The Customs Saga, or It's a Long Story

The Duke and I walked up to the immigrations desk at the Indira Gandhi International Airport with smiles on our faces: we were leaving India! And going to America! Where there are no cats! The officer on duty, portly and bearded, glanced at my passport briefly, in the manner of bored immigrations officers everywhere, before stamping it. As he looked at The Duke’s passport, frowned, and started flipped pages, my stomach sank. I knew it wasn’t a good sign.

It wasn’t. Remember when my brothers had passport trouble trying to come to Indonesia? They had new passports issued when they returned to Delhi--new passports, entirely blank of, say, an Indian visa or entry stamp.

“Where is his Indian visa?” the officer asked.

Calmly, I explained the situation in detail, showing the passport’s date of issue, a mere month before, and place of issue, the U.S. Embassy in Delhi. I told him that the family was moving, never to return to India, and his old passport was packed away somewhere, probably winging its way towards America.

The officer stared at me. “He needs an Indian visa,” he said, shortly.

I stared back. Had he been listening at all? “He doesn’t have one in this passport.” I repeated my explanation.

“Where is his old passport?”

I repeated myself all over again.

The officer thought for a moment. “He needs an Indian visa.”

I thought about explaining yet again and went with the more sensible option instead. “Is there a supervisor I can talk to?”

So that is how The Duke and I found ourselves in a back room of the immigrations department, arguing with yet another portly, bearded, and utterly bored Indian immigrations officer.

“He needs an Indian visa,” the supervisor told me.

I sighed, and began the story again: “He’s been living here in Delhi. His new passport was issued at the U.S. Embassy here. His old passport is—"

Holding up one hand, the supervisor interrupted me. “Listen to me. Listen to me! He needs an Indian visa!”

“Yes, yes, I know. But he doesn’t have one in this passport, and our plane leaves in an hour. Is there anything I can do?”

“Listen to me. Listen to me! He needs an Indian visa!”

I think I can be excused for snapping a little bit here: “No, you listen to me. He does. Not. Have. His. Indian. Visa. In. This. Passport. What can we do so our flight does not leave without us?”

The supervisor thought for a moment. “You can show me his old passport with his Indian visa.”

I bit down, hard, to suppress the scream rising in my throat. “Maybe there’s another solution?” I ventured, after a moment or two of deep breathing. “Maybe there’s a…a fee he can pay.” I crossed my fingers and hoped my hint would be taken. “You know, like a fine, for the trouble we’ve caused the customs department. What do you think? $100?”

“He needs an Indian visa.”

I gave up on subtlety. “I have $200 cash in my wallet. I’ll give it to you right now this second if you’ll stamp his passport.”

Bribery in India is a fine art, an elaborate negotiation of power and status, one that I had clearly just mistaken for a mere exchanging of cash. The supervisor looked at me disdainfully and came back with, “Listen to me. Listen to me. He needs an Indian visa. Otherwise we don’t know whether he’s in the country legally.”

I wondered, shouldn’t the fact that he’s in the country now prove that he, at one point at least, had an Indian visa? As I did, inspiration struck. “Fine,” I nearly snarled. “Let’s pretend he doesn’t have an Indian visa. Let’s pretend he is here illegally. Deport him!” My shouting and wild arm motions were attracting attention now. “Just deport him! He’s a criminal! He’s got no visa! Throw him out of your country! We’re never coming back here anyway, we promise. So just deport him!”

The supervisor would have none of this. “No, no,” he said. “Listen to me. If he were here illegally, we would not deport him. We would put him in jail. He needs an Indian visa.”

“Jail?!” I shouted. “So because he’s here using your resources illegally, you’re going to keep him here illegally? That doesn’t make any sense!” I was nearly hyperventilating now, crazy with the thought of The Duke not allowed to leave India and/or in jail. (I'm not sure which is worse.)

After about fifteen more minutes—I kid you not—of lobbing back and forth “He needs an Indian visa” and “He doesn’t have an Indian visa in this passport”, during which the supervisor told me to listen to him at least six more times, and also suggested, in response to my agonized “what can I do?”, that I simply leave The Duke behind, at which point I pondered whether the jail cell that would likely be mine after punching a customs official would at least be next to The Duke’s, the supervisor conceded that perhaps, perhaps, a photocopy of The Duke’s Indian visa would suffice.

With that news, I sprinted to the airport’s only pay phone, only to learn that a. The Duke didn’t know our father’s cell phone number and b. there is no 411 in Delhi. Nearly panicked, I finally found the number to my family’s hotel at the airport’s information desk, and, upon hearing my dad’s voice, burst into tears.

“Dad,” I sobbed into the phone, “they won’t let us leave! We’re going to be trapped in this hot, chaotic, nonsensical, utterly godforsaken country forever!”

My dad instantly agreed to drive the photocopy to the airport. With only about forty minutes to our flight, the twenty-minute drive would mean cutting it close. I went back to the Singapore air desk to tell them about our predicament and extract a promise that the plane would not leave without us.

The employee at the Singapore desk was very solicitous, promising that of course the flight wouldn’t leave without us, if he could, um, if I didn’t mind, please, take our baggage tags.

