Preface
The “archer” on the balcony
I was nine when my father announced that our family would move from Singapore to South Africa. On my private map, South Africa was less a country than a collection of television images: red earth, hungry animals, and danger with very good lighting.
I began collecting branches around our apartment compound and tying them together with colored rope. The result was allegedly a bow. In my imagination, it would defend my baby sister from a lion arriving at our future log cabin. In reality, it could barely defend itself from gravity.
South Africa would dismantle that arrow of ignorance more effectively than any lecture. It replaced my fear of the unknown with a habit of looking closer.
Johannesburg
The land as a shared language
Our gardener, Judas, treated unused soil as a moral problem. With the landlord's permission, he planted corn between the flowers. My mother answered with eggplants, pumpkins, and Chinese long beans. By harvest time, the garden had abandoned any clear national identity.
We sat on the stone steps and shared white corn under the jacaranda trees. Judas told us, “If the land does not grow food, it is like the soul having no home.” I had arrived expecting difference to be the main story. The garden showed me a deeper resemblance: both Chinese and South African lives could be organized around soil, food, and the dignity of making something grow.
School
Rules bow to love
At nine, I chose a sport unsuited to a small boy who could not balance a racing kayak: kayaking. The team operated “by invitation only,” and I was not an obvious invitation.
The team leader argued that a rule designed to protect excellence had become a reason to leave a willing child on the shore. The rule was changed. I did not become the fastest paddler, but I learned that a strong institution can revise itself without losing its standards.
Inclusion was not the opposite of excellence. It was a test of what excellence was for.
Later, when I capsized in the Vaal River, the captain abandoned his own boat and jumped into the freezing water. His decision lasted seconds; its lesson has lasted years. A team is real when its values cost someone something.
Emmarentia Dam
The breadcrumb game
At dusk, the lake turned gold and Egyptian geese cut dark V-shaped lines through the water. On the benches sat people whom the city often trained itself not to see: laborers after a shift, or people carrying everything they owned in a plastic bag.
Sometimes that bag contained a small piece of bread, perhaps their only food for the day. Yet I repeatedly watched calloused hands tear off crumbs and throw them toward the geese. For a moment, someone treated as a recipient of charity became a giver.
I had thought generosity was what happened after abundance. By the lake, I saw it used to defend dignity during scarcity. That memory later gave the word “Ubuntu” a human face.
Pandemic years
Stars in the darkness
During the pandemic, electricity and water failures reduced daily life to arithmetic. A toilet tank held eight liters; a supermarket water container held five. Something as ordinary as flushing became an expensive decision.
Power cuts also removed Wi-Fi and the usual excuses for not looking up. My sister and I lay on the backyard grass and searched for the Southern Cross in Johannesburg's clear night sky. South Africa did not teach me to romanticize hardship. It taught me that people can remain attentive, funny, and generous inside it.
When I eventually left, I carried a less dramatic kind of courage than the wooden bow I had brought: the willingness to enter a place without deciding in advance what it must mean.