Stereotypical.

“Hey Singaporean!” he said.

The day before he had denounced to the entire floor that Singaporeans are frigid, pompous, think too highly of themselves, gives awful service and is made of fake smiles. I’m guessing that was an insult to me but I have no reason to be offended. I laugh.

Stereotypes are a form of survival mechanism. It allows us to judge beforehand and approach situation carefully when we don’t have the complete information. But that does not justify its truthfulness, or rather lack of it. I thought about what Singaporeans think of Indonesian: how we’re hardly punctual, messy, childish, inconsistent, corrupt, easily deceived and has a dysfunctional state. Non-chinese Indonesians overseas are maids. Our Muslims are militant and narrow minded. How we’re so horribly uneducated. They may reflect a grain of truth, but it is just a grain amplified by ignorance and xenophobic hostility. They are not universal laws.

Remember that.

I have met gracious, funny and lovable Singaporeans as much as I have met punctual Indonesians who follows the law. Our Muslim population are predominantly tolerant, open-minded and educated lot. They just don’t make the evening news, internationally.

Bigotry is an argument that cannot be appealed by logic. I don’t quite grasp why these adjectives attach themselves so firmly to nationalities. What does that make me? I am neither of these things. Similar life conditions in the same country create a series of repeated response mechanisms that over time become the norms of its society. But individually? It’s a fallacy of composition and division. Are they relevant? Are they valid?

I think not.

Mall-Walking

I visited 7 malls yesterday. 7 malls! While you might think that is nothing compared to a trek through Orchard Road, these malls are gigantic okay and twice as glamorous. It’s equivalent to visiting 7 Vivo cities but they are miiiiiiiiiiles apart from each other. Count the i’s. That’s how far they are.

Cecil and I got into all sorts of shenanigans. Really, freaking, hilarious. I don’t think I can divulge them, lest I reveal the actual nature of my job (which by the way gets more amazing and more confusing each day). Between the two of us we ended up buying yummy juices, fancy biscuits, a really fudgy slice of chocolate cake, underwear and a belt. The job dictates it, we say. Haha this internship is causing me to go into deficit. The parental subsidies are barely enough to keep me safely afloat, covering me in cases of food and transportation emergencies. And this? This is costing me more than I thought it would!

Let’s just say this is like espionage combined with a little bit of paparazzi and plenty of writing and magic dust. I’m probably making this up. It’s frustrating, excruciating and bloody bewildering. Sometimes I’m unsure why they’ve picked me to do this. But it’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s ridiculous. So… it’s okay, it’s all good. It’s all good, really.

In the end, we were very tired by the time we reached the office at 7-8ish. My feet shriveled up into raw pink slabs inside my heels. We ordered up some noodles for dinner in the office, took cabs home. I collapsed into my bed in my work clothes. Disgusting I know.

So that’s my day.

Be Still My Heart

This could be a brand new start.

Compulsion

“So he went his way and was alone. But the way of the world was past belief, as he saw the strange entanglements of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear, the ultimate fear of death, that made men mad. So always he must move on, for if he stayed, his neighbors wound the strangling of their fear and bullying round him. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness.”

” A dangerous phenomenon in the world is a man of narrow belief, who denies the right of his neighbour to be alone.”

- The Man Who Died, D H Lawrence

I’m trying to understand what this means. What does it mean to you?

Lie, Live & Let Go.

When it comes to you, I’ll get bored, repulsed, distracted or forgetful one day. It’s a matter of hours. When it comes to me, it’s a matter of seconds to flit from one fancy to the next.

But those are awful little lies and in white lies, we dearly trust.

I am bored, thoroughly repulsed, easily distracted and, soon enough, forgetful.
This is not a lie and in truths, we doubt.

So long.

This Is How We Roll.

You cannot say that you have lived in Jakarta until you’ve tasted, smelled and felt what the public transportation system is like. I don’t mean the legendary traffic jams where cars really do slow down to the speed of a nonagenarian with arthritis in its knees and bunions on its feet. Combine that with the mass rapid transit and now you know how to really live. So let me describe what the transportation system is like:

At 6 o’clock I must leave the house. At best, I can leave at 6:15 because at 6:30 EVERYBODY gets in to their car and make their way to work at the same bloody time and I would be very late. I flag an angkutan kota, a tiny tin can on wheels to take me to the main road at Pulo Mas for Rp 2000. With the rise in fuel prices, it’s costing me Rp2500 now. You do the math okays?