I knew what that meant and, luckily, managed to snatch them back from his hand just in time. I argued with him for a few minutes about whether or not I should relinquish my baggage tags, and thus my guarantee of getting on the plane, and was just in the middle of clarifying, loudly, that “a customer who has just paid five THOUSAND dollars for a seat on the plane should not be left behind because a set of IDIOTIC immigrations officers from YOUR COUNTRY, SIR cannot solve a SIMPLE problem, which would be PERFECTLY EASY if they, like every OTHER nation in the 21st century, had computerized records at customs OR even a basic attitude of CUSTOMER SERVICE” when a man in an expensive suit walked up behind me and called me by name.

This man, as far as I’m concerned, was a hero, but really he was an employee from the exclusive hotel where my family had stayed the night before; his job was greeting arriving customers, and, occasionally, rescuing departing customers. Smoothly, calmly, he pried The Duke’s passport—but not his baggage tags—from my grip and marched off to sweet-talk the supervisor. When my dad arrived, photocopy in tow, the suited man retreated into the backroom and, after fifteen minutes of heaven-only-knows-what, during which my dad and I played keepaway with the Singapore Airlines employees trying to grab my baggage tags, the suited man emerged, with a surly supervisor agreeing that yes, maybe we could leave India.

Triumphant, and mentally taking back everything I said about customer service—the bit about computerized records still stands--The Duke and I went back to the original officer, who, still bored and barely looking at the passport, glanced over at his boss and stamped the necessary documents. Trying to be good winners, we thanked him graciously and were turning to go when he stopped us.

“When will you return to India again?” he asked.

The Duke and I stared in disbelief. I knew he hadn’t been listening. All our resolve to be good winners flew out the window. “Never!” we shouted, nearly in unison, sprinting down the hallway behind the Singapore Airlines employees, waving our baggage tags and laughing with the joy of our soon-to-be freedom from Indian bureaucracy, and also cats. “Never!”

***

No saga is complete without an epilogue. A mere hour later, my mom and Klement arrived at the airport, where they, too, spent nearly two hours fighting with immigrations officers over the exact same dilemma, just this time with Klement’s passport. (Listen to me, people. Listen to me! Computerized records.) A mere five hours later, The Duke and I arrived in Singapore, ready to begin backpacking across Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia. A mere nine days later, The Duke and I landed in San Francisco, where the immigrations officer on duty glanced through our passports, gave us an entry stamp and, looking up briefly, said, “Welcome home.” And a mere nine days and one second later, I cried.

The Martian in My Meal

Most of the food I ate in Cambodia and Vietnam was delicious. I loved Vietnamese pho, or noodles (though I didn't love my inability to pronounce the word, which is something like "fuh" but high and possibly falling tone), I loved Vietnamese beef dishes (strange since I usually avoid anything beef in the States), and I ate a tomato and chicken and pineapple soup in Cambodia that destroyed my desire to eat anything else ever again, ever (which might be a good basis for a dieting company).

There was one notable exception to the rule, though. At a small noodle stand in Cambodia, where I had ordered a seemingly harmless bowl of chicken noodle soup, I found an alien in my noodles.

Now, before you think I'm needlessly exaggerating for the sake of the story, like how I claim that the Three Nephites once rescued me and Alea from being lost near Sandy, and how the "alien" was probably just a squid, take a look.


What the heck is that thing? Now imagine you find that in your soup. What's worse, it was buried under the noodles, so that I had eaten about 2/3 of the bowl by the time I stumbled upon the extraterrestrial at the bottom.

What did I do about it, you may ask? Well, I'm no Sigourney Weaver: I shrieked. Then I fished it out of my soup and took a picture. Then I finished the noodles. Hey, touring Cambodia makes a girl hungry.

Whose Fault Is This?

In the past three days, I've been in India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Cambodia. Somewhere in those three days, I've picked up a nasty cold, which has, strangely enough, spread to my eye; in addition to a runny nose, cough, and persistent headache, I now have a symptom I've never experienced before: I can't see out of my right eye because it's covered in pus. The poor Duke has already suffered in-detail descriptions and displays of this probable pink eye, which I find strangely fascinating as well as disgusting, but now, upon realizing that I have a whole wide audience upon which to inflict my pain, I will tell you all this: I can see, and feel, the pus filming over my eyeball and congealing in the corners. When I wipe it away, it looks, and feels, just like snot--watery, greenish-yellow lumps. It's like my eye noticed that my nose was running and wanted to join the fun. It is so. freaking. disgusting. And, let me tell you, wonders of the world are slightly less, well, wondrous, when you have to keep blowing your eye so you can actually see them.

I blame India. I usually do.

Stranded in Singapore

I left Indonesia on Sunday, with possibly the worst flight schedule ever: an hour-long flight to Jakarta, a four-hour layover in Jakarta, and hour-and-a-half-long flight to Singapore, a thirty-hour layover in Singapore, and a five-and-a-half-hour flight to Delhi.

(No, come to think of it, I've had much worse flight schedules. A certain eight-hour layover in Charles de Gaulle springs to mind. Or maybe the ten-hour layover in Taipei. Or what about that time I scheduled a flight through O'Hare in the winter?)

