Rod Mackenzie

“It won’t take your mom long to get permanent residence,” said the immigrations official to Michelle, the Chook’s mom, on the phone. “She isn’t an Asian.” When Michelle, who as the daughter can sponsor her mother to New Zealand told us this story that evening, I breathed a sigh of relief as my permanent residence application was dependent on my wife’s. Then I felt uncomfortable about what many would see as a racist inference.

Why would a kiwi government official, a public servant with a responsible position, say that openly on the phone? This column takes a peek at the possible answers and at the issue of where does racism and discrimination end, and taking responsibility for a nation’s own citizens begin. A delicate issue. Or a cut and dry issue.

Our laptops, bought in China, with us here in New Zealand, I have now discovered have been heavily compromised by the Chinese. Brett, just short of seven feet tall, is the Chook’s son-in-law and an IT boff who was also some years ago one of the very best gamers in the world. Computers and IT are a huge part of his life. He looked at my laptop and after an initial check muttered, “I wonder if this laptop will beat my previous record of finding 18 spyware infections on a PC. Let’s see.” He found roughly 388 spyware infections, all from China. It should be a while before his new record is broken. Further, when Brett set up the wireless on my laptop, he discovered that all my traffic was still being routed through China via Google.co.nz. In other words all my emails and my Internet activity could still feasibly be monitored from China or intercepted. Brett said they could use my ISP to send spam anywhere in the world and all sorts of other nefarious things.

That didn’t surprise me. When I was living in China people get spied on all the time, especially “foreigners”. I made many friends in China. But, sadly, at the end of the day, I learned during my five year stay not to trust a single Chinese person because of the spying and duplicity. Whereas there are Western people I would trust with my life, not necessarily friends. This spying includes all my emails and where you go on the Internet. (This snooping culture, where you are your “brother’s keeper”, is one reason why Communism spread so successfully in China.)

My Thought Leader blog was hacked into by the Chinese and one hacker left the following odd, Chinglish message and title as a draft in my Thought Leader blog account. Notice how he had been keeping up to date with my blogs at the time. For example, a blog about gorgeous babes on Twitter and Facebook enticingly inviting me to let them follow me (I couldn’t in China, boo hoo) or my response to one of Sandile Malema’s many non sequitur blogs. This message, below, is not edited at all except for one unfortunate censorship.

“All your bases are belong to us

Do not be afraid. I am a ‘white hat’ hacking for good and not for bad. Two tips I offer to you:
One – change your password here the computer generated passcode used to create your passcode is the same for all TL users. Do not use this information to hack into other user accounts and write on their behalf. Even if sandilememela (memelas) is a [censored by Rod]. Although could be funny.

Two – use a proxy server to bypass Chinese controls over the internet. Do so and facebook babes can be yours.”

After that all TL bloggers were asked to change their passwords. I have had to change it more than once as my account got hacked into again and again. I don’t think “hacked” is the right word. With all that ridiculous spyware the Chinese could pretty much do as they pleased, my personal affairs as easy to open as a paper envelope.

My mail to South Africa got intercepted by the Chinese. For example, a hard copy of my now published memoir, Cracking China (see my profile on the right) just never got to SA. My publishing contract with my publisher got returned several months later. An innocent publishing contract! Probably because it contained the name of the book and I have decided only to send the contract once in New Zealand. My other paper manuscripts, prior to 2009, and other correspondence to SA were never intercepted by the Chinese.

I am not alone in this. Many “foreigners”, lawai, westerners living in China, will tell you stories of having their private affairs pried into. Or read accounts in memoirs like Tim Clissold’s Mr. China and Peter Hessler’s River Town. One Australian friend discovered her landline was bugged. She changed phones. Foreigners teaching and living on college campuses have told me that various school officials would arrive at their door at inconvenient times, ostensibly to visit, but to snoop on what they were doing.

I made many mainland Chinese friends and acquaintances. Some I will always keep in touch with, including students who adopted us as a mom and dad, as recounted in my memoir.

The point is that the kiwi authorities feel that the “Asian” culture is just far too different from the Western culture for people like the mainland Chinese to adapt to. I understand that, having experienced both cultures. In conversations with the family, who have been in Kiwi Land for more than six years, and who have Chinese friends living here in New Zealand, the kiwi authorities also often deem the mainland Chinese as just too much trouble, as I touched on in a previous blog.

It is stated in the New Zealand immigrations website that photocopies of required documents that are certified by the Chinese police will not be accepted. That speaks volumes. Can you argue that this is just New Zealand protecting its own people and culture? I think so. Over to the readers.

It reminds me of the kiwi authorities’ previous generosity in allowing HIV positive people to immigrate to New Zealand. That has now been changed because of its thorough abuse which can be seen here, about a Zimbabwean practicing unsafe sex in New Zealand infecting kiwi women or here and here. These stories are clearly an example of a country that wishes to protect and serve the needs of its own people. A far cry from South Africa, where many people are “allowed” in over the borders with disastrous consequences. This laxness is an overreaction to the horrific discriminations of Apartheid, which unfortunately takes the Rainbow Nation to the other extreme.

The interview, taking place at two PM on Sunday 21st March, will be about my recently published book, Cracking China: a memoir of our first three years in China. Many people found the book very funny (that’s what they tell me) and believe you me I had no shortage of material to work with. The mainland Chinese culture, especially out in the “sticks”, is way different and was a total culture shock. I just chose from the best stories and experiences, and the book wrote itself. My wife is a strong character in the book, known as chookie, or The Chook. Hence it is “our memoir”.

We have now moved to New Zealand and there are a lot of mainland Chinese here. I know they are not from Hong Kong as I can speak some Mandarin, and of course Cantonese is the language in Hong Kong. There is also just something about their shy, demure demeanour that endearingly gives them away. And they still do things in their own different way in Kiwi-Land.

