'Man-di-LAH!': Carefully explaining to the Chinese in Shanghai what it meant to grow up in the old SA (part four)

Following from the previous post in this series

The entire English department at the Shanghai University of Engineering and Science knew of Nelson Mandela. Should I say “of course” they knew of him? No. People tend to see their country as the centre of everything and can be appalled, perhaps, to realise that in far-flung countries people don’t know the more famous members of the South African leadership cast. The Chinese cannot respond to the famous/infamous Zapiro cartoons on Zuma raping the judiciary, of course (and now I use of course). Even after carefully explaining the cartoons they cannot give the cartoons the various emotive meanings South Africans automatically do.

However, even some taxi drivers know of Mandela, Man-di-LAH, which is how they pronounced his name when we chatted in Chinese on rides. After the typical question about which country I came from — I don’t look Asian so I invariably get asked that — the cabbies would show astonishment and gasp, “Why aren’t you black?” I would tell them South Africa had a lot of white people and Indians and also some Asians. Then they would say, “That is where Man-di-LAH is leader.” The first few times I heard that I was delighted that that great man was known even to some cabbies in China. But back to my lecture given to my Chinese audience in Shanghai: “I was there that day in Cape Town’s city square when Nelson Mandela was released. The crowds were like gathering storm clouds as they waited for him to appear on a balcony among the ANC banners and flags. White people were so torn about his release and all the changes. I was living in a commune in Rondebosch, Cape Town, and not one of us living there had the same political view. We quickly learned not to discuss politics. One girl in our commune was genuinely scared about Mandela’s release and the ushering in of a new, democratic era. Later, when the first elections took place, some white people packed loads of tinned foods and went and waited in nearby Zimbabwe to see what the outcome would be.

“There was great fear of a civil war. When I was teaching at Langa High in Cape Town from 1989 to 1990, the staff, almost entirely black, were swapping jokes about the changes sweeping through the country. In the staff room there were only two white people, myself and one other, and the other twenty or so were blacks, of the Xhosa tribe. Most of the talk in the staff room was about the new changes and Basil Mamatu, my desk colleague, told me a joke while the others carefully listened, waiting for my response. ‘Do you want to know the good news or the bad news?’ he asked me, grinning. ‘Go ahead, hit me with both,’ I said, grinning back, knowing this was a kind of test. ‘The bad news is that all the whites will have to go live in the townships. But the good news is that all their stolen TV sets and radios will be there waiting for them.’ I burst out laughing. At the time it was a great joke. The rest joined in laughing and we all walked around shaking one another’s hands, a very Xhosa thing to do when someone has told a good joke.

“To be a white person and to be told a joke like that by a black person — especially in those times — showed I was completely accepted. Some whites at the time would not have found the joke funny at all. Others would have laughed out loud as well. You could tell a person’s stance on racism and politics by the jokes they told and their responses. And that hasn’t changed.”

“Do you feel completely accepted here?” asked a younger teacher in my audience. Somehow the question was unexpected. “Well, yes I do,” I replied, then added, perhaps a little obsequiously. “China has been very kind to us.” And this was true. But I thought of another university I was currently teaching at in Jiading, a part of Shanghai. There, on my first day, I greeted the Chinese English staff in their staffroom, and sat down in one of the office cubicles. But a senior-looking woman came in and swiftly ushered me out of the teachers’ office and opened a massive empty office next door. She stood outside the door with her hand pointing to the doorway, gesturing me into the office, refusing to speak to me even in Chinese. I walked in and she closed the door behind me. Now I had no one to talk to. I don’t think she was being rude. I don’t know what she was being. But from then on I had an office all to myself that was half the size of a tennis court, about the size of our entire apartment in downtown Shanghai. The room had a coffee table and a huge imitation leather lounge suite and there was a great view from the windows. In my two hour lunch break I would often take a snooze on the couch, or I could work on my laptop without being disturbed. Was I being discriminated against? Was I being treated as a special guest?

I moved on to describe South Africa’s countryside: her sheer beauty and sharp contrasts; the bleak Kalahari in winter, the lush wine farms around Stellenbosch. I was fairly confident I had travelled around and seen more of South Africa than most South Africans. Joanna flipped through pictures of the Drakensberg where I had hiked with friends from Mont-Aux-Sources to Cathedral Peak. We looked down on eagles that circled over cliffs far below. We watched mountain horses sniff us out from afar, ears cocked, eyes wild and staring. In the mornings we would wake up and our tents were so stiff with frost they were like huge wedding cakes. I finished off by talking about South Africa’s neighbour Zimbabwe (leaving out the dismal politics, just not enough time in my allocated lecture slot) and my expedition with friends on a house boat on Lake Kariba. I put on the screen the following passage from a poem I had written, From Lake Kariba:

In torchlight crocodiles’ eyes go red, flame-points
Unblinking and ghostly in an inky whispering.
For a while on the boat we’re silenced by their demon-light.
‘You have to respect those damn flat-dogs. They have tiny,
Photographic brains. Within days they’ve got your habits,
When you go for a pee, or when a buck comes down to drink.
Their tails shoot them out the water like bloody arrows,
And only the water’s refraction will make them miss’.
‘I once saw a monster flat-dog haul a giraffe in. Don’t think
You’re half a man to be scared. One swipe of those jaws
And you’ll be exactly half a man’. All pull at Zambezi beers
As this half-joke gathers and focuses contemplation,
Taking us across the surfaces, where columns of red dots
Float and wait. The boat rocks in the lake’s slap and hiss.
We’ve shut up again, because we can’t go further in.

“I would be so afraid to be so alone,” said several of my audience after I finished my lecture. I knew they would say this. The magnificent solitude to be found in an African landscape was lost on virtually all the Chinese I got to know. They are used to growing up in small, cramped apartments in broader, over-populated communities where everyone cheerfully minds everyone else’s business. Here, in Shanghai, it is difficult to be alone.