In any case, my long-distance travels went smoothly, and, unusually, I didn't cry once, not even when Garuda Indonesia made me pay overweight baggage fees, not even when Singapore Airlines made me pay overweight baggage fees, not even when Jet Airways made me unpack and repack my carry-on and throw away my special SPF 45 facial sunscreen, by far the most expensive cosmetic item I own. (Okay, so I teared up a little bit as I begged, but it did no good.) And, luckily for me, nowhere in all this baggage paying and inspection did anyone think to weigh my backpack; had they even picked up they would have noticed that it was at least forty pounds, far over the standard carry-on weight limit.


My layover in Singapore, far from the being the utter waste of time I had anticipated and grumped about, was the highlight of the past week, if not month: Singapore is such an utter contrast from Indonesia that it seems almost eerie it's only a few hundred miles away. I wandered around the city in a daze, utterly awed at the, to me, amazing features of the city: it had crosswalks! And street signs! And maps! And sidewalks! And bus stops! And a Metro! And DRINKING FOUNTAINS! And a LIBRARY! And PEANUT BUTTER M&MS!!!!!


Phew. I'm getting all wide-eyed and excited again. I barely slept during this day in Singapore; half of that was the paint fumes and mattress coils in my hostel dormitory, both of which prevented me from really settling in, but the other half was the sheer high of being in a city that stayed awake past eleven p.m. I don't think I'd enjoy a longer stay in Singapore--in fact, I know I wouldn't; of all my trips there in high school, every time I stayed past three days or so the novelty wore off, and instead of appreciating the cleanliness and organization, I started fearing the obsessively perfectionist culture and dictatorial government that makes it so--but my twenty-four hours in efficiency and order made an ideal oasis between states of chaos, especially if by "oasis" I mean "tantalizing preview of things to come." Just think--two short weeks and several terrible flight schedules from now, I can eat all the peanut butter M&Ms I want, refreshing myself from public drinking fountains while crossing the street, in a crosswalk, on my way to a library. I can't wait.

A Conversation

Fellow English Teacher: Where do you usually get your hair cut in Semarang?

Petra: Well, I tried once at the Johnny Andrean salon in the mall, but I didn't like the cut. So since then I've gotten it cut by my mom, and in Bali.

FET: How often do you cut it?

Petra: I try to cut it every month and a half, maybe two months if I'm lazy.

FET: How long has it been since you cut it?

Petra: I guess about two months now.

FET: When are you going to cut it again?

Petra: Well, I might as well wait until next week when I'll be in India again, so my mom can cut it. She did a great job last time.

FET: So you're going to wait for longer than two months?

Petra: Yes, alas. I've been wanting to cut it for the last two weeks or so, though.

FET: Yes, you should have cut it two weeks ago. It looks very messy.

So that's what she was leading up to. Yes, folks, my colleagues are just that subtle. And just that kind.

Picture This

I went to the mall yesterday to print photos. (The news here, of course, is the printing of photos: I go to, or at least walk through, the mall a minimum of two times and maximum of, oh, six or seven times a day, including Sundays, and therefore nearly any story of this past year could begin with "I went to the mall yesterday." Lest you think I'm reverting to that brief phase in sixth grade when I thought the mall was a cool place to hang out, let me remind you that not only is the mall within seven minutes, on foot, of my house, it also includes the gym, the internet cafe, the bookstores, the grocery store, and the shortest, and most air-conditioned, path to church.)

This photo-printing booth in the mall has a display of photos they've printed. Most of those on display are high schoolers taking what the SLO and I refer to as "Asian pictures": cutesy poses, usually involving Churchhill's V sign, though with much less gravitas; cutesy stickers to accessorize the picture, mostly hearts, stars, teddy bears, and SpongeBob SquarePants; and cutesy backdrops, including everything from the pineapple under the sea to flowers to stars to beaches to, somewhat incongruously, Piet Mondrian paintings. (By the way, if you haven't seen my face superimposed on a Piet Mondrian painting, you haven't lived.)

In the midst of all that Asianness, one picture, front and center, caught my eye: the portrait my family took back in December, which I printed at this booth a few months back. I always suspected that having a white person around was good for business; now my suspicions are confirmed. Family, if you're reading this, forget all your plans for next year. Let's all stay in Asia and go into advertising!

Days of My Life

The day in Indonesia is divided into four parts: pagi or morning, siang, or mid-afternoon, sore, or late afternoon, and malam, or night. It may seem strange, to anyone unfamiliar with the tropics, to make such distinctions, but once you've been here you see the necessity. Morning is like morning everywhere, with day dawns breaking left and right, and the city beginning to stir around six a.m. Much as I complain, I like this time of day: with the sun not yet fully up, the air is still relatively cool, cool enough for the old Chinese man down the street to sit outside on his wicker chair, sarong hiked to his knees, and slowly, with dignity, nod his head at everyone who passes, and the hordes of freshly-bathed schoolchildren in freshly-ironed uniforms--red for elementary school, blue for middle school, and grey for high school--add an energy to the start of the day, an eager brightness that is gone a few hours later, as pressed clothes and spirits begin to droop in the tropical heat.

The heat really hits around ten, the time siang begins--this, then, is the "mad dogs and Englishmen" phase of the day, when everyone, meaning, mostly, me, is sluggish and sweaty and sleepy, wanting only to go home and nap under a fan. The less said about siang in this hot city, the better.