Today chookie and I went down to a beach and after a long beach walk went to a coffee shop. Suddenly a young Chinese lass came running in, dressed like a waitress, and asked the coffee shop waitress behind the counter, Annie, for a cup of hot water. Annie looked awkward as hot water was a slightly unusual request and being just water there was no charge. The general deal is to order something and then it is okay to have water. “Umm…” Annie asked as politely as she could, “do you want anything else?”
“No, no” said the young Chinese, “just hot water.” Wide-eyed, Annie walked over to the urn that dispensed hot water for tea and picked up a paper cup. As she began to pour the girl ran out the door and turned right. Through the large glass window we could all see her running into the building next door. Annie watched her disappear, puzzled, and nearly over-filled the cup.

A few minutes later we all watched the customer running back, long black hair flowing in the air, a purse clutched in her hand. For what purpose?

The coffee shop was empty except for chook and me so a manager walked over as he had observed what was going on. The unusually cheap customer took the hot water, said thank you, and dashed back to the building next door.

Both the coffee shop manager and Annie watched her disappear through a door. “But why would she want hot water from here…” asked the manager of the waitress with a thoughtful pause, “…when there are several in that restaurant she is working at?”
“And why did she rush off to get her purse,” responded Annie, “when she does not have to pay for it?”
“And why… hot water?”
“Yeah…especially as it is a hot day. Cripes.”
They shook their heads and walked back to their stations.

A small, run of the mill anecdote. The entire episode easily explainable, perhaps. It is one I would not have included in Cracking China as there were far, far better from which to select. But there you have it. The mainland Chinese can be most endearing and puzzling. It reminds me of the epigraph I have at the beginning of my memoir, taken from a Sun Shuyun’s memoir, Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud. Sun Shuyun is a Chinese woman who moved to England to become a BBC film producer and wrote a memoir about her nostalgic travels back in China many years later. This is the epigraph, what an old Chinese monk said to her in China:”Little Sun, you’re a Chinese. We don’t think of you as a foreigner, so we can tell you what we really think”.

None of us knew what the Chinese lass was thinking, what she was on about, when she came in to order some hot water.

“Right,” said the exasperated customs official at Auckland international airport to the poker-faced Chinese gentleman, “in your country, if yew make a false declaration on re-entering yer country, what happens?” Marion (The Chook) and I had arrived in Auckland from Shanghai travelling Air New Zealand,a flight which is scheduled twice a week from Shanghai and loaded with Chinese tourists. Many of the Chinese, it had now became clear to us , insisted on trying to bring in all sorts of products not allowed in New Zealand even though the declaration form we had received on board had made this patently clear, and which their tour guides accompanying them also knew.

“…on re-entering yer country, Choina… what happens?” came the peeved question again. The rhetorical question lingered, the lull between the shimmer of lightning and the cascading thunder which has to follow.

The Chook and I couldn’t hear the muttered response as we sat waiting for our customs official to go through what we had declared on the Entry to New Zealand form, such as more cash than normally allowed, which simply needed to be declared. But we became amused by the repetition of the question by various customs officials all dealing with a fascinating race we had had the bizarre privilege of dealing with for the last five years. One Shanghai chap was trying to bring in about three kilograms of prescription medicines for which he had no prescription but a long tale we could not follow.

Eventually our Customs Officer came back with the required forms to record how much cash we had brought into the country in the form of US dollars and Chinese Yuan. “Roight,” he said, in that lovely, cracking snapper of an accent, ” so yew’ve declared that you have brought cash into the country that’s more than the usually allowed amount. His eyes twinkled with reasurrance and kindness. “All yew needed to do was declare it. Well done on just doing the roight thing there.” Behind us echoed that frustrated refrain of a question like one of those final boarding calls for passengers: “Loik oi said.” Deep pause for breath. “If yew make a false declaration at the airport in yaw country, Choina. What. Will. HAPPEN?”

Our customs official raised his eyebrows as he scribbled down our declaration, and muttered an answer in sympathy with his beleagured colleague. “Well, what will happen won’t be entoirely pleasant.” The Chook and I smirked and shook our heads all too knowingly at the debacle going on behind us, as any reader of my memoir or blogs, Cracking China, will understand. Our customs official thanked us again and we were on our way into Auckland to join the family in a six bedroom home in North Shore. That home, like a scene out of My Family and Other Animals, now included us, and totalled seven highly individualistic and opiniated people who were going to live together.

I had been to kiwi-land before but had never noticed the nature of the TV news which I blearily watched in a state of jet lag with Marion’s grandchildren the follwing day. The boys are two young, tall dudes. Very, very theoretically, I would be the “step-grandfather” (aaaargghh!), but they just call me dude (cool). The headline news were about rare, kiwi vintage planes, such as WWII Catalinas on an air show at Rotorua Airport in New Zealand . The other riveting bit on the headline news was the astonished reaction of the kiwi public to a British Marine veteran’s face being erroneously used to advertise a kiwi War Museum. His face had been used by mistake to advertise the NZ war museum for fifteen months. This was headline breaking local news. The veteran was personally interviewed at his home where he was dressed in his full regimental uniform and wearing a glittering, cutlery service set of medals on his jacket which he was proudly showing off to the interviewer. I lapped up this island “insularity”, this homely, over-the-dinner-table nature of the local headline news. So refreshing compared to what is dished up in other, more “cosmopolitan” countries such as South Africa, or propaganda-heavy China.

The next day on the TV news there was a bit about a Chinese tourist who was nabbed at Auckland’s airport for carrying half a suitcase of foods from Shanghai. Bringing organic products into the country are absolutely forbidden by NZ customs. The goods have thankfully no chance of passing the scanners at the airport. The Chinese visitor had made a false declaration on entering a beautiful island whose authorities go to great lengths to protect its vulnerable ecology and he payed the price, despite many warnings.

