Batavia.

Dear you,

You make me feel like one pre-menstrual mess. You place my closest relative two hours and a traffic jam away. Grandmother is only 5 hours away. That’s only about 2 additional hours, give or take. Do you realise how close I am to jumping on a train each weekend to run away from your neon lights?

I know I’m stubborn to insist on walking on your streets despite running into a pathway of flies and rubbish, rebelling against a land development authority that doesn’t exist. I skip the potholes and the rubble you call a pedestrian walk like it’s a game I used to play on colored tiles. Grey means safe. Black means I just walked into a pile of trash. But I still do it just because it gets me a little angrier each day…. which inadvertently makes me happy.

Like a nanny, you take care of the kids and the lazy on the sidewalks of your junctions. So you raise resilient children, living on the margins of your capitalists, wanting the very same things. And every year or so when they feel like playing around with economics and welfare by increasing the profit margins of their oil companies, your roads are swarmed with demonstrators without a cause. You can do better than this. How can you let the machinations of these emperors run?

Still, you do things each day that tilt my head skywards with every passing skyscraper. I’m transfixed by the glass panes which in the morning seem to absorb dawn’s rainbow coloured skies and in the evening seem to preserve its turquoise and blue afternoons within its panes. The little things you do: a row of flags flirting with the wind in jewel shades across the highways to greet the coming of another president and another trail of disappointment. How will you break our heart?

At least this empty house contains my hollowness. And I know when I leave it’ll follow me there. It’ll contain all the things you make feel and you make me feel so angry, giddy, alone, frustrated, enchanted and overwhelmed. I think it’s called feeling alive.

I want to be in five places right now, at the same time. But that’s half a lie.

I have 11 days left and all those 11 small little days would rather be spent here within you.

Most Persuasive Reason To Send Me On A 3-Hour Trip to Bandung at 7AM

Okay I’m convinced.

Modern Condition.

I’ve lost count of how many weeks have gone by. I do know that there are 43 days left. One entire month and a bit left. I’m okay. I’ve managed to settle down alright, partly because global cities are similar wherever you go:

The glamour. The dirt. The glazed and averted eyes. The cliffs of chrome and glass. The marble fortresses. The rivers of tin and steel. Different flavours of the same pollution. The kabuki faces. The nomads. The pot bellies and the empty stomachs.

The irony.

The distance between squalor and Department of Justice & Human Rights is roughly four metres. In four metres lies an abyss of letters and punctuations. I’m losing faith in the Bureaucracy. I still believe in Democracy though. I have been reminded where I came from and that has tempered much of my ideals. Identity is an individual expression but it is more contextually sensitive than we readily admit. It is defined by the spaces we occupy, always defined in contradistinction to this…Other. I think I’m making sense.

I don’t know. I’ll always be a strange kid wherever I go. That’s okay. There’s plenty of misfits here. Most of them seem to be working under the same office.

So it’s alright. I’ll be fine.

I can do this adulthood thing.

Gutterflower.

There are people here who live at crossroads: street children, women and men who live at the junctions. When the lights turn red they hawk their wares - whatever they can sell - from songs, toys, water and warm bodies. When the cars desert the streets they walk back to their houses made of zinc roofs and thin sheets of wood. From far away they look like matchboxes stacked one on top of the other, hidden behind the bushes just off the highway.

Sentinels.

As my bus turns around the roundabout this morning, Monas rises into view. Grey outlines emerge against a gauzy radiant white sky as though they were transparent shadows flipped upright. To the left the bulbous dome and minarets of the Istiqlal Mosque nudge through. To the right the intricate spires of the Cathedral thrust itself upwards as if in answer. Like sentinels standing quietly in silence, they face the giants of Bureaucracy and Business. It’s squat in comparison. But against a pearly canvas, they gleam ethereal and luminous with all its faith and all in harmony.

The discords you hear are the din of the little people and the little day. If they would tilt their head skyward and gaze upon this light and surrender to its height, maybe they’d hear it too.

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.

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.

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.

Of Dots & Ladybugs

Yesterday I saw a dot matrix printer.

A DOT MATRIX PRINTER!

It prints by punching dots of ink - usually black. Cheap and good and economical! The letters looked like little pixel fonts. A dot matrix printer is possibly one of the oldest type of printers out there, dating back to the 1970s. It’s so old! A gigantic machine - klunky and clumsy. They used an Epson dot matrix printer for almost everything in this silly bureaucracy. Hard - that’s how we like our data.

Still it looked ancient! I wonder what happens when one of these monsters break.

I wonder if Epson still have the spare parts. I wonder if they even still make them.

I wonder if they have stocked up an entire warehouse with rows and rows of dot matrix printers. Use them and throw away.

I wonder if they have a special dot matrix printer man specially trained in dotty matrices to come and fix them right again.

I wonder where he lives.