Sore is my absolute favorite, lasting from three-ish to sunset at six, which seems like a confusing and arbitrary chunk of time to the Western mind, at least until said mind experiences it, and then it's obvious and natural--of course those hours are different. Sore is bookended by calls to prayer, and something changes in the air during the three o'clock call, some slight shift in the temperature and the light which makes everyone start greeting each other with selamat sore instead of selamat siang, and which brings the old Chinese man out again, ready to greet the neighbors as they head home. Sore is cool again, almost cool enough to be pleasant, and as the sky darkens the bats come out, swooping low overhead, and, if you live in a neighborhood like mine, the muezzin keeps up a steady stream of goodness-knows-what from the mosque's loudspeakers, filling those hours between the calls with preaching and reading from the Qur'an and, as far as I can tell, trying to clear his throat. (I know Arabic sounds kind of like coughing, but, really, not that much.) Some people find the noise of the calls distracting and invasive, but I love it: the sound of Allahu akbar! echoing through the city stirs something in me, something deeply spiritual that I can't quite describe, and not even the fact that my local muezzin sounds exactly like Tom Waits can destroy the feeling.

For all this extended-evening period, night comes on fast. By the time the sunset prayer has ended, sunset, too, has ended; the night is as dark at six p.m. as at eleven p.m. It's rather disconcerting, this sudden sunset, like someone turned off a lamp; I find myself, every so often, going into a building just before six and coming out, a few minutes later, to wonder if, perhaps, my clock is broken and I spent more time inside than I thought. Malam is relaxed and quiet: by nine p.m., if not earlier, everyone is at home, watching T.V. or just hanging around on their porches, chatting peaceably, swatting mosquitoes, and waiting for bedtime and therefore the next morning. Early to bed and early to rise, they say; they must have been Indonesians.

I won't miss this emphasis on pagi-pagi, early morning, over malam-malam, late at night, but I've grown used to, and fond of, these four-part days. More especially, I'll miss sore, the bustle and the bats and the breeze, the projected invitations to come to prayer, to come to success. I'll never again, alas, settle for a simple English "evening."

Making a Difference

Miss Hannah: “So, what do you think about adoption?”

Student: “It’s bad.”

Miss Hannah: “Really? Why?”

Student: “Ummmmm...”

Miss Hannah: “What about if the child’s natural parents are dead? Isn’t it better for the child to be adopted?”

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “And what about if the couple can’t have children themselves? Wouldn’t it be better for them to adopt a child who needs it than be childless forever?”

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “And what about if the child’s natural parents were abusive or unable to take care of the child properly? Wouldn’t it be better for it to have parents who loved it and treated it right?”

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “And what about if the mother were an unwed teenager? Wouldn’t it be better for the child to be adopted by an older couple more capable of raising the child?"

Student: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: “So now what do you think of adoption? Isn’t it a valid option, in some situations?

Students: “Yes, I guess so.”

Miss Hannah: Would you ever adopt a child?”

Student: “No!”

Miss Hannah: “Why not?”

Student: “Because it’s bad.”

New Slang

Rolfo says that only I would get a pick-me-up out of learning new slang; I contend that if everyone knew what slang usage I was referring to, they, too, would find it almost unspeakably cool.

I stumbled across the construction in question on a t-shirt in Yogya; I was so enchanted by the words that I bought the t-shirt. (Because, really, isn’t cool slang worth a dollar?) It says, in so many words, saya ndak suka situ mbaca-baca tulisan ini. Kalo situ pengin mbeli aja sendiri, or, in translation, “I don’t like you reading this writing. If you want to, buy one yourself.”

Clever enough. The whole thing is very informal language: ndak is the central Javan adaptation of tidak, or “no”; kalo and pengin reflect recent vowel shifts in their spelling; mbaca-baca and mbeli are significant in that they use the Javanese verbal prefix N-, an assimilating nasal, instead of the more formal Indonesian meN-; aja is an informal version of saja, having, as is common in spoken Indonesian, dropped the initial s.

But all that is old slang, at least to me. The thing that really caught my eye was the word I translated as "you": situ. It's not technically a personal pronoun at all, but a term of spatial deixis. It means, literally, "there." So, again, "I don't like there reading this writing. If there wants to, buy one thereself."

Neat, huh? I mean, personal pronouns are a type of deixis, but spatial and social deixis are typically not so interchangeable. (Does anyone know another language that does this?) Apparently, though—and I’ve done my reading now—using “here” and “there” for “I” and “you” is becoming common in Indonesian youth language. Those crazy Indonesian youth! Here finds their language fascinating. Doesn't there?

For Spacious Skies

U.S. States My Students Guessed Were the Largest

In The Order That They Guessed Them

Canada
Mexico
Los Angeles
Virginia
Brazil
California
George W. Bush
Alaska

Spring Break Numero Tres

Spring break the third was occasioned by the Big Scary National Test that all twelfth graders must take to graduate. While my seniors, along with their other teachers, suffered and sweated and stressed, I waved goodbye and headed off for a week at the beach.

My life is good.