“Still having a go at the Chinese, Rod?” the reader might think. No, that is just how many of them are from the Chinese mainland. And I have five years of experience to back that up. They are, by turn, exasperating, baffling, winsome. But from what I could see from the kiwi customs officials, only the first two terms apply.

“So dude, the school kids here in New Zealand are really difficult and terrible,” said one of the dude juniors (step-grandchildren not) to me. They are also from South Africa, where students were(are they still?) a bit more respectful. “But with your size you could handle them alright as a teacher!”

Yeah. The Chook and I are now for giving New Zealand a crack, which was always in the pipeline. Anyone for Cracking Kiwi-land?

Definitons of cracking: to… give it a shot, to get a break, go crazy, excel, excellent, learn a code… Nerve-wracking at times, but the next step.

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 street lights and billboard signs illuminated the room in our 22nd floor apartment as if it were dawn. Now and the 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 ten thirty PM 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: 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 over-rated 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 the 1st of February 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, 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 twelve AM. 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, changing to a Chinese channel. We will be sitting in the kitchen and, abruptly, the TV turns on to a Chinese program. We never watch TV and have the TV set to the channel for watching DVD’s. 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. And time to leave, fellow writer: good luck in New Zealand”.

The Kate Turkington show. Me live at ten thirty PM South African time on Sunday evening March 7 with Kate on Radio 702. It will be four thirty AM 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 which 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.
______________________

Cracking China: a memoir of our first three years in China, ISBN-13: 9780620451079, available at Exclusive Books and other bookstores, or contact the publicist Helco Promotions, at (011) 462 2302 or E-mail helco@mweb.co.za.

It was Chinese New Year here in Shanghai this Friday night. Sitting in our apartment on the 22nd floor was like being in a high-tech Star Trek movie. The fireworks started during the day and by 10PM our home in Shanghai was aglow with spectacular fireworks. Whistling skyrockets, massive explosions like gushing waterfalls, gigantic chandeliers or monstrous spiders were erupting in red and green between the endless high-rises and skyscrapers. The noise was truly awesome, intrusive, and if I were a child and not frightened, I would have had such fun running around the apartment — now a spaceship — trying to fight off the marauding Kazon raiders or whatever.

Marion and I sat in our kitchen, staring through the lit-up windows in awe. At times the light was so intense it was almost daylight. From time to time we could even smell the fireworks. I wondered how the little children and pet animals were handling what sounded like a war zone. I went to bed and somehow went to sleep in the noise and woke up at about 2.30am because it was suddenly so eerily silent.

But after a while I could hear in the distance fireworks still going off and felt for those families and their children who could not sleep. The mainland Chinese do not have the Western concept of privacy and consideration for others. I am not saying this to be rude; generally they genuinely do not mind everyone cheerily sharing their “privacy”.

Before briefly looking at Google’s new Buzz, I’d like to describe some more examples of the local Chinese culture on non-privacy. A stranger, such as a plumber, or a neighbour who wishes to speak to our maid, will think nothing of walking into our apartment smoking a cigarette. It won’t occur to them to ask permission. If I am checking out my goods at the counter sometimes local folk will peer into my bags and discuss what I have bought. Once I was looking at purchasing a cellphone at a counter next to a supermarket and a young woman barged in and asked the assistant to look for a particular mobile battery for her. This is very typical intrusive behaviour here. The assistant stopped helping me to help her. I have been here long enough now to just shrug my shoulders at people who could not be bothered to wait their turn … but the interruption lasted much longer than a few seconds. I lost my temper and shouted at the woman in Chinese to wait her turn. You have to shout to get things back into order, that is to say, become most indignant and show it. The attendant sheepishly stopped what he was doing and went back to helping me. The young missy glared at me, making all sorts of simpering tut-tuts and actually just flounced off, indignant herself. That is just one of many examples.

Many times when I am in the office, some teachers, usually men, will come and put their heads virtually between me and my laptop screen to see what I am doing. Especially if I was checking my private email account I would just shove them away and tell them this is private. Nowadays I am more used to it and I suppose the shove is gentler.

What remains one of the most bizarre examples is phoning or SMSing late at night that is to do with business or something routine that could have been handled during the day. One Chinese teacher had asked me to edit some essay he needed to do for a university assignment and SMSed me at half past eleven at night to find out if I had finished it. I was just dozing off in bed and the bleep woke me up. In the morning I emailed him his edited assignment and asked him never to send messages like that after 6pm. The best (worst?) was getting a frantic SMS at nearly 1am from a Chinese English teacher. She had just read an email from me sent several days ago requesting her to download an attachment and print out copies of a lesson for the students. In the SMS she apologised for only reading it now but she would make sure the copies would be printed tomorrow. Um. Today. In the morning I checked the email and saw she had also sent a frantic email at about half past twelve at night but obviously felt a SMS — which sounds like thunder at nearly 1am — to ensure I was up to date. Again, these are just two examples of many. Yeah, put the phone on silent at night, but that for some reason means my alarm goes off on silent.

I really love Google Buzz. It’s like Facebook, only it deals with Gmail customers. As Facebook and Twitter are still banned in China it is so cool to make public announcements and interact with groups of friends on issues. It is also useful for me to advertise my new book, now out, Cracking China, and its sister, this blog. In other words, I can tell my “followers” what my latest blog topic is. But there seems to be a serious privacy issue. I have an option to search for people online. I can tap in any name, say John, and every person with that name in his Google or Gmail account’s email address comes up, including their picture if they have one. (Some gorgeous girls out there under certain names, I quickly discovered. I could stop my subscription to Bikini Magazine if I had one.) This is extremely intrusive to the average Westerner. It is one thing to find a person’s name on a public forum like Facebook, where the person volunteered his information, another to just have handy the entire list of Gmail clients with a particular name. Presumably they are only people who have joined Buzz on Gmail. But when I joined there was no clear option to preserve my privacy.