Then I take Transjakarta all the way to Harmoni. The Bus Way, as the local calls it, is an adorable bastardization between a tram, a bus, a subway and a regular train. I’m probably confusing you. Let’s just say that it operates on an exclusive dedicated lane like a tram, but it is demarcated with bricks. Buses travel on them. It has automatic doors like a subway. It has a dude who guides people out and regulates the people coming in like a train station master. Tada!

At Harmoni, I get off the bus and join the mass of people heading over to Block M, one of the primary corridors. Here you really notice urban planning at work…. Or rather lack of it. Both the administrative and financial centers congregate along Thamrin-Sudirman stretch and Rasuna-Said which lies parallel to it. Those many cubicles need to be filled somehow! Gigantic portions of Indonesia’s largest earners funnel their way into this small area. The little people stuff themselves on to their Bus Way, the Bis Kota and the Mikrolet. Those higher up in the food chain come rolling in their cars because once you can afford the installments for an air-conditioned rhinoceros, public transportation is oh-so-beneath you. Oh you won’t go back.

Morning traffic is regulated in parts of these areas where you can only enter if you have at least 3 passengers in your car. Evening traffic is not regulated. These cubicles have to empty themselves at the end of the day remember. Thus we trickle out on to the streets to join the molasses of tins and wheels.

In the evening, all of these people unite at Harmoni again. Harmoni interchange, as sweet as it sounds, is a small tin can of death suspended on metal stilts over putrid grey waters. Overcapacity is not a quantifiable limit by weight or by number of commuters. Overcapacity is a fervent prayer that these sheets of metal would not fold unto itself like a house of cards. I laugh but it wouldn’t be very funny really.

The queue here is like human Tetris, each piece filling whatever empty space before them. These little sardines push their way with their baggage, their insecurities and their weary self so they can get a little closer to home. It’s a test of patience. You feel so utterly helpless. All you can do is step a little forward as the mass moves along. There really is no point in getting angry or sad. It would be a waste of energy. You want to learn Zen? Here’s the best battlefield.

Clutching your bags and fearing for pickpockets, you sway along as the bus careen forward and swerve into clumsy curves. I expect my biceps and triceps would be well toned by the end of all of this. They better be.

It takes up a huge chunk of my day, like every single one of orang Jakarta. This is how we live. So pardon me sir if we haven’t thought about these faceless enemies of terror. Our daily terror lies on our roads. I hope in time you’ll see that we’re not so dysfunctional after all but that we operate excellently on the margins.

There are some things that do not require an explanation. I’m not sure why I’ve chosen to accept to get paid at less than 5 dollars a day and get physically assaulted by the transportation system daily. I had the choice to stay comfortably numb or to have my head and my cardiac muscles ache a little too much each day. This was a calculated whim. I trust the powers of cognitive dissonance to tell me that there is no place I should be but here.

It’s working.

Dangnabit.

Arrogance in Peach-Flavoured Light

Everyday I make my way through the heart of this capital, coursing through the administrative and financial artery of Indonesia. It’s a tiny stretch, really, in comparison to the scale it commands. It is studded with skyscrapers, prerequisites to our dear development. The new ones shoots from the earth like cliffs of glass but its foundations are still the same, a compact of blood and mud. Look at Sampoerna Strategic Square, a bastion of concrete furnished with the Imperialist touches. Perhaps it’s true that behind these fortresses lie panic and emptiness.

Still it’s a pretty sight. And in the morning light, they look like alien sentinels. Morning light has a way to make things more poignant that they should. It hides away the many corners of urban life to reveal something new. I seem to notice different buildings as though they had sprouted out overnight even though the mold and rot tells me it has been there longer than I have been. Today I noticed this beautiful grey cathedral with its ornate turrets rising round the corner. In the peach-coloured light, the ditch turns a glassy bluish grey, like translucent jade. But as the water shifts in eery stillness, it swirls the detritus from its bed and the leaves and the trash seem to sparkle green, orange and yellow. Like opal. Peach flavoured opals. In the army base, rows and rows of dusty green shoulders are awashed in the same soft light, softening hard muscles underneath.