I have no amusing adventures to relate about this week of vacation because, frankly, I had no adventures. Quite the opposite: I did absolutely nothing. The SLO and I rented a $4 hotel room in the Kuta beach area, and then proceeded to spend the week doing what one does at a beach. For the SLO, blessed with wonderfully tannable skin, this involved lying on the beach. For me, blessed, or perhaps cursed, with Northern European ancestry, this involved lying on the beach, fully sunscreened and covered in several sarongs, looking therefore ready to enjoy the beaches in, say, Saudi Arabia. This also involved getting tired of the sun and heading away from the beach to browse in used bookstores, purchase books in used bookstores, read the books purchased in used bookstores, and return the books purchased and read, which, of course, began the cycle again. I blew a lot of money on paperbacks.

My life is really good.

Oh, and of course no trip to the beach would be complete without a hideous sunburn; the burn this time, on my back and shoulders and right arm and leg, was so bad that I’m still peeling, three weeks later. Those of you who have seen the pictures can agree: I have lowered my skin cancer onset age to, probably, 25.

My life, at least for the next three years, is good. Thank heaven for spring breaks.

Q&A

Questions My Students Asked Me, When Told They Could Ask Anything

What do you think of Indonesia?
How do you buy a gun in America?
Do you like Led Zeppelin?
Will Seung-Hui Cho's body be buried in America or sent back to Korea?
Why is your face so red?
"Sunburn"? What does that mean?
Do you have a boyfriend?
Do you really drink baby's blood in your church?
What Indonesian foods do you like?
When a woman has an abortion, doesn't she regret it?
Who would win in a fight: American rappers or the Japanese yakuza?

Here She Is, Miss(?) Central Java

You do two or two-and-a-half years in Java in which all you do is live with the people, write down everything, and try to figure out what the hell is going on...
-Clifford Geertz

Indonesia never ceases to amaze, surprise, and confuse me. Just when I think I'm getting the hang of things, slipping into a comfortable and understood routine, or, as Geertz put it, figuring out what the hell is going on, I find myself, along with a former fashion model, the director of tourism for Central Java, a professor at a local university, and a hairdresser, watching transsexuals strut down a runway, and taking notes on their beauty, dress, walk, poise, breasts, and overall worthiness to become Miss She-male Central Java 2007.


Somehow, in this fairly conservative Muslim country, where men and women generally don't hold hands or even hug in public, where drinking is rare and only for Christians, where immodesty is nearly unheard of, waria*, or male-to-female transwomen/transsexuals/transvestites, are generally accepted and, sometimes, even encouraged--this beauty pageant, for instance, was not a shabby back-alley affair, but set up and funded by the regional government, and hosted in the building of the city's Insitute for Women. Although these pageants have been protested by several conservative Islamic groups, the current Miss Waria Indonesia is a high-profile figure, who works with AIDS-awareness campaigns and writes confessional books, including her bestseller Jangan Lihat Kelaminku, or "Don't Look At My Genitals." And it's not like religion was absent from the evening, either--those of the judges and staff who were Christian gathered in the VIP room for a quick prayer before starting; during the pageant's introduction, we were greeted with the blessings of Allah called down on our heads; and one of the contestants, my personal favorite, was even wearing a headscarf and modest evening wear, like any good conservative Muslim girl should.


The pageant itself was pretty much par for the course: the contestants strutted down a runway in revealing clothing, using feathers and fans to flirt at the spectators; the judges argued in the back room about who looked more like a woman, #23 or #64--or, rather, who looked more like a hot woman; and the audience suffered through several loud, melodramatic, slightly off-key musical numbers, complete with backup dancers and fog machine. The audience was almost entirely other waria, growing drunker and more boisterous by the minute, although there were a few groups of friends and family, including young children, and at least one beamingly proud mother, an ancient, hunched-over woman in Javanese traditional dress who, every time her child was on stage, turned around to grin and tell us, "I'm so proud of my girl."


That granny may call them "girls," but, frankly, it was not always immediately evident; they were not, on the whole, as convincing as Thailand's famous lady-boys. Indonesians are usually small, but these girls were not: most, if not all, were taller than me, which is nearly impossible for women and rare even for men. Most also had broad shoulders and strong collarbones showing through their strappy evening gowns; the tiny former fashion model next to me kept making a tsk, tsk noise as she noted this, and I know she eliminated at least one contestant based on her bicep definition. I myself was far more likely to strike out candidates when I noticed their leg hair; I mean, come on: if I feel obliged to shave before wearing a skirt to school, it's only fair that a contestant bothers to shave before entering a beauty pageant. If you want to be a woman, you have to suffer for beauty like one. Oh, and also? With the length of some of those skirts, I had a hard time following the advice given in the title of Miss Waria Indonesia's book. I can now testify that most of the audience and contestants were not, technically speaking, girls.


Not so for the actual winner, though, or so the rumor went. My vote was cast, of course, for the one in the headscarf--how could I resist such delicious irony?--but the other judges shot me down and chose the prettiest instead. Typical. Shallow and unfair and utterly typical. But then again, before I start getting angry, I take comfort in the thought that at least there was one thing about the evening that didn't confuse me.


