Displaced South Africans: Fish discover water last

The Chinese love doing the peace sign for photos: the index finger and forefinger held up like a pair of rabbit ears. Children use the sign and waggle the hand to show they are happy. It is even a way of saying hello. Sometimes the use of the gesture is deliciously resistant to meaning, or perhaps means what Westerners know: peace brother, peace sister. Be cool, my china.

For the Chinese the sign does not mean peace; it means victory. Victory from the old dynastic way of rule and the ushering in of communism, which they like to think set them free. It took several decades of heartache to figure out that “freedom” was very wrong. I found the hand gesture, used ad nauseum, most curious when I first arrived in China.

I admire the new reforms and changes spreading like fireworks through Shanghai as we prepare for World Expo 2010. Around where we live you would think we live in a virtual slum (been there, done that in our first year in China: awesome stuff).

Here’s the link to my web album on our immediate surroundings.

Do visit; the album will perhaps give you far more insight into what I mean when I go on about cultural shocks in some blogs.

Yet, jostling near these gaunt images in the album is the stately buttercup yellow Jing’an Temple, beautifully preserved; a variety of clothing boutiques; a classic Chinese park where the oldsters practice Tai Chi among the willows, which thoughtfully dip their downy quills in ponds where old castles’ walls also shimmer in the waters; and restaurants offering cuisines from all over the planet.

And yet a couple of hundred metres away from all that, our area looks like a slum for the nonce, because buildings everywhere are being torn down and new ones will be thrown up to showcase Shanghai to the world in 2010. (It is with great difficulty that you cannot see at least one crane on the horizon in Shanghai.)

For the first few years after we left South Africa, I seldom thought about the home country, felt no pangs, no longings. I love living here in Shanghai, though I could do with a bit more real countryside close by. But now, after so many years “in exile”, I feel such nostalgia.

Now I would love to hike over Table Mountain again, end up going down through Cecilia forest and Constantia to that hotel across the road in Bishop’s Court to enjoy a beer. I forget the name of that hotel. I first did the walk when I was 21 with an American slightly older than me (who always had to wear snow-skiing sunglasses), whose name I still remember – John.

Memories like that have opened up a whole rainbow of memories: a scintillating band of nostalgia linking me to the faraway place of my birth, where I spent the first forty years of life living in different parts of SA.

I was born in Durban and we moved to Van Riebeek’s Park in Jo’burg when I was seven. A few months later I went to Saint Andrews’ boarding school in Bloemfontein. Natal, Transvaal and the OFS by the age of seven. Not bad going. After the first couple of holidays home from boarding school my Dad picked me up at Jan Smuts Airport and drove, not to Van Riebeek’s Park, but to a farming area in Boksburg where we lived for many years. Later on I would also live in Grahamstown, Cape Town, Fish Hoek and, for the most part, in the northern suburbs of Jo’burg. Many memories, fragrant as rained-on fynbos, now suddenly emerge; pollen flung across a field of khakibos in a gust of wind.

I think part of the reason why I feel the sudden surge of nostalgia is that Shanghai is soon going to grant, for free, permanent residence to foreigners who meet certain requirements. We meet the requirements. I shuddered as my wife Marion showed me that in the newspapers.

I truly could not understand that shudder initially, at least with my mind, the purely neural, discursive route that often ignores the intelligence of the body, the spirit mysteriously housed in the body.

My eyes widened, smarted, as I looked at the gift the Chinese are planning to offer us: a place to stay, you can belong here: go where you please, work as you please. No more nonsense with work permits and justifying our existence.

It hit me finally: we have tried living in three countries (England, New Zealand and different parts of China) for nearly five years. The ride has often been fun and instructive, but there was an underlying trauma. My wife and I have always been foreigners, looking through the window, not invited to the table to sup, be part of a family. You don’t know what you have until you no longer have it. Fish discover water last.

Look, we have enjoyed the ride for the most part, but what got that electric shiver going through my body took Santa Claus China putting us in his lap to offer us one of the most precious things a person can be offered: a home. A place where we can belong. Of course my wife decided immediately on what kind of apartment we are going to buy.

I find myself raising my hand and waving it in that curious V for Victory sign at all around me (mostly curious Chinese), nearly all the time.

A South African born Irishman with slowly slanting eyes? Agh, toe.