It is still early days for Buzz, so let’s see how it goes. The point is, that ain’t going to be a problem here in China where everyone is already everyone’s most intimate friend. Even at 1am, deep under the bedclothes.

A young Scotsman, Wee Tom, disliked his nickname for obvious reasons. His schoolboy friends had seen him in the shower and he was very wee where matters are supposed to count.
“Ha ha, Tom, when you get it up you’re going nowhere. She will fall asleep from boredom.”
“Just wait and see,” retorted Wee Tom. “Things will develop. I guarantee you my bride will be a virgin — I have strong religious views on that — and we will have a honeymoon night in a hotel next to the Niagara Falls and the next morning she will regard those majestic, cascading waters as her second greatest moment of ecstasy. A disappointment by comparison with the first moment.”
“Woof woof, Tom!” howled his friends. “At least you are never short on wisecracks. Get it? Short, ha ha.”
“Aye, but that wasn’t meant to be funny,” muttered Tom.
Unfortunately Tom never grew where it mattered and one day, never having had the pleasures of a girlfriend, he went to the Edinburgh zoo. He regarded an elephant with its swaying trunk, lazily pulling off leaves and inserting them into his mouth, the image almost hermaphroditic, he thought. And then an astonishing idea occurred to him as he saw the trunk arching up again, so splendidly phallic in its glory. He went to Scotland’s finest transplant surgeon and told him his idea. The surgeon’s eyes sparkled as he said “Aye, by coincidence some research in enlarging men’s size has been done in that area. We could do it as an experiment on you but you will have to sign various documents absolving us of any responsibility before we can do some experimental grafting.”
“Done deal!” cried the ecstatic Wee Tom.
A few weeks later, after various operations, the team surgeons sat around Tom as he proudly stood in just a sheet on a table. It was indeed a solemn occasion. He let the sheet drop and there was a momentous silence.
“Are you sure you don’t want Nurse Jenny to use a feather to assist a successful ascent to glory?” asked one of the senior surgeons, stroking his beard while they all gazed proudly at their craftsmanship.
“No, that’s kinky, and besides, I am a religious man,” replied Tom. “I will just tense my lower stomach muscles the way you trained me.Up up and awaaay … ” he cried, hands on hips, staring at the ceiling above him. He felt his new acquisition rise and rise and, simultaneously, the surgeons’ heads and Nurse Jenny’s reverentially turned upwards as they followed progress. Their chins remained uplifted in astonishment and delight as they admired their great achievement.
Nurse Jenny’s jaw dropped, her eyes widened and she gasped, putting her hand to her mouth. That was just the sound Wee Tom so badly wanted to hear. He could hear the distant rumble of Niagara Falls as he recalled his promise to his schoolday friends.
Tom relaxed his lower tummy muscles and slowly all eyes and heads lowered in the room as they witnessed the gradual touchdown. A moment of reverential silence; then everyone applauded, and, with a kind of Freudian foreshadowing of greater things to — ah — come, Nurse Jenny popped a large bottle of champagne and its white froth gushed everywhere which she, perhaps prophetically, licked off her fingers …
(To be continued in a moment … Notice your reaction to this interruption of our merry tale. Write down your reaction if you can.)

* * * * *

In all the debate about sexual activity on the SA media, centering around our president Jacob Zuma, I have got to thinking again about the role of religion in it all. Our Tom, now no longer wee, is a self-declared religious man. Nevertheless, he wishes to persevere at things that many religions do not see as a “spiritual” practice. And those “cults” who practise Tantric sex and so forth, which do see the spirituality in sex are demonised by certain religions, one of which will now be named: Rhema and its leader, Ray McCauley. (I regard “Rhema-ism” as an independent religion, and emblematic of the lunatic charismatic fringe that does a grave injustice to the more traditional approaches.)
Our problem with our sexuality in South Africa is that we have been taught to be ashamed of our bodies through religion and even post-religion. By post-religion I mean that even though some people have ceased to practise religion they still have assumed a thought system that determines their relationship to their bodies, others’ bodies and what is acceptable sexual behaviour. There is a lot of shame, anger and awkwardness about our performance in the area of sex. In religious circles we are taught to not even masturbate! I know. I used to be a church-goer and even attended Rhema Church for a bit in the early Nineties before I saw through it all. I went on men’s “retreats” in another church where much time was given to getting us to control our bodily desires, including the “sin” of masturbation.
But our character Tom seems to have a firm grip on things and is desperate to perform well. Shall we proceed with our merry tale about Tom? Note your reaction to that question.
Before we continue (oh get on with the gag Rod, you are perhaps muttering), I have a question. Why oh why is it that the debt-laden McCauley will allow the non-Christian Zuma to speak to his flock, not the Christian Zille, and McCauley also remains silent about the president’s ongoing sexual shenanigans? Polygamy in Rhema would be regarded as deep sin, “of the devil” and the practice of the cultic and deluded. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I see a very silent Rhema in the media … where there should be engagement and honesty. Do not bite the hand that feeds the mouth. Our story:

