Way back, when my woman announced that she was heading to China to teach English, I was torn.

It was an act of dire desperation. Our erratic Eden, where we somewhat shunned the spirit of Madness that dwelled upon the water, was finally in ashes. It was always just a matter of time before the serpent backed us into a tindery corner with a hard spark in its eye. Yea, the heavens faltered and angels fell, but we dared not heed the signs. Swiftly running out of money and work in that truest jewel of all False Bay, we tried instead to live off love. This is not an exercise I can recommend to doe-eyed sweethearts anywhere. A word to the wise: once poverty kicks in the front door, romance gets the hell out back. And there’s no way to valiantly dash after it on an empty stomach, Romeo. The spirit’s willing, but the flesh… Oh Lord, the flesh.

On the one hand, the starving animal inside me was eerily relieved at the prospect of our financial woes being remedied, even if that meant my soulmate stoically packing her bags for the far side of the world. Something had to be done to save what was left of the Beautiful Game, and as always, she was the one who stepped up to the plate, swinging wild and free, while I lay snared between the cheapest seats, gnawing at my wrist.

Deeper down, however, my hunter’s heart was breaking. She wasn’t leaving me - that much I knew - but she was quietly slipping away to distant, darker pastures. The first few weeks following her decision sent the red flags flying high. Things hadn’t exactly been rosy up to that point, but now we withdrew into separate worlds as she quietly steeled herself for what had to be done, and me having no idea what the hell to do next. Holding her close in kinder times, I used to whisper that I would follow her to the ends of the earth, but fuck almighty, the age of sweet nothings had well and truly passed. This was real. The only way for a relatively unskilled, roundeye hippie to get in on the action in China was as an English teacher, and the very thought of it scared seven shades of shit out of me. I’ve never taught anything to anyone before, except perhaps how to roll a three-blader joint or grow potatoes in a stack of old tyres. The idea of standing in front of a group of Chinks in a truly alien land, jumping through hoops of horror that I could not yet imagine or comprehend, seemed utterly outrageous to a forty-three-year-old professional slacker worn dangerously thin by Art and introversion. What’s more, goddamnit, we had a house full of eclectic hand-me-down whatnots and, so help me, a little dog. I couldn’t just wave a magic wand to make all of that disappear, and shit, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. My heart and my head were being drawn and quartered in a million different directions and I simply poured weed and whiskey and whatever the hell else I could find into the black hole left in its wake, as I slowly imploded in the loft upstairs.

My woman mostly kept to herself on the ground level, hitting the cheap red wine at night and watching trash TV with the dog on her lap. She clung to that snowy little pup like it was the last fluff of manna left on this earth, and man, I couldn’t blame her. One hungover morning, while she was out trying to score pills under the guise of some bullshit errand or the other, I was going through my usual routine of sitting down with Soekie and a pair of scissors in the diamond sun, carefully snipping out the tiny blots of red wine from the fur on her back. I finally cracked. In a gush of tears and rage and insane laughter, I realised that it would be China for me too, baby, and it always was. I never really had a choice, I just couldn’t face my fears or my fate. My woman and I were bound in neo-wedlock under some divine or cosmic law, not the mere gangster code of church or state, and if we were to go down, hell, we would go down together, and at least have one last mother of a Trip on the way.

When she got home, I sat her down and we had a proper conversation for the first time in ages. We held hands and cried a little, and then got to work. She already nailed down a job on the northeast coast and was due to leave in less than a month. I had an insane amount of ground to cover in order to catch up, so I started applying to schools right away. I was still entirely consumed by the icy flames of mortal dread, but there was so much to do that I simply couldn’t afford to think about it. Within the fevered blur of the next few weeks, I managed to somehow land a position with a rather prestigious learning centre, in the same city where my woman was headed, with relative ease. I guess their readiness to hire just about any foreign devil willing to take the plunge should have given me food for thought, but I was too busy choking on the scraps from Destiny’s butcher’s block to pay it any mind.

Whichever way, Rome wasn’t torn down in a day. In the end, due to passport issues, visa constraints and other copious amounts of red tape that seems to hold the rickety Chinese model together, I would only be able to leave a few months after my woman had set off. This would buy me some time to get our meagre affairs in order and pack up what was left of our life, while she boldly began paving a brave new path for us, all alone in the Oriental wilderness.

That, at least, was the plan.  

 
Seeing her off at the airport was pretty rough. It felt more like a final farewell than a gaunt goodbye. Despite the ongoing devilry of the past few months that had threatened to drive us apart, we had become hopelessly intertwined like two poisoned trees, fiercely coiling to reach the sun before the Darkness settled. When we finally managed to let go of one another, our palms ran with a crude perfume, like blossoms under a banker’s heel. I don’t remember much about the long drive home, but I do recall getting horribly drunk for the next two days. When I finally rose, shaken and stirred, I made a detailed list of everything that had to be taken care of around the house. I promptly got violently ill and took to the booze again. Eventually, I somehow found a way to get down to it. Every dawn must face the day and every bender has its end.

All things considered, getting our humble abode ready to be rented out was relatively easy. I threw away a ton of stuff and burned the rest. Finding a suitable new home for our little dog-child, however, proved to be far less straightforward. Years of living with two outlaw spaceheads had made her skittish and morose, wholly unsuitable for civilian life. In the darkest of those lonely days, it got to the point where I considered taking her to our favourite swimming spot and simply holding her down beneath the waves, forever thereafter facing Mercy’s cruel wrath. In the end, thankfully, sanity prevailed while stars conspired and I got her settled with an angelic new crew, a stone’s throw from that very beach.

