The need for belonging: on being displaced South Africans

Helloooo … comes the weird, atonal, semantically disjointed noise, shouted at me from the construction sites in Shanghai: constructions sites as numerous as anthills in the veldt in Boksburg on the huge plot, virtually a farm, I grew up on. Those plots and smallholdings are gone now. I last visited the place more than 10 years ago to discover all the dairies and cattle-land had been replaced by warehouses and businesses. I am a sucker for nostalgia and that was a sad day indeed.

Well I remember the emptiness of that day. You know that sick lurch in your stomach, eyes blinking with the shock of so much just gone without warning as I drove back to my home in Jo’burg. It was an emptiness filled with the memories of my family, including those of my father and only sister who died in separate events in my school-leaving year while we lived on that huge plot.

Today, Shanghai: heellooo. Sounds bitter with a similar emptiness, crooned by deeply brown, grinning construction workers from other Chinese provinces such as Anhui who may have never before seen a lawai, a foreigner, and that is the one word they have learned. The local Shanghaiese, who scorn these outsiders, treat us more courteously.

I now love the brown-skins; I greet them too. Ni chi fan le ma? Have you eaten yet? A classic Chinese greeting. Hellos, perhaps ironical or bitter-sweetened in this context, are meaningless to the Chinese. Asking something concrete such as “Have you eaten?” or “Are you going to work?” are more affable, meaningful ways of greeting.

Hellooo: The sound has a mocking quality and is repeated over and over as you walk past. It is a gaunt sound, thin on meaning and seems to be a taunt that cut deep when we were raw in China back in the small city of Shaoxing some four years ago, two-and-a-half hours away from Shanghai by bus .

What “hello” should be: a respectful acknowledgment of your presence, a simple courtesy, solid as a warm house, a fireplace within.

In China the sound could deepen our sense of displacement because it did not invite companionship; we were on display, could not speak the languages.

It took me a while to learn that the sound was not really mocking, well maybe not. It was delight at seeing an extremely rare species, foreigners. The disjointed noise from several grinning strangers at the same time still reverberates through my Western conditioning; triggers off disparate meanings, memories of being bullied or mocked at school as I hid behind books from the big, cruel okes.

China four years on. I suddenly ask the questions: Do I belong here? Have I found a sense of place? Land belongs to those who work it proclaims the ANC Freedom Charter. I look at what my heart has touched, what my words have touched: the many, many wonderful Chinese children and teenagers I have taught. Do I belong here? The question is awesome, but there are no answers.

I have “worked this land” now for four years. But in many ways I do not know if I belong here. Though I love Shanghai, it is still so alien in some respects.

Land belongs to those who work it. Words which are ominous in the light of the Zimbabwean land-grabbing and the unrequited violence on farms in SA. So ominous in the light, no, the darkness shed on SA’s stance of doing nothing for Zimbabwe, the government seeming to aid and abet with the way it went about giving financial aid to that country now on its last breath.

The shedding and spreading of that darkness: it has come over sea and land to torment us here in Shanghai. My wife’s son disappeared on New Year’s Eve. As I write this he has been missing for thirteen days, and so is the car, which was not his, that he was driving. Thirteen days. No trace.

I looked carefully at my wife who only got the news three days ago. The warm, twinkly eyes and the mischievous teddy bear grin had gone as she slumped in a chair after the phone call from New Zealand, where her daughter got the news from the father, Marion’s ex-husband, a man in Jo’burg now completely beside himself.

It is a horrible, speechless thing to sit there with helpless hands as you look at your wife, her face now white with mother-fright. We have no idea what has become of her son. The police don’t seem to be doing much either, we gather. Just another missing person.

Since the news, we have simply got on with life here in Shanghai. What else can you do? Marion has been magnificent about it, so strong. She still comes home bubbly with anecdotes about the children she teaches. The shadow of her missing son is barely there, hinted at in the eyes, the brave tone of voice. What will be will be.

Our mothers, our women, custodians of precious life. Life! So wonderful! It’s like words strung into a well-wrought poem: a sparkling tinkle of thrown-up gems that shimmer briefly in the light from the mysterious treasure trove it came from, only to fall back into the same mystery. If the worst has happened to her son in crime-riddled SA, then life is so cheap. How can life be both precious and cheap?

So bitter for me to look on this courageous woman I have been with nearly six years. I search for a word to describe what I feel, yes me, who has revered words nearly all my life, who has been so astonished again and again by their rhythms and possibilities. I try and grab for the word, foolishly thinking somehow it will be a candle in this darkness. Oh, the word I am looking for is right here: reverence.

Reverence is a candle. It is a candle. I lift it high.

When my body brought me news of its coming death,

I thought of the snow that once burst

Silently against our bedroom window.

When my fingers brought me news of their coming death,

I held again my mother’s hands,

Learning, this time, to let them go.

My wife’s body

Has also brought us news of death.

It was not her cough, the fever that racked her so,

Racked me so,

But the first serrations of cherry blossom