* * * * *

Tom could not wait to ask out a buxom blonde lass, Roxanne, whom he had his furtive eye on for many a year. He felt so confident now, and strode around Edinburgh thoroughly cocksure. He smiled at the lasses and now! Behold! They often smiled back! And did not that honey as she whisked past quickly glance down at his crotch area before looking away with a flush sweetening her cheeks?
Tom gave his groin a pat almost whenever he thought of Roxanne. “Down, young man!” he proudly scolded. He then thought of his finger-wagging deity and prayed for forgiveness and felt his prize new possession obediently and shamefully wilt.
A delighted Tom listened thrilled as Roxanne readily accepted the invitation to dinner and to watch a movie. “Aye, Tom, I have wanted you to ask me out for years,” she breathed down the phone and his ears tingled. Tom felt such regret, almost grief, at all that wasted time. His groin area suddenly took on a real life of its own. He laughed and patted, barking, “At ease soldier!” He saw that divine finger shaking back and forth once more, and again Tom prayed for forgiveness.
In the restaurant on their first date, Roxanne and Tom went to an Italian restaurant and soon there were warm bread rolls and wine arriving on the table while they thought about their order, eyeing each other from time to time over the menus. It was a marvellously fresh experience for huge Tom, and again he heard the expectant roar of the Niagara Falls. Not only was Tom hot under the collar, but hot in the loins and secretly let his zip down a wee bit to let the poor creature breathe.
A moment later, Roxanne’s eyes widened as she saw a peculiar sight. A long pink trunk came arching over the table from Tom’s side of the table, took a bread roll, and then disappeared again under the table. “Oooo, what was that?” gasped Roxanne.
Deciding to be honest, Tom explained the transplant surgery. The truth would, ah, come up, sooner or later.
Roxanne was now truly intrigued. “You could join a circus!” she exclaimed. “Can it do that again, snatch a roll, like?”
“Aye,” wheezed Tom, face turning purple, “But I don’t think my bum could take another bloody bread roll.”

* * * * *

“By the cold and religious we were taken in hand, shown how to feel good and told to feel bad,” cries Roger Waters in Pink Floyd’s album, The Final Cut. It sums up many monotheistic religions’ dogma about the human body and its most powerful urge and definition of itself: sex and sexuality. What we are seeing in South Africa, unwittingly led by Zuma (whom I see Zapiro has gloriously crowned again with a much larger shower spout in his latest cartoon) is an explosion of debate on what constitutes proper sexual and marital customs. These customs lie at the heart of society. Some commentators are saying his misconduct is now too old hat. No, no, I quickly demur.
Because hopefully the Zuma Mêlée will also get us to be transparent about the contextual nature of our inherited, religious or post-religious values. Which the likes of Rhema church are most certainly not. That is about dishonesty, deceit and currying favour with the powers that be, to state the obvious. His flock is woefully deceived. How can one possibly attend a church and voluntarily shell out all that money in tithes and offerings for McCauley’s lavish lifestyle? At the time of the news of all his debt, he was living in Durban and he and his latest wife would fly to Joburg every weekend to deliver sermons and duties … at the cost of his flock. The flock is brainwashed. But then so are we all. So this Zuma Moment is a wonderful invitation to us all to look at our deceptions.
If you found the Wee Tom joke funny, note that the ending is crucially reliant on Tom’s utter honesty in his confessions to Roxanne. Even though a self-confessed religious person, there would be no joke without his transparency. Jokes take us outside of ourselves through sheer laughter. We cannot laugh when we are being our conventionally thinking selves. The punch line requires just that: a punch. It is utterly fresh information, something surprising and honest. Laughter is like a coughing fit or a huge sneeze. Notice how for a moment you are no longer here or there in the middle of a body-shaking sneeze. Laughter works the same way. Being utterly honest with ourselves, being ruthlessly open to other ideas, be they polygamy or acknowledging other cultures’ customs, is surely freeing. South Africa has a splendid chance in this Zuma Brouhaha to re-think herself.
If you did not find the Wee Tom joke funny, ask yourself why. Maybe you just don’t think it is a good joke, but be honest about your reasons. A joke like this can never be told in many religious circles. Why? Because there we are told to feel bad, to live in denial. What if the Wee Tom joke had ended with him confessing again to his deity and asking for forgiveness? No joke. That’s like adding soap water to the celebratory bubbly; all the fizz is flattened. What’s left is just a stifled way of thinking that perpetuates dead systems of perceptions and behaviour.
This could be a watershed in South Africa’s history. Many of us are tired of being screwed around; our bums cannot take another roll.

It was the most awesome T-shirt I had ever seen. A funky deep purple dye and a cartoon of a drunken cat on the front. Thirteen years old, I stared at in gobsmacked delight. Gimme! The cat was all starry-eyed with a wasted grin on his face and he was lying inside a whiskey bottle. “Awe, Mom, why can’t I have that T-shirt?” I said over the phone. For some reason my mother had laughed when she saw the T-shirt in a shop and said she would discuss the matter with her friends at work before buying.
“I just don’t think it is such a good idea,” my mother said with a big smile in her voice and I could hear one of her friends laughing in the background.
I was bewildered. It was civvies day at our school soon and we could all wear casual clothing instead of school uniforms and my heart was set on wearing that T-shirt. It was just a picture of a drunk cat, for heaven’s sake, I thought. About a decade later, I was reminiscing about my school days and suddenly there was that memory of that T-shirt of the inebriated cat inside a bottle. What I also remembered, with renewed impact, was the slogan on the T-shirt: “Happiness is a tight pussy”. Ahem. Memory shifted meaning. For the first time it occurred to me why my mother laughed and refused to buy the garment.

We just seem to be chock-a-block with memories and undreamt-of associations that we only make some sense of much later in life. Some are even built into our genes or our souls if we still choose to believe that.

The most powerful, for me, was visiting Ireland. I am of Irish descent and proud of it. Singing in pubs is a pastime of theirs, and of mine, even before I became aware of that trait among fellow paddies.

My first experience of the Irish proper (as in those who live in Ireland) was the ferry from Holyhead in Wales to Dun Laoghaire just outside Dublin. The ferry was just a huge, floating pub. I sang as best and lustily as I could with the lads at the bar counter, many of whom had baggage trolleys loaded with boxes of Forster’s beer which they were taking back to Dublin for their shebeens, I gathered. I recall sitting back with my head raised and arms folded (just like them, it came naturally, that posture) extolling the virtues of Van Morrison’s “Brown-eyed girl”, but could not keep up with all the real Irish ditties they all knew so well. I was jealous. Their music was deeply tattooed into their identity.