This sliver of good fortune temporarily brightened up the strained video calls between my woman and me, and God only knows, we needed it. After everything, distance had not made the heart grow fonder. Our fragile peace was way beyond that. Oceans apart, it seemed we were finally locked away in opposing dimensions of alienation and duress that the other simply could not comprehend, however hard we goddamn tried. Her crazy tales of Oriental fuckery seemed almost too fantastic to be true, while she seemed to find my domestic hardship grossly overcooked in the light of her fierce sacrifice. I could finally feel her slipping away. As the date of my departure drew near, I kept waking up in the dead of night, reaching for her like a ghost limb in that vast and empty house. It felt like I was staring down a sawn-off double barrel of terror and pain, and the clock was fucking ticking. But it was too late for tears and I had nowhere else to go. The only way around it was through. Thus D-day came and off I went, sweating and seething, from the frying pan and into dragon fire.  

The Valium had worn off somewhere over Hong Kong. When I finally arrived on the Other Side, Qingdao International was a hot damn mess. As my dazed gaze at long last picked my woman out among the heathen hordes in the arrival lounge, I was struck once more by her terrible beauty. I rushed out to meet her, running scared. For the briefest of moments, nothing else existed outside our bittersweet embrace. Then the brute and final weight of the clusterfuck we were in suddenly came whistling toward me straight and true, hitting me flush in the gut. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to get the hell out of there the way I came, but my legs were gone. A current of sparks flew in my eyes, somehow flipping the ragged magnets of our starved hearts and thrusting us apart. I was vaguely aware of us standing perfectly separate and still in the midst of all that sweaty madness while my soul recoiled in horror. In the end, reeling blind like a goddamn junkie, I had no choice but to allow myself to be led out into the roaring gloom of the concrete hive by my woman’s firm and matronly hand, never to fully return.

There is nothing on this earth that can prepare a free-blowin’ lily of the Western Fields for China’s awesome assault. Suffice it to say, it was one of the toughest battles that I ever had the honour to face, on all fronts, and God only knows I’ve lived through a few. In the stinging absurdity of the coming weeks her hard-earned street smarts would go a long way in shielding me somewhat from the barrage, but I had to find my own way through the tacky trenches and, having already earned her stripes, she knew it. Rest assured, brothers and sisters: I will happily regale you, for good or ill, with mind-blowing sagas of Middle Kingdom madness in times to come, for they are fucking legion. But this, for the most part, is a tale of love, not war.

The vile monkey dance of work and mere survival aside, what cut me the deepest in those early days was the ever-growing divide between us. We had started off on the backfoot and there was seemingly no way to catch up to one another. One late afternoon on a rare day off, we were strolling on Shinan’s promenade in loaded silence. Flanked by glitzy skyscrapers on the one side and the dull ocean on the other, all that was still unsaid were being echoed by the rowdy crowds surrounding us. It was the usual mob of couples snapping sunset selfies, bad drunks, hawkers peddling baby turtles, wretched beggars and bratty kids taunting the soap bubble sellers as they floated their glossy orbs out onto the breeze. I suddenly stopped, sending my woman thumping awkwardly into the Nikon on my back. I was fucking tired. Tired of the noise, tired of the silence, but most of all, I was tired of feeling goddamn concrete under my feet wherever I went. Without a word, I slipped through the blue railings separating us from the tide and scampered down the paved slope to the water’s edge. As per the lurid signs posted everywhere, this was strictly prohibited. My woman therefore promptly followed, feline and fluid, until she was crouching at my side. We took of our shoes and slid our feet into the water, just as the sun was setting across the bay.

I’ll never be sure exactly what it was that broke the Iron Spell. Perhaps it was simply sitting out the last golden light of day while the Yellow Sea lapped at our ankles like a jaded pup. I guess there was something, at long last, in that awkward, stolen moment that reminded us of what we once called home. She nestled closer and we half-smiled at each other with mouths ruined by nicotine gum and pidgin Chinese. Just then, a flurry of stray bubbles from the walkway above suddenly flew out right in front of us and she tore herself loose, sitting up tall and clapping her hands, laughing with fright like an abandoned child. I swear, I loved her so much in that goddamn moment I thought my heart was going to break.

Right then and there, as the whole skyscraped mess surrounding us shrunk down to nothing inside those fleeting crystal balls of Fate, I knew we were going to make it. Yessir, the world was a big and scary place, but it had nothing on where we’d already been. All the beat-up muscle bikes I had her weeping on the back of, all the darkened parking lots she had to drag me across, all the fool’s gold we have already lost and the blood money we were yet to outlive had sealed us within a tiny universe all our own, so fragile and whole that we simply could not be kept apart for long. There was no blade or bullet hungry enough, no curse or quarrel quiet enough, no Nazi needle sly enough to call its flaws and shatter it all on the wind.

 
I don’t always like to admit it, but when I’m right, I’m right. Delivered now from those freakish foreign shores, I am grateful to say that we are happily hunkered down once more in the makeshift ravages of domestic bliss and still going strong. But every day I look inside to pray: fail me not, oh gypsy blood. Let us continue to drift free across the seven seas as one, ‘till death does its part and nothing’s left but a message in a bottle, destined for the broken brave.

Photography, words, narration © Copyright Jac Kritzinger.

Music © Copyright Albertus van Rensburg.