Open letter to the small town of Steynsburg, South Africa: Why back to China?

Many of our friends have asked us why we decided to return to China ... I am sure many less intimate friends have silently wondered the same question from the sidelines.

Well, basically, since shortly after shaking off the euphoria of seeing Africa's beautiful blue skies; breathing her sweet air; again being awed by her billions of stars at night; re-acquainting ourselves with her motherly smells and comforting sounds and for the first time in a long time again feeling part of a culture we know and understand we started discovering that our feelings were mostly not reciprocated - from neither friends nor, sadly, from our closest family. Superficially everything was OK, but deep down there was sooo much animosity that even we, in our euphoria, could not pretend to the opposite for more than 6 months.

Somehow a gap had developed and somehow the bridges seemed to have collapsed beyond understanding and repair during the 5 preceding years that we were away. Somehow we seemed to have changed (grown?), somehow most people we knew before seemed to have remained where we left them when we got on that first plane out of SA. 

For the 1st 4 months or so we were ensconced in our idyllic home, on the outskirts of town, isolated from the inherent, in-bred Ugly around us. The two business promises that convinced us back were broken in this time but still we did not suspect the real motives. When we devised a new plan to make a living, with the sole aim of doing good and helping out the poor of our community where we decided to make our home, we were happy and, thinking well of ourselves, we went into this with gusto, especially after numerous locals stopped us on the street and promised support.

The whole situation changed the moment we emerged from our little house on the outskirts of town and actually started doing what we spoke to locals about for the preceding 4 months.

Suddenly we were people from outside, suddenly we were (said to us to our faces) "the Sinners on whom God shall have no mercy and whose business we will not support". Suddenly we were people who were trying to close down older, more established businesses whilst we were really just trying to ask a fairer price for our products, thus helping the many poor people in town. Suddenly and out of the blue a best friend and business neighbour, in his drunkenness,  started shouting horrible, below the belt abuse at people entering our new business at night  ....

We were robbed and broken in to more than once a year, we were told to "Go back to Europe where shit like you belong" ... Our animals were harassed when we were not at home and people would drive by in the middle of the night shining their lights into our bedroom and waking us with their hooters. During the day,  people we know would walk and drive past us, or stand in front of one of us in queue and and when we greeted them would not even acknowledge our existence.

In the end we could come to no other conclusion than that the source of the revulsion the community felt for us, living quietly on the outskirts of town and doing nothing but an attempted good in a poor town, was the fact of our sexual orientation.

We did not want to believe that in a country like SA, with a most liberal constitution guaranteeing our status as a same-sex couple, people could behave like this.

The evidence, however, proved us wrong.

That is why we returned to China. She is a so-called communist state with all that might entail in the minds of the unenlightened, brainwashed and paranoid, but she is a place of true freedom where we live safely, happily and above all openly as a loving, single-sex couple, where people accept us for who and what we are and judge us only on what we bring to the betterment of the local community.

One thing I have to add, and there with admit my own skewed preconceptions, is that the one group of people in Steynsburg who accepted us fully, showed us true friendship, opened their homes to us and supported us all the way were the ultra-conservative farmers. To you guys, thank you. You have taught me a lot about taking off one's own blinkers!