But still, South African born and bred, I was absolutely at home with the Irish, and it was definitely an ancestral resonance, a sense of belonging that lay deep below the surfaces of verbal memory.

That sense of belonging was temporarily removed when we got to the passport check-in at Dun Laoghaire (Dun Leary in English). The tubby, blue-eyed official grinned and waved the lads through with their crates of Forster’s beer and without checking their passports, no less. And they were reeling drunk, singing at the top of their voices. He looked at me and my girlfriend at the time (this was long before the advent of the Chook) more cautiously, but friendlily enough. He checked my passport, which was Irish and which I produced with a proud flourish.

The passport official then started asking me questions about the duration and nature of my stay in Ireland. What I was going to be doing and so forth. The cheeky bugger, I thought. I am an Irish citizen, as evinced by my passport and did not need to answer such questions. “Long as I like, mate,” I said in my best, cringeworthy, fake UK accent. “This is an Irish passport and I have as much right to be here as you have… and here is my Irish birth certificate,” which I produced from inside a flap of the wallet into which my precious passport was inserted. The document was a cherished “particulars of a foreign birth”. The official had a sort of blank grin on his face while the momentous nature of our brotherhood sank in. “Catch you later, mate”, I primly announced, and stalked into Ireland.

Ireland! Many times on my trip there I could not shake off the feeling that I had been there before. You have been here before, echoed something through me, not so much the words, but an electric surge that contained the deeper meaning underlying those words, buckets drawn up from some unfathomably deep well. It was eerie; it was déjà vu. I could feel and smell the history of me – an ancestral me – on solitary walks down those beautiful stonewalled roads all over the Irish countryside.

I tried to put into the following lines my experiences of Ireland

Pick two of her stones, bright and bare –
Your words will soften them, creating her eyes.
She is this country: her unbridled lips
Gentle you into verses, wetting the mist and the noon
On this road which is narrowed in the glow
From coal-damp stone walls. Stones are everywhere
And grant this scene the burden of the ages.
Listen: The pulse of boots, gunfire, hooves.

This was in the mid-nineties, South Africa was a barely-born democracy I was tremendously proud of and very hopeful about. I found myself associating my identity as a second-generation South African with my ancestral identity as an Irishman. Of course, I was also aware of the sad, cruel history of Ireland, or rather, both Irelands:

Today, rain-tender as mourning often is
In the ancestral home of County Antrim,
You are a journal untouched, a language unfingered
In two South African generations of saddening
Into the senseless. That’s why she’s called you –
To put these stones and their stories into
A hearth of words, to take them back
To another home, a dwelling of a kind.

County Antrim! Before writing the poem I actually had no idea where my grandparents came from in Ireland. The sense of belonging, of deep, wordless, tugging memories, you have been here before, been here, been there was strongest in County Antrim. At times my eyes were watering with the power of the déjà vu. And “it was getting weird, like!” as the Irish might say. When I got home to Joburg I phoned my mother in Cape Town to find out where my grandparents came from. Yes, you guessed it: County Antrim. We are, I realised, our histories, in ways much deeper than we can cerebrally know. The scary or sobering thing is we are not tuned into our histories, our deeper identities. For some reason, and only to some extent, I was tuned in when in Ireland. My unwordable experience of my ancestral home was one that I will hold high and cradle close as something sacred, venerable. There is something poetic and musical about us Irish. And the sad thing is I will probably never live there.
So what is your identity? What have your memories made of you? In the rest of the poem which follows I often compare Ireland to a sacred but violated woman, a Mary figure, a Guinevere. Dropping the stones partly means letting go. The rest? A wordless significance, brimming with ancestry, identity and a wish to belong somewhere, somewhere, still resonates nearly fifteen years later:

Two homes, two histories,
As blunt as the stones in your hands.
The one where you now hike, stop and crouch
Holds an ancient, terrible loveliness.
She tugs
At you until your bones ache.
Your body sags, feeling its ghost-light
Brimming through the skin at the sight
Of her body and its old, stupid hurt.

Here’s the scenario: you are working in Shanghai and your SA passport is about to expire in a few months. Good, responsible citizen that you are, and not wishing to have trouble with the Chinese authorities when renewing your work visa, you duly go to the SA consulate in Shanghai.

Bureaucratic procedures combined with the Chinese love for paperwork (remember they invented the fabric and love to swim in it, I assure you), the process takes several hours, and there is no one else there, that is to say, no queue. Ja well no fine, such is life. Your passport photos are inadequate for some reason so you go downstairs and across the road to get a fresh set. All your fingers, both palms and full handprints are inked and placed on an official document. The whole paperwork thing really takes a while but ja well no fine so gaan die lewe. You are a Sawth Effricen, so you are as stoic as a bulldog and you can take the punch/jy kan die punch vat. The Chinese official helping you is a nice bloke anyway so you chat about life in Shanghai.

You then pay and wait for the receipt. And wait and wait. Eventually you go back to the cashier window and ask how long is it gonna take to get a receipt. The chap that you rather liked looks at you blankly and says the SA consulate official who has the authority to stamp the receipt is away for a while. It is lunch time so you know exactly what meeting it is that all bureaucrats are extremely disciplined about, so … ja well no fine on that score but why couldn’t the Chinese gentleman at least tell you he had gone to that unbelievably important meeting? You do have other things to do, like go back to work before the boss gets the hell in.

After a brief discussion that turns into a heated debate the official you used to like gives you a receipt without that bliksem stamp but at least you have proof. He thanks you kindly for your understanding and co-operation and further promises to courier a stamped, signed, sealed, framed, kissed or whatever upgrade to your home, but that never arrives. Ja well no fine, all is bureaucratically normal, nothing specific to hak or complain about.

Three months pass and you send a polite email enquiring about your passport, including the three ID numbers you have (SA ID, passport ID — a little different, a caveat to readers — and sommer nog ’n eenetjie you didn’t know about above your passport mug-shot if you remember correctly its whereabouts).