*This is a tricky one to translate. Waria is a blended neologism, a combination of wanita (woman) and pria (man); hence, in the actual construction of the word, it's closest to the English "she-male," which is the word I chose above. However, "she-male" is often derogatory in English, while waria is the polite, non-derogatory form. Unfortunately for the translator, the other possibilities in English--transwomen, transsexual, transvestite, as listed--are far more technical, and therefore limiting, than waria. The waria community as a whole is diverse, with some just transvestites, who look and act like men in day-to-day life**, and others transwomen, dressing and identifying as women, and others still transsexuals, actually undergoing surgery to become women, and the term itself encompasses all these variations of sexual identity. To spare myself, and my readers, the intricacies and political implications of these terms, I will use the Indonesian waria, or, if it must be translated, the English "she-male," though with the caveat that I don't mean it offensively, and have only chosen it for its relative simplicity and similarity, in origin and structure, to the Indonesian term.

**I asked one kind waria, who spoke excellent English, whether I should, when speaking to waria, use Pak, mister, or Ibu, Mrs. She said, "It depends on whether I'm wearing lipstick." Such a flexible gender identity, wouldn't you say?

In Da (Indo) Club

I found about the concert through the radio station where the SLO and I do our biweekly English program; there was a giant poster hanging on the wall and, after noticing that one of my favorite Indonesian pop songtresses would be performing, I wrote down the time and date and location and decided to go.

So that is how, on a Saturday night, at eight p.m., the advertised starting time, the SLO and I found ourselves wandering around the sixth-floor parking lot of the local mall, searching for evidence of a concert about to start, or, indeed, any sign of human life at all. When we finally found the cafe entrance, tucked away behind a huge “NO PARKING” sign and the bright red van parked in front of it, the eager, friendly, polite, bleached, pierced, Mohawked employees, after enthusiastically shouting SELAMAT PAGI, good morning, at us, and igoring my rather feeble and confused protest that wasn’t pagi, morning, but malam, night, told us that the concert would begin sebentar lagi, or in just a second. So we found ourselves some steps to sit on and began critiquing the short skirts and three-inch heels of the girls who arrived after us.

By ten p.m., we realized that, like dummies, like fools, like total Indonesia neophytes, we had been duped. Concerts, apparently, are not like movies, which start ten minutes early, but like meetings, bus departures, and, indeed, everything else in Indonesia: they start when they start. Indonesians call this jam karet, or “rubber time,” as “just a second” gets stretched into ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, two hours, never. But we’ve learned, this year, the fine art of hurrying up to wait, so we were content to use our time to not only speculate what would happen if the girl in front of us bent over in a skirt like that, but also to drop 100-rupiah coins off the side of the building to see what, or who, we could hit, wander onto the seventh floor and into a group of teenage boys, post-birthday party, who were eager to show us what, exactly, they were doing, or maybe just wanted to do, in the elevator, and, of course, grow increasingly more annoyed with the employees’ constant shouts of SELAMAT PAGI. ("But...but...but..." I wanted to say, "it’s not morning! Stop it! I don’t understand!")

Around eleven p.m., finally, the show started. The first singer, Rio Febrian, was fairly uninteresting, musically, but was one of the most performance-happy lead singers I’ve seen in a long time. He strutted and preened and emoted and mugged for the many cell-phone cameras shoved at him, all with a giant grin that said, “Look at me! I’m a real rock star! Don’t you just adore me?” I usually frequent indie concerts, at which the lead singer looks far more likely to break down and cry, whether over the indignity of performance or the cruelty of society and/or women, it's unclear, so the contrast was somewhat, well, adorable. I thought about throwing my panties on stage to show my adoration, but was too pressed in by the crowd to even breathe deeply, not to mention strip and toss.

Perhaps the crowd was just drunker by the time the second singer, Bunga Citra Lestari, arrived, or perhaps she is more popular, but as she skipped onto the stage in a tube top and tiny miniskirt, suddenly the audience surged forward and I had elbows in my stomach and back and a camera resting on my head. (Note to the man standing behind me: I know my head may make a good stable platform, and maybe you thought I wouldn’t notice, but, please! I can feel that.) Her set, like her skirt, was short but sufficient; she danced around rather awkwardly, smiled a lot, sang her two or three popular songs, as well as a few American ones, invited a flamboyantly gay man to join her in a romantic duet, and, in my favorite moment of the evening, looked momentarily nonplussed and faltered in her singing as she looked into the crowd to see a tall white girl mouthing the words to her hit song. (This seems impressive on my part until you consider that those words were “Apa kabarmu? Kabarku baik-baik saja,” or “How are you? I am fine.”)

As Bunga took her final curtseys and pranced off stage, a strong techno beat began and one of the employees climbed up to the stage to shout, one more time, SELAMAT PAGI! (By this time, though, it technically was morning, so I felt less annoyed.) Taking this as their cue, all the other employees jumped onto the tables and bar and began dancing; the other concert-goers followed suit, as the SLO and I stood, mouths agape in amazement and amusement. Could this really be Indonesia, all this drunken dancing, all this hip-swivelling, booty-shaking, bumping and grinding? Or, more to the point, could this really be Semarang? Nice, innocent, conservative, Muslim-majority Semarang? And ha! Does that guy in the loafers really call that dancing?

Figuring we couldn’t embarrass ourselves more than the guy in the loafers, we shrugged off our shock and joined in, though still giggling at some of the dance-floor of drunk Chinese-Indonesian men. So now I can say, with perfect honesty, if you ever get to chance to visit this particular cafe, the tempat party, or party place, of Semarang, do. You’ll have a pagi to remember.