If I have to see too many sunrises, it’s not so bad.

Oh Quagmire.

Time does not permit me to say much because if I revealed to you the situation where I am writing this you’d understand that it’s rather Unethical! I’m not rocking this city very well but I am learning how to one day at a time. Last night I stepped outside my office to be greeted by a black river of cars and motorcycles. The city plunges into dark within minutes. The roads are lighted by the grace of headlights of the thousand mechanical bees and buffaloes that trickles out of these granite and glass cages. Roughly three people die on the road each day. You do the math.

So far everyday is something new.

On Monday I met with an economist with all the juicy details of this little fledgling democracy.

On Tuesday I learned about our pathetic health care policies, best described as ensuring every citizen is given a cuddle by a public health official before you conk off to Nevereverland.

On Wednesday, I get a glimpse of what the view is like amongst the highest rungs on this society. Though the air is convoluted, it smells really nice.

On Thursday, a smelly old man offers me Korean health products.

On Friday I met with a host of physicists who if they’re not careful with their presumptions, may just make enemies of all economists, anthropologists and political scientists with their arrogance. I can tell you now that it would be a funny fight.

On Friday, I met with a host of politicians who, when tapped on their temples, rings like a hollow amphora. And just like an empty vessel, they’d gladly fill themselves with voices of other people who dare to call themselves an academic. Anyone whose theories they’re able to absorb and with such a limited capacity and limited patience, it’s enough to give you a rude shock into the sheer obscenities in parliament.

Why the heck am I majoring in political science again?
As one friend curtly pointed out, it’s just an incestuous circle anyways.

Last night they tell me the demonstrations have started. My heart squeezed a little glee. I’d imagine it’d smell like sweat. I wanted to see it. I’ve been too long sheltered inside small city-states to get excited of the promise of seeing blood spilling across our national monument: all for the escalating price of black gold.

What does development mean? What about equality and what of equity? What road maps should we follow?
Quagmire is a really funny word isn’t it?

But I was hungry and I was tired and I had a throbbing headache and carrying too many things and I didn’t feel like braving it through the traffic.

So, roadside kids flagged my taxi. Having bought my air-conditioned safety, I made my way home clutching my handbag and my laptop ever closer, feeling my way in the dark.

I’m Alive

Whenever I get on planes, I imagine how it would crash. I imagine the kind of airlessness inside a tin can of death and time hovers on the mortal and the ever after. Before I know it, it lands and I’m spared the horrible movie playing inside my head.

In other word I’m alive and well, children! This city has treated me well. Welcome to Indonesia where the food is better, the traffic is worse, the air smells funkier and the people oh so quirkier. It’s been what… 5-6 days now? My limbs are still in their rightful places. I’m okay. I can rock this town.

I came with the father, tagging along wherever he goes. I’ve met with soo many different people. They’re all really really fascinating. Everyday is always something new. Two days ago some grody old man started talking to me on the angkutan kota (a “well-worn” mini bus) and started selling his Korean health machine thingymajig. He had teeth like broken fences, smells strange and had white wisps of cotton for hair. He was creeeeeeeepy. His hand grazed my side at one point. *shudders* haha okay sooo many more stories and I would write it all here. I have it all recorded in my laptop which is beginning to sound like an epic tale about a small-town girl’s misadventures in the city. But NEVERMIND I shall probably tell you more my slight obsession with transportation systems here some other time.

Oh right I should probably tell you that I am writing this in an internet cafe. We’re still looking to set up internet at home so if you know of a good internet plan in Jakarta, drop a comment okays? I am rather enjoying this laptopless life. The electricity tries to get funky with me and I was electrocuted several times. I’m actually secretly enjoying this life without emails and internet. Now you can’t track me down with inane requests when you don’t have a bloody corporate identity detail for me to follow (rawr)!

Hokay. Work starts Monday. I am terrified and really really excited too.

Adios~

p.s. I can cross the road now. A+ for me.

Static.

Sayonara!

Most of all, this girl needs to grow up.

Midnight Hour.

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;… In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”
- Soren Kierkegaard

This space can be read by all.

How transparent do you think I really am?
How much of it is the truth?

This, my midnight hour? Think.

Theatrics.

