Kate Turkington and I on Radio 702… etcetera

Thabonk! Skrreek! The bottom part of our bed collapsed at about two in the morning the other day here in Shanghai . “Oh for – – sake!” Marion, The Chook, moaned as we lay there in a half-resurrected position, sleepily trying to figure out what had happened. “Let’s sort it out in the morning,” I muttered and we dozed off again, in semi-upright positions like vampires half-out their coffins, mattress gradually sliding off the bottom edge of the bed. After an hour or so I gave up trying to sleep and sat in the kitchen and had a coffee and stared blearily at a copy of The Power of Now while chookie bubbled and squeaked; that cute snore of hers.

A mist lit with streetlights and billboard signs illuminated the room in our 22^nd floor apartment as if it were dawn. Now and then a firecracker went off as it is the tail end of the Chinese New Year and Spring Festival. Dozily I ruminated on our almost completely unemployed status in a very foreign country and on the apparent success of my recently published memoir, Cracking China, and my imminent media exposure. One example is being interviewed live on the Kate Turkington Believe it or not show this coming Sunday 7 March, at 10.30pm on Radio 702. For readers outside SA, that is almost like being interviewed on the Larry King Show. Enjoy the flattery, Kate (grins).

The light dissolved in a melted snow in our kitchen was a sleet of yellow and shadow. The knife-edges of cupboards, door handles and gas stove were dissolved in this Monet, Impressionistic wash of silhouettes. Our dirty pots and pans, cups on the shelf, the veggies and fruit on the rack, the portable oven we had found as Chinese don’t use them; were all metal, china and organic slivers — flimsy auras of themselves. Chook’s latest gift of flowers from children she taught was a trace of stalks and blossoms on the kitchen table. The room was a light, painterly series of effects, barely here, something that could be blown away by a breeze, an emblem in my mind of the uncertainty of our lives as South Africans in a very foreign country: China. Unemployment can be equated with a sort of failure; my memoir and the gathering media attention, including the London Book Fair, a kind of success. It occurred to me again that success and failure are overrated terms: our lives are run too much by defining and restricting our current circumstances with either label.

The clichés are obvious: when some doors close, others open. The cliché is a cliché precisely because of its truthfulness. Hence the truism gets repeated. And some wonderful doors are opening; the early success of Cracking China, which only became available in print on February the 1st this year, our imminent move to New Zealand where we have a huge, fully furnished, five-bedroom, bought home to move into along with our family. Doors are opening — even banging — wide open. One just has to be alert enough to see them, hear them.

The broken bed. It is an emblem of disorder, I thought. If your bed and your bedroom are neat and in good order, that indicates your life is in good order. Our lives are not, happily so, funnily enough. When going through “crisis”, which all of us do, and which is often a potentially powerful watershed, good advice is to keep disciplined about the basics: making the bed, cleaning the home, dressing and washing properly, brushing one’s teeth. These basics I also used when I taught people once to run their home-based businesses in Johannesburg. Do not sit on the phone in your pajamas speaking to clients at noon. Get up and prepare for each day as if going to the office. Groomed, with bed made and teeth brushed, then start phoning the clients from your home office. The shift in your attitude is constructive and dramatic and will impact your business. It even transmits down the phone line to your listening client. Those franchisees who did not listen to this simple advice struggled to make it.

Kreessssh! There was a clattering noise from our balcony two days later. It turned out part of the ceiling on our balcony had fallen and splattered over our hanging laundry. The balcony is the only practical place in Chinese apartments to hang washing. We chuckled. Half-jokingly we believe there is a ghost in our home we have named after the famous Chinese writer, Lu Xun. Sometimes the TV set switches on and off on its own. We will be sitting in the kitchen and, abruptly, the TV turns on to a Chinese program. We never watch TV and have it set to the channel for watching DVDs.

Lights sometimes mysteriously flicker and Marion swears blind she has seen a tall Chinese man with a moustache in traditional clothing in a mirror or reflected in a window. We don’t know what to believe but we half-jokingly accept Lu Xun the writer’s presence. Perhaps the bed was a prank of his; it is the third time it has broken recently. Part of the balcony ceiling has caved twice in the last few months. Perhaps Lu Xun is signaling us: “Time to leave, fellow writer: good luck in New Zealand”.

The Kate Turkington show. Me live at 10.30pm South African time on Sunday evening March 7 with Kate on Radio 702. It will be 04.30am in China in the freezing, arse end of a long Chinese winter. May there be loads of chuckles and travel stories to share! I have promised my publicist to only have coffee without a tot of brandy before the show. But after the fourth cuppa there are no guarantees.

Success and failure: meaningless terms that limit us and sometimes defeat us. Was that Lu Xun tapping my shoulder approvingly as I finished this column? Xie xie ni peng you. Thank you, friend. Or Jungian archetype. Or befriended shadow. Agh, I still prefer nymph-like babes for inspiration.