The Proof Is In the Picture

Remember when I said (or, okay, wrote) that traffic in Indonesia is dangerous?


This lovely sign, all brightly colored and cheerful, keeps track of the number of accidents happening in the immediate vicinity. (How immediate, I must admit, I am not sure. I hope it's larger than the one intersection where it was posted, though.) In any case, in the month of February 2007, there were 14 incidents, with five people dead, 12 heavily injured, and 13 lightly injured. Oh, and this all cost roughly 6 million rupiah, or about $600.

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FOLLOW, BE ORDERLY IN TRAFFIC.

Yeah. Or get out of Indonesia.

Spring Break Part Deux

The second of my vacation times began not so auspiciously, on a Saturday night, when, after teaching church English class and piano lessons, but before midnight, the appointed time to pick up my mother and brothers from the airport, the phone rang. It was a number I didn’t recognize, which is almost unfailingly a bad sign. Usually on the other end is someone who, having gotten my number from goodness knows where, wants me to help them learn English, or teach English, or recite English, or, barring all that, cheerfully butcher English. In this case, it was my father, calling to tell me that, due to visa issues, my mom and brothers were detained in Singapore, unable to enter Indonesia. They would visit the embassy first thing Monday morning and hopefully arrive on the midnight flight that night, but, until then, I should proceed with my routine as usual, going to church and school without family in tow, and the cereal I bought, the mattresses laid on my floor, and the Indonesian food cooked by the maids would have to all go untouched.

Oh, who am I kidding? I ate the cold cereal myself as soon as I hung up the phone.

I’m not going to go into detail about the precise nature of the visa issues, as, first, they’re rather boring, and, second, I’m not the sort of daughter who would take advantage of a public platform such as a blog to proclaim her own and her mother's silly mistakes to all the world--except, of course, when I am--so suffice it to say that they were simple problems and, with some smiles and patience and souvenirs given, two-handed, to custom officials, my mother and brothers arrived safely, and still on a high from their unexpected boon of a Singapore vacation.

Semarang couldn’t quite offer them the same level of Westernized sophistication as Singapore—no Border’s Books, no midnight movie showings, no coin-operated public toilets—but what my city and I had to offer was, I hope, enjoyable in its own way: a trip to my school, to be mobbed by excited teachers and alternatingly excited and shy fifteen year olds; a trip to Yogyakarta, to sample street food, ride on motorbikes, visit Borobudur, and watch a wayang kulit performance; and a trip to Jakarta, to visit our old house, hospital, and haunts, eat at Wendy’s, and commemorate Good Friday in an eighteenth-century Anglican church, decorated with tombstones of sea captains who died of typhoid, while, outside, a solemn darkness veiled the sky and a tropical rain fell.

So. It wasn't the SPRING BREAK! that my mom had been so eagerly anticipating--no beaches, no spas, no flashing people--but it was still a vacation to remember. Thank you, Mom and The Duke and Klement, for coming, and thank you, U.S. Consulate in Singapore, for allowing them to come. My life, at least, is better for having seen my mother holding onto her hat on the back of a motorbike, The Duke performing songs on his guitar for my eleventh-grade classes, and Klement sneaking around Borobudur trying to get his head, and just his head, into our photos. Indonesia will never be the same.

Mormon New Year

To celebrate April 6, the date of both the Church's founding and Jesus' birthday, and therefore an important day in the Mormon ecclesiastical calendar--if, that is, we had one--the branch in Semarang gathered together for a small commemorative activity. The program was fairly standard, as Church things go: we sang some hymns, heard a "spiritual thought," and watched various "spontaneous performances," meaning, mostly, listening to our district president sing love songs from the 1940s.

After the closing hymn, one sister brought an Indonesian dish, yellow rice shaped into a tall cone, that's used for special occasions like births, deaths, marriages, and circucisions. Standing around the yellow rice cone, we sang "Happy Birthday" to the Church, and the branch president invited the "oldest" member of the branch--the one who had been a member the longest--to cut the yellow rice cone and eat the first serving. Before we ate, we all held up our plates of yellow rice and said, by way of a toast, "Endure to the end!"

Why can't all church activities be like that?

Maid To Order

At first thought, living in a house with eight servants seems wonderful. It struck me as such at first, too—that, plus the appellation “Miss Hannah,” made me feel so very antebellum South that I caught myself longing for hoop skirts and handsome moustached suitors. Sometimes, it’s true, having servants is great. I’ve never been much of a cook, and, after several months of doing so in Egypt, I have no particular desire to hang my own laundry on the line to dry. For the most part, though, I’d trade them, yes, all nine of them, for, like, ten minutes of privacy.

They’re nice and all, I'm sure, "nice" only goes so far when it means putting up with the constant presence of ten people intent on, from my perspective, bothering me. I couldn't possibly detail everything that has ever bothered me about the servants--we'd be here all day as I complained about how sometimes they lock me out and I'm stuck standing on the street in the rain for thirty minutes at eleven P.M.--so we'll just do the biggies.