The purpose of Art is to illustrate. Its aim rests on clarity: to amplify and make vivid an image, a statement or a theme. Its purpose is not to obscure. That is what politicians do. Artists do not make things confusing, rather they untangle the complicated into something coherent. So scriptwriters, whatever dimension you choose to give your characters and your plot, show it in what they say and do. It is the job of the audience to interpret what they have seen but ultimately the responsibility rests on you to illustrate this through the words. A director’s responsibility would be to translate these words into a composition, free to interpret whatever is written. An actor breathes through these words into action. An actor does not act with a mask. Rather the mask is merely a thin veil where disbelief is suspended, confined by the elevated stage. An actor reveals snatches of real emotions, what has been felt before. There your movement is true, veiled and vulnerable all at once.

Before we talk using terms such as “depth” and “between the lines” and “substance” and “complex” recklessly, remember your primary aim - to make visible and make clear a message. My expectation as an audience is that your message is worth its $15 price tag. Is that clear?

Made of Red, White and Something Else

I did not submit my piece on hope for my homeland. To put it simply, I think it’s icky - for lack of a more appropriate word. It’s not that atrocious. But framed in a book? Even if the only readers are the writers and the editors themselves, I don’t want it. This is the condensed version of what I wrote:

Someone called me a traitor for having lived most of my life outside of my homeland. That jerk.

How can I lay claim to having hopes for my homeland when it is not my home?

My relationship with my countrymen revolves largely around guilt, created by the false notion of identity that is incongruent with who I am. I’m going to pretend that made sense, thankyouverymuch. What does it really mean to be a Citizen of Some State? Is it level of contribution to our dear GDP? Is it cultural consumption? s it political participation? Is it possession of capital? Is it about family?

I think it’s about family. If so I belong to a large complicated family connected by legal strings and hereditary diabetics. I do not belong to a country. What have I to inherit? I may just be a product deficient of civic education or national education or what have you. I consider it a blessing frankly. I just feel out of place in the national sphere, be it here nor there.

Andrew Largeman in Garden State said it best:

“You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone….You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back.It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

It’s just a constant state, not of anger or pain but just longing. It’s about wanting to have roots for all the frivolous, and all at once the most humane, reasons: just so you could never float away too far from gravity and too close into the sun.

All the strings that tie to me are those of by kin or by friendship. They pull me closer to the ground. But all the spaces that makes me feel like home? They lie beyond these political demarcations suspended in the international airspace: an enclave of 300 square feet in the sky.

This is life of the modern nomadic: feeling like you belong to Someplace Somewhere Somehow but never here nor there. With “internationally mobile work force” and “globalization of labour” and “transnational flows of human capital” - terms that mean the movement of people - I’m sure you’ll feel it too. In the coming generation, this is what we’d all come to.

Does this make me a traitor to my own country? I think not.

Let me float on the margins. I’ve found some of the most wonderful misfits here.

This is where I belong.

The Other 20%

Meant yes yes yes! Oh bunions here I come.

HAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAAHAHAHA

What on earth did I get myself into?

The One with the Baseball Cap.

Today I spoke with a boy after 6 long years, a boy whose name had meant furtive phone calls, shy smiles and then some. We talked about the people we used to be, the places we left and the people we knew. We talked about how we faded into the silence with all our awkward growing pains. I think I’m the jerk who stopped talking first. I’m sorry!

So we talked about the things we missed out on in each other’s lives. He tells me he misses this country. But it’s not the country that you miss. It’s our little colony atop Toh Tuck and Bukit Tinggi. From up above, our microcosm was sheltered from the ground below. I know so. I live here and I feel home sick for that place on a hill that no longer exist. Its constituent parts had dispersed with a burst, lodging the shrapnel pieces all over the world. I miss it too.

We’re a little taller, a little less shy and a whole lot different and yet we’re still two kids talking on MSN late into the night because neither one of us can sleep. Words flowed out easily like an open faucet because like Corrinne Bailey Rae once said:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Don’t you think it’s strange?

There is a greater magnetic force that’ll bring us back to a place somewhere in the world just for a little while. It’ll happen when all of us have grown a little more and garnered the ability to jump on planes on a heart’s whim. Because that’s what families do: reunite and disperse in bursts of laughter, tears and pain.