverbial cards, the best chance I have to persuade someone to share her life with me.

My present life contains the seed from which a good future can spring – for myself, and for any other person or persons for whose welfare I may be at least partially responsible in about five years’ time.

This is my current life, in Taiwan. (Thus are my words, on a smallholding just outside Bronkhorstspruit on Tuesday, 24 August 2004.)

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MONDAY, 23 AUGUST 2004

[A necessary repetition of previous thoughts to clarify the meaning of certain concepts.]

Identity serves a PURPOSE; this purpose is SURVIVAL.

To survive, a person needs to FUNCTION.

In order to function, a person requires IDENTITY.

Why? The reasons include so that he can identify himself to others in the community to enhance the probability that his needs will be met.

Identity is compiled from information provided by a particular environment, at a particular historical time.

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FRIDAY, 20 AUGUST 2004

Afternoon, between four and five, under a tree; light-brown socks, old leather shoes, green shorts, yellow underwear and a red short-sleeved shirt with white speckles.

Just walked back from town to the smallholding, last stretch on a dirt road. In town, I purchased three books at the total cost of one R5 coin: When White People Were Poor, a Truman Capote book and the screenplay for an Italian play with the title, Six Characters In Search Of An Author. Paid a visit to some second-hand furniture stores, did my banking at Standard Bank and Postnet, and had lunch at the Spur Steak Ranch.

At the Spur, I sat in the smoker’s section. An elderly woman was sitting alone at a table behind me. I don’t know what she was drinking, but she yelled “One more!” in the direction of the nearest waiter soon after I had arrived. Also sitting alone was an attractive young woman at a table across from me. She was talking on her cell phone the entire time, drinking iced coffee and smoking one Paul Revere after another.

I ordered a Spur burger for R23.95, extra garlic sauce for R7.95 and a Black Label for R9.95. I read the County News (R1) and lit up two Nat Shermans with Lion matches.

In the middle of town, I read some interesting facts on a notice board: Pretoria is 50 kilometres from Bronkhorstspruit, Cape Town 1,380 kilometres, Johannesburg a hundred kilometres, Taipei 11,620 kilometres and Hong Kong 10,800 kilometres. Then I walked back to the smallholding.

Now, I’m sitting under a tree, and I’m thinking: Life is … pigeons cooing, cars driving past, the wind blowing through the leaves, something between my teeth, footsteps in the background, small birds and insects making a commotion in the trees, the smell of vegetable soup from the kitchen, a radio playing lounge music from the sixties, a telephone ringing …

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FRIDAY, 13 AUGUST 2004

The hermit (and his loved ones), first notations

I have once again realised today, Friday the thirteenth, why some people are hermits. It’s the silence, the absence of confrontation with people who do not understand you, who have no idea what goes on in your head, who misunderstand you; also the absence of your own voice when you once again try to explain yourself.

The hermit, therefore, gives up to a large extent on his attempts to be understood and to be accepted by the community, even by those he loves.

SUNDAY, 15 AUGUST 2004

The hermit (and his loved ones), second notations

I love my family, and they love me, but between this love and the manifestation of it there is a lot of misunderstanding, and a lot of frustration.

“Talk to them about it,” someone might say.

I can’t, because they cannot hear me. They are trapped in their own insecurities and fears which, as it turns out, have never properly been confronted. I am talking to a brick wall, and there is always frustration and verbal aggression in their response. And sometimes this frustration and verbal aggression are also present in my own voice.

My parents love me, but I believe they do not respect me. The main reason for this is because they judge me according to certain standards.

They respect my older sister because she qualified for a certain career, because she has a fulltime position at a large corporation, and because she earns “good money”.

They respect my younger sister because she has tried hard over the years to build her own life along lines with which they can relate – work, money, marriage, setting up a home.

In comparison with my two sisters I fall out of the bus with “creative independence”, “intellectual enlightenment”, “the Enlightened Individual”, “freeing yourself from the worker-boss relationship”, “language as identity creator”, and “the concept of God in a person’s search for his own identity”.

I believe not one of the people I love deeply understands these things! And it’s not because it’s above their intellectual abilities – no one in my family is stupid. But just because you know what “creative” means, and you know what “independence” means, is not to say that you will understand when someone does not want to do a job that would require giving up his creative independence – whatever the price.

There are always reactions to what I have to say. My older sister reckons I think too much. My younger sister is not interested in my “thoughts and opinions”. And my parents are just people – they have their own understanding of things, and anything that upsets that, or anything that they don’t fully comprehend, leads to a response of verbal aggression.

I have deep affection for my parents and my two sisters. But to try to lead them to better understanding with verbal communication is virtually impossible. I speak in a language they do not understand. My world is not theirs. I don’t blame them; I am merely giving expression to my own frustration.

* * *

What is family? It is a case of individual entities thrown together by fate and who, by spending thousands of days in close contact, develop love for each other. But to expect understanding from them just because they love you is to throw one and four together and to expect to get two. I have to accept the situation as it is.

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