River Town & Soshanguve

A friend recently sent me a chapter from the book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. The author, Peter Hessler, served with the Peace Corps in China and later published his experiences.  I found myself nodding along with most of what he wrote, and there were some parts in particular that resonated with me…

“For the first few weeks, Dean Fu searched for tutors who could help Adam and me.  He was as lost as we were—he had never known a foreigner who was trying to learn the language, and I suspected that secretly he felt the project was hopeless.  Waiguoren couldn’t learn Chinese—everybody in Fuling knew that.  Our students found it hilarious that we even tried.  They would ask me to speak a little Chinese, or write a character or two, and then they would laugh at my efforts.  At first this didn’t bother me, but quickly it became annoying. They thought I was dabbling in the language when in fact I was serious: I knew that studying Chinese was one of the most important things I could do in Fuling. So much depended on knowing the language—my friendships, my ability to function in the city, my understanding of the place.”

Peter Hessler, I hear ya!  The early days of my language learning were similar—my team leader Luc searched for a suitable teaching arrangement.  My teammate Julie and I were matched with a teacher in the local Adult Education Program, but she could not even fathom teaching non-native speakers, let alone those with white skin from a whole different country.  She struggled to wrap her mind around where to start – our first lesson was filled with her attempts at teaching us what syllables were (they’re the same in Setswana as in English, by the way.)  She was accustomed to teaching literacy to locals who had grown up their whole lives speaking the language.  So, it was a rocky ride from the start.  One essential piece of language learning: a sense of humor!  Unfortunately, that set up only lasted about a month before we moved onto lessons with a neighbor, Mama Jane. 

People here also giggle with delight to hear me greet them correctly.  They often assume, incorrectly, that it means I can hold a conversation beyond a mere greeting.  Then I stumble, they laugh, we move on.  It becomes annoying.  Just earlier this week someone asked me if I knew how to write my given name, Mapula.  I grumbled, “yeah, of course,” and all but me were amused.  I have never tried to learn Chinese, but maybe it’s a little bit like trying to learn a local dialect that is a combination of 6 Bantu languages (plus some Afrikaans thrown in for good measure.) I frequently feel all alone in a crowd here, present with people but surrounded by foreign customs & language. Like Hessler, I know that learning the language is the key to relationships and my ability to function & understand this place. 

“…For the first few weeks we often complained about the honking and the noise, the same way we complained about blowing our noses and seeing the tissue turn black.  But the simple truth was that you could do nothing about either the noise or the pollution, which meant that they could either become very important and very annoying, or they could become not important at all.  For sanity’s sake we took the second option, like the locals, and soon we learned to talk about other things.”

                The sound & air pollution in Soshanguve aren’t quite as bad as Hessler describes in his town, but there are still plenty of aspects of local life that present me with the same choices: magnify & be annoyed or overlook & move on.  Often I know the right choice is to overlook but the mental shift becomes difficult.  In my case, many of the honks are directed at me, being white in an all-Black township after all, so even now, after a year, it is still greatly annoying. 

“And Fuling was a frightening place because the people had seen so few outsiders.  If I ate at a restaurant or bought something from a store, a crowd would quickly gather, often as many as thirty people spilling out into the street.  Most of the attention was innocent curiosity, but it made the embarrassment of my bad Chinese all the worse—I’d try to communicate with the owner, and people would laugh and talk among themselves, and in my nervousness I would speak even worse Mandarin.  When I walked down the street, people constantly turned and shouted at me.  Often they screamed waiguoren or laowai, both of which simply meant ‘foreigner.’  Again those phrases often weren’t intentionally insulting, but intentions mattered less and less with every day that these words were screamed at me.  Another favorite was ‘hello,’ a meaningless, mocking version of the word that was strung out into a long ‘hah-looo!’ This word was so closely associated with foreigners that sometimes the people used it instead of waiguoren—they’d say, ‘Look here come two hellos!’  And often in Fuling they shouted other less innocent terms—yangguizi, or ‘foreign devil’; da bizi, ‘big nose’—although it wasn’t until later that I understood what these phrases meant.”

                Living in Soshanguve is a challenging, and sometimes frightening, experience because they also have seen so few outsiders.  South Africa is a much more racially diverse nation than China, but the townships are just not places where you see a lot of different kinds of people.  They are pretty homogeneous; it is highly unusual to see even a white South African, let alone one who has come all the way from America, “the land of dreams.”  So, I guess it can be expected that there are LOTS of stares, shouts, hoots, hollers, marriage proposals, requests for phone numbers, etc. 

                The local term of choice directed at me is usually lekgoa, which means white person.  Because of the history of South Africa, this term is loaded with more than racial connotations.  Light-skinned Black South Africans may also receive this term, but more importantly anyone who has really “made it,” with a good job, money, etc., will often be teased and called a lekgoa by friends, family, and neighbors.  White in South Africa is synonymous with having money, resources, education, and power.  I just learned today a new word that basically means boss or one who has people under him.  I was then told that this term could apply to me.  “But I haven’t hired anyone!” I protested.  No matter, my friends said. Being white was enough to warrant the label. I’m sure the sight of me has also generated other terms, whose definitions I probably wouldn’t appreciate knowing. 

Side-note: I remember tutoring with a girl here, helping her with an assignment form English class.  She had to read a short article about a Western (American or British) journalist’s experience in China.  It was very similar to what Hessler writes here, but it was so ironic for me to help her understand while sitting there thinking, “I know exactly what this guy is experiencing.”  My young friend probably had no idea what was going on in my mind!

It was quite validating to read and relate to Hessler’s experiences, but it still doesn’t make the fitting-in process any easier.