You receive an email a few days later stating nothing has been received but the matter will be followed up, with another “thanking you kindly for your understanding”. Ja well no fine … Then you receive a frightening email a week or so later, bearing in mind you are a foreigner in this country and are required to be legally here. Here, ek se, is the unedited cut and paste except for the italics and the words “you wince”:

“Dear Mr. Mackenzie,

We are still following up with your application with head office these days, however, with no answer yet. According to the passport application registration online, there is no record of any of passport applications of August this year (yours inclusive). Therefore, we assume that they may have lost the whole batch! While awaiting the confirmation from head office, I think it would be more proactive if we courier another set of application to head office . So, we need your cooperation and understanding [you wince] to come to our office again for a new application form and a set of fingerprints along with two passport photos.

Sorry for the inconvenience incurred and looking forward to your kind attention to this matter.

Best Regards! …. ”

Now it’s no longer ja well no fine and so gaan die lewe.

You scratch your head, check your receipt (hell, pity the upgraded, kissed or whatever receipt never arrived) and see the date was 13th July. In quiet desperation you email the oke and say you did it in July, knowing it probably collected dust until the next diplomatic bag / mule with saddle bags / pigeon with collar / whatever, was sent off in August.

Next email:

“Our diplomatic bag goes to South Africa once a month, mostly around 8th of the month. If you applied after that date, application will have to go with the next bag. Thanks for your understanding and co-operation…”

Of course, you are now tired of being thanked for “your copulation co-operation and understanding” and things are no longer ja well no fine. How do you stay legally in the country when either the SA consulate or the relevant section in South Africa are just not doing their job and perhaps blameshifting?

The above was nearly my scenario. Fortunately, I live life on my Irish passport, a wonderful EU first world passport.

Ah, the first world. Let’s compare getting a new passport from the Irish Consulate. When I was living in Southampton, England, my Irish passport had expired and I was living on my SA passport, which I had used to get into the country. Ja well no fine, I sent off the expired one with relevant documentation and the fee to the Irish Consulate in London. I got back my new passport about two weeks later. I need say no more.

But now what about all the South Africans in Shanghai and elsewhere in the world who do not have — I am embarrassed to say — what I call a “first world” passport and they need to renew that extremely valuable document? You cant open bank accounts, look for work etcetera, etcetera unless that passport is up to date. God help those guys. God help South Africa, every government department going through corruption and crises from Eskom to Telkom to the Post Office which stole my Christmas and New Year cards to my octogenarian mother last year.

I am not writing this merely as a complaint, but as a concerned citizen and an embarrassed South African.

“So,” I chooned told ou Phil, “you should have seen my mutt Bruce. He was a Labrador and he couldn’t stop eating. My mother believed he must still be hungry if he was happy to have more. My old lady and blurry Bruce were a scary combination. She would just keep piling up his dog bowl. Eventually he would come waddling and wheezing off the verandah into the lounge, belly hanging halfway to the floor, slump in front of the fireplace and slowly, evilly, deflate like a tractor tyre for the next two hours.

“Jissee, but he could drop horrible ones. His ears would cock in half-interest while the family cursed, some of us even leaving the room for a few minutes. Eventually my mother learned. My old man, hanky over his nose, insisted he only get one bowl of chow. So of course Bruce would scoff his chow down in less than ten seconds flat and head for the other dogs’ bowls. There were a couple of moerse frights on that verandah. My black and white brak, Scruffy, genuine ‘pavement special’, was smaller and older than Bruce, and was the ou man of our five dogs. He just told Bruce to take a fricken sexual hike off Mount Kilimanjaro in dog language…”

I could check out that Phil, grinning, wanted to talk about his dogs as he interrupted, “Did he pomp a lot?” and sipped on his brandy and coke (spook & diesel for those in the know) in O’Hagan’s Pub in Paulshof, Jo’burg. “I had a brak who couldn’t think of anything else – ”

“Bruce’s sex life?” I loudly interrupted back, proud of my favourite childhood mutt, that wheaten Labrador of mine who followed me wherever I went. “Balls of steel,” I bragged, dramatically pausing to swig on a Hofbrau Draught. “And his,” I said whilst lightly belching, “needed regular exercise. Dammit, that champion would risk his life against competing Alsatians for the glorious prize that was on heat. Came home looking like Attila the Hun after a really fierce battle, my bru, but with a contented grin on his face…”

“I had a Jack Russel once,” said Phil. “And all he could think about was pomping. 24/7. He first tried it on a bathroom towel. My old lady was helluva annoyed. The best was when he tried to take on a Dalmatian. Just picture a littlebrak taking on a Dalmatian’s hind leg. She would turn around quizzically to try and see what this cheeky little bugger was up to…”

“Ja, no, Bruce had self-respect, tjommie,” I interjected, feeling no shortage of one-upmanship. “Only his size would do, usually Alsatians. We eventually had to have him spayed, because the neighbours complained about all the visits to their plot. And you know what? He still went and visited his girlfriends, coming back looking like Genghis Kan who had fallen of the Great Wall or something…I don’t know how he hoped to get it up, hey maybe he still could….”

I don’t know how long ou Phil, one of my best drinking buddies nearly ten years ago in Paulshof’s O’Hagans and I talked about our childhood pets. Maybe he can’t remember. Spook & diesel will do that to you. Maybe one of the other okes was bragging about his Jack Russel as in retrospect that Dutchman friend of mine, Phil, would have preferred bigger dogs. It doesn’t matter.

