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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Personal Agenda: Postscript II

From: Letter to Parents

SATURDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2000

“[…]

Yesterday was exactly 22 months from the day I arrived in Taiwan, which is important for the simple reason that I was in Korea for 22 months and three days. By next week I will be in Taiwan longer than I had been in Korea.

So the time goes by. I stand in my living room and scan my surroundings, and when I think of how this very room looked when I arrived here, I can’t help but think I’ve done all right so far. I see my computer. I see all the CDs and the books. I see the guitar I bought at the pawnshop for R60. I see my blue electric guitar, and the colour TV …

I don’t teach as many classes at the moment as last year. It was a senseless rush that never gave me proper time for what I really wanted to do. It may sound as if I don’t have my finger on the pulse of reality, but I know enough of the world to know that you must do what you deem fit and what you love, otherwise you grow old and you only played the game those who supposedly knew better than you had taught you. Dad always said I can’t just do what I want to do – that it’s not how the world works. I must admit that I don’t have much respect for how things work.

If you just live your life according to how things are supposed to work you’re exploited by those who don’t follow the rules. I’ve got a bit of insight into the workings of this world, and I have no time for people who want to boss it over me just because they have more money than me, and therefore – because this is how it works – I must do as they say. Anyway, the world doesn’t move forward because people always do the ‘sensible’ thing.

However, it should be stated categorically that I’m not completely naïve. I know all too well what happens to people who don’t take the money business seriously. I know all too well how the hierarchy of our society works. My noble politics will take me nowhere if I don’t have money to support it. Dozens of history books have given me a good idea of how people get to positions of power and how they stay there. And I have gained enough first-hand experience to know that people are tricked into believing certain things, so that those who are above them, can stay above them.

Enough politics. Suffice to say I am exploring other ways to make money. I don’t intend to be poor again. But I’m also not planning on serving other people’s agendas.

This stubborn independence comes at a price, of course. If I had followed a more conventional path, I would probably by now have had the conventional rewards of a house – for which I would have belonged to the bank for the rest of my life, a nice family car – for which I would have belonged to another bank for at least a decade, and a lovely woman with whom I could have shared my life.

Do I think about going back to South Africa at some point? I contemplate the possibility from time to time. I can think of many reasons why it would be good. The reality, however, is that I can earn R10,000 and even more per month in this country, with what is in fact a part-time job. In South Africa I’d have to work where, and for how long every day to get half of that?

Certainly there are possibilities that I have never considered. The problem is to discover these things. If one can spend a year in a place where you regularly exchange ideas with other people, you can surely start working on a few prospects. But how to go back, keep myself alive, not lose momentum with the projects I am working on, and find ways to make money that suit me and my personal agenda …”

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Personal Agenda, Book One: Introduction

The Questions We Ask

Most people are searching for something. That it might take you years to lay a finger on it and say, “This!” usually does not make the search less frantic. Some people look for ways to make money, or ways to be liked. Others are looking for a place where, after a long journey, they can sit back and for the first time in their lives declare, “I have arrived.” Other people (or the same people looking for all aforementioned things) are searching for a person – someone with whom they can spend at least a portion of their life, and with whom they can search for other things, or the same things other people search for.

One universal aspect of all these searches is that questions are asked. A significant number of these questions relate to the person asking the questions – each person is driven by instinct to gather as much information as possible about him or herself, and for related reasons similar information about other people.

A few familiar questions: What do I look like? Am I pretty or ugly? Am I smart, or am I a bit of an idiot? Am I an “engineer” or a “lawyer” or an “artist”? Do I like pizza? How do I like my pizza? How do other people like their pizza? What do I want to do with my life? Do I want to be rich? How rich? Would it be okay if I don’t own the biggest house on the street? Do I want a car or a motorcycle? How should I wear my hair? Do I like the colour pink? What kind of music do I like? Do I believe in God? Is it good enough just to go to church every now and then? For which political party do I vote? Do I watch sports, and if so, who or what team do I support? Who are my friends? What kind of person do I like? Why do I like certain kinds of people? What types of people like me, and what are their reasons for liking me? What do I do in my spare time?

And these are just the questions that came to mind while I was changing CDs. I can add dozens more. And then you as the reader can look at the list and say, “Okay, but you’ve missed a few.”

Does everybody think about these things all the time? No. Some of these questions may require that we get comfortable for a while to consider possible answers, other things we just know. The important thing is, how we answer these questions determine how we perceive ourselves – on our own, in the privacy of our own spaces, and also when we’re around other people.

Many of us also find ourselves at one point or another in unfamiliar places where nobody knows us. This forces us to introduce ourselves to a crowd of strangers: “Hello, I’m (X). I like pop music. I would like to own a bookstore one day. I don’t like onions on my pizza, and I go to church once a month.”

The questions we ask ourselves, the ways we respond to them, how we introduce ourselves to strangers and how people react to us ultimately determine whether you hang out with other pizza eaters or not; whether you believe your soul is sorted the day you die; whether or not and with whom you may one day produce children; and how you spend your free time. Again, just a few examples.

This brings me to the book you’re now staring at. This is the result of my own efforts – especially during the past four years on the island of Taiwan – to formulate a few questions and match them up with some corresponding answers.

Who I am in the context of the wider world is not of any great importance. I am indeed a phantom, who will never meet more than a few of the people who will read these words. (Just as well! If I had to wait until I was known to more than ten people before I would even think about starting this project, I would be sitting on my couch right now watching TV.)

To a considerable extent I am just an ordinary man. Some of the things I have experienced, other people have experienced as well and will still be experienced by many others. Problems I have had, and that I am still going to have, is similar to the problems that millions of people have to cope with every day. Many who will read these pages have also had other and perhaps more interesting experiences; or more, and more serious problems than I will ever have. There are also people who may never be as happy as I have been, or may still be in the future. Others may speak of exactly the opposite.

What binds us all is that we have to ask ourselves certain questions at one time or another. Questions to which answers must be found, even if it takes a lifetime.

(Sunday, 18 May 2003)

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Personal Agenda: Postscript I

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.

May 2003

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