Author: Brand Smit

Pale-beard does his math

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?

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Vision of the future, possibility two

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.

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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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Where is my place in the Great Hierarchy?

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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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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