Ja, our childhood pets. They were just great, hey? And taught me responsibility too. That’s why my parents had them for me. I fed them. I bathed them. Removed the blurry ticks and dusted them with tick powder while they indignantly snorted and sneezed. I separated them when they fought. Man I loved them. Yeah, I said above my old lady fed Bruce. But I gave him the first bowl and it should have been the only one, even if the only reason was the unbelievable farting afterwards. His backside could crackle like Guy Fawkes. She would just look at that mournful, gluttonous face, his ears eagerly cocked and bring him more and more Dogmore. (Is Dogmore still going in SA? Must be. It’s the grrrrravey, hey?)

At one stage I had five or six dogs, a sheep called Bartholomew, budgies, guinea pigs, a table of white mice where I kept on changing the maze that led to their food, and an aviary of pigeons and cockatiels. No cats. Let’s agree on one thing about dogs, manne? They are always genuinely pleased to see you when you get home. Cats just turn up their tails and show you their south end. Like that’s what I want to see while I am scoffing down my after-school toasted sarmies. Homework consisted of hurling the school satchel under my bedroom desk and heading out with the canine gang for the nearby vlei or whatever.

And Bruce always knew when I was feeling down. Like when I came home from a bad-hair day at school, some stupid caning for no bloody rhyme or reason or I’d been bullied by the big okes. He would come and lie on the bed next to me while I nursed my emotional wounds and shove his snout into my chest and belly. He would stare at me with those soulful eyes, head cocked, making throat-swallowing, gulping noises of sympathy and dinkum try and cheer me up. And he did. Fully.

I still now and then dream about him, and the ou man, Scruffy, who would give Bruce a hard time anytime Bruce tried to take over his spot as top dog. Maybe they are saying hello from doggie heaven, hey?

So, what’s your doggie and other childhood pet stories? Skiem I should write another book, Cracking Canines.

“I got this cool joke,” I said as a group of us Scrabblers sat and sipped our coffees after an exhausting round of Scrabble at the coffee shop on Fish Hoek beach some years back.

“A long time ago a Jewish couple had a baby and the father, Giuseppe, especially wanted to know what career his son would take. Giuseppe went to his rabbi who was quite a mystical bloke and asked how he could find out what his son would become one day. The rabbi scratched his beard, intrigued by this challenge. ‘What you should do,’ the rabbi thoughtfully said, ‘is when your son can crawl you should put on the first step of your staircase a bottle of wine on one side and a bag of money on the other side…’”

Daniel, one of our fellow Scrabblers, interrupted me with, “I hope this is not going to be offensive or irreverent.” He was usually an amicable chap with a keen sense of humour but now his eyes were blazing as he glared at me. He was Jewish. I hasten to add that this blog is not an attack on any religious group; I have had many Jewish friends who have been kind to me, including when I was down and out in my twenties, jobless and homeless (I was taken in by Jewish people) at one stage… you get my drift.
“Oh not at all, not at all,” I quickly replied to Daniel.

“Anyway,” I continued, “the rabbi said to Giuseppe, ‘if your son crawls towards the wine first and grabs that, that means he is going to be a successful merchant and quite possibly a liquor store owner and therefore a wealthy man. If he crawls over to the money bag and grabs that, then he is going to be a successful banker and also a wealthy, successful man. Either way you need not worry; he will be able to take care of you in your old age’. The rabbi looked at Giuseppe keenly, guessing the real reason and worry for the man’s concerns about what career his son would take. Giuseppe nodded, impressed by his rabbi’s wisdom. ‘But what if he doesn’t grab either the wine or the money bag?’
‘Pray he doesn’t,’ the rabbi solemnly replied, ‘but don’t let that bother you. Come back to me with whatever happens and we will take it from there.’

“When the baby could crawl Giuseppe decided to try out the experiment. On one side of the first step of the staircase he placed a bottle of wine. On the other side he placed a bag of money. The mother put their little son on the floor a few feet away from the two articles. The lad, an exuberant boy who could crawl fast, eyed the wine and money bag and scooted across the lounge floor.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Daniel listening intently to the joke, clearly curious, but concerned about the punch line.

“The baby grabbed both the money bag and the bottle of wine at the same time and tried to pick both up most enthusiastically.
“Giuseppe was astonished by this turn of events and went and told his rabbi. The rabbi slapped his own head and cried, ‘Oy vay, the boy is going to be a Catholic priest!’ “And,” I added for Daniel’s benefit who was now grinning and chuckling, “I heard this joke from a Catholic priest whilst he stood at the altar speaking to his congregation during his sermon one Sunday morning. All the parishioners laughed.”

Daniel smiled at me, nodding. In a sense the joke was a profound lesson for both of us; nobody was offended.

I am not a Catholic. But I have learned a lot from them and their literature, including the teachings of Meister Eckhart and contemporary writers like Henri Nouwen and most definitely that wonderful monk who was once an abbot, Father Thomas Keating. Such wise fruit and healing teaching has to come from that profound, ineffable source all spiritual people of all persuasions revere.

At one stage I was a big ecumenicist and loved visiting different churches. I slowly “evolved” into a universalist and attended Catholic and Buddhist retreats and sometimes the two faiths combined. I miss that in China.

The essence of many spiritual traditions is to rid or purge human beings of what is sometimes called “the false ego”, that superficial structure of graspings and longings that identifies too seriously with…. oh, stuff. Stuff like identity, prestige, money, how intelligent I am, my qualificiations, anxiety about the future and guilt about the past. The absolute infallible rightness of “my” religion. Through this process we learn to be present to what is instead of resisting or denying it and thus feeding a false self that does not accept things as they are. In other words a false self that cannot take jokes about what it clings to so dearly, missing out on all that life has to offer. I love that magic Dido song with the constant refrain, “Cos nothing I have is truly mine”. There is a wonderful reverence in that song.

Jokes teach us to not take our egos, our false selves, our attachments, so seriously.

As Eckhart Tole says in that wonderful book, The Power of Now:
If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call it John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and two minutes later he gets eaten by another fish – that’s tragic. But it’s only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of a dynamic process, a molecular dance, and made a separate entity out of it.