First, while their constant confusion between “foreign” and “stupid” may be amusing, and fodder for some good blog entries, it does get tiresome. They delight in pointing out the obvious to me, until I feel just the tiniest bit like pointing out to them that I am, in fact, seven or eight years older than them, and, what’s more, perfectly capable of intuiting that yes, that mouse poop on the counter means it is dirty. They also can't seem to believe I can do things alone: yes, it’s been a long, hard battle, but after twenty two years on this planet, I am also capable of toasting bread, boiling water, and peeling oranges by myself.

Second, they clean my room. What am I complaining about? you may wonder, especially if you are my mother. I’ve never been the neatest person in the world, and the room probably needs the cleaning.

Sure it does: tile floors do get dirty surprisingly quickly. I wouldn’t mind having someone swipe a mop over them once a week or so. But the maids do far more than that—they feel the need to tidy. Since I generally do keep my room fairly neat, they indulge their clenaing urges by moving things, rather than actually neatening them. Every few days, I come home to find the door to my room wide open, with the stack of books I had left on the bed suddenly moved to the desk, while the papers that were on the desk are moved to the bed. They mix piles of paper—tenth grade homework wantonly shuffled in with twelfth grade homework—and frequently they change the setup of the room as I liked it. Sometimes I think the next time I come home to find the air conditioning temperature reset, the curtains closed, and my shampoo bottles moved, I’m going to scream. Or throw things. Now that would be a reason for my shampoo bottles to be in disarray.

Third, and finally, the kicker: food. Indonesia is still a scarcity culture—the thin are poor and malnourished, the rich are fat and happy. Having food to offer is not only a sign of generosity and good host behavior, it’s a sign of social status, and, as such, is hugely important. Everywhere I go, I’m dogged by people offering food—at friends’ houses, at school, even after church. I understand the reasons. I know they’re just being nice. That’s fine.

It’s not fine, though, when it’s at home, my one supposed place of refuge. Yet every time I come home, the first thing I hear is a maid saying, “Have you already eaten?” They’ve even given up on hello, just going straight to the food issue. Worse still, there are four, sometimes five maids, and they all feel it necessary to check on my eating habits, which means walking from the front door to my bedroom means running a gauntlet of “sudah makan?”s. Worse still, they don’t believe me when I say that I have, and so then I have to endure an interview, every day, without fail, about what I’ve eaten: what? When? How much? I don’t know why they even bother asking, because their conclusion from the interview is always the same: I must be hungry. I must eat more. I must try the chicken, the fish, and the vegetables. I’ve taken, lately, to sneaking food into my room just so that I have some privacy about what I eat and when—if I eat in the dining room, there’s always at least one maid hovering over me urging me to add more. They also, in desparation to please, knock on my door every hour or so to bring me a plate of snacks. Sweet? Yes. Kind? Yes. Utterly invasive of my personal space and decisions? Yes.

This all drives me insane, in case you can't tell. My eating habits aren’t exactly the greatest, but at least they’re my own; moreover, I resent the implication that I cannot, by this point, figure out when I’m hungry and when I want to eat. I mean, anyone who knows me well knows that I cannot, in fact, figure out when I’m hungry and when I want to eat, but, by golly, it’s my right to suffer hunger headaches and nausea if I want to!

We’ve come to an uneasy peace, though, these past seven months, all of us learning to compromise. They’ve stopped hiding the toaster in the mornings, their initial strategy for keeping me helpless, though they do still hang around and watch me spread the jam on the bread, checking that I’m doing it to my own specifications—"Are you sure you don’t want apricot? Or chocolate? Why aren’t you using butter?" I’ve stopped offending them by rinsing my own dishes. I still put them in the sink, though, which, judging by their faces when I do, causes them endless amounts of pain. They clean my room, but they don’t move stuff off the bed, and I’ve learned to grin and bear it when I come home to find it all in stacks. As for the food, well, that’s still a battleground, though now it's more like a Battle of Cheat Mountain than a Gettysburg. harder. I’ve basically just learned to lie to their faces with deliberately vague answers: “Have you already eaten?” “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes.” “What?” “Food.” “Where?” “Not here.” It may not be terribly polite on my end, but, hey, it’s a compromise: by definition, everyone’s unhappy.

I never thought I’d say it, but I’m looking forward to not having servants anymore. And if I have to eat my words as soon as I get back to the States, well, no problem—at least that way, I won’t be lying when I claim I’ve already eaten.

My Undaunted Mettle

For the last few months, I’ve been teaching piano lessons at the church on Saturday afternoons. I hate, absolutely hate, hate, hate doing it, but am loath to back out for a number of complicated reasons, most of them involving guilt. (I am Mormon, after all. Guilt comes with the baptism.)

It’s easy to see why I hate it. I teach four boys between the ages of 7 and 10, and, when lessons begin, they all climb on the piano seat together and start banging, all at once. When I choose one to start and ask the others to leave, they sit there and stare at me in shock and incomprehension, like I suddenly started speaking Xhosa, not Indonesian. When I finally persuade the others to go away, they go about four feet away and either make ridiculous amounts of noise or stare at me with big, soulful eyes, as if hurt that I would separate them. What’s more, it’s been four months since I started teaching and they still can’t really read music; the most talented can pick his way slowly through a simple song, and the least talented still just randomly guesses, looking at my face for positive or negative reactions. Their parents, though, expect miracles, and constantly ask me when their sons will be able to play the hymns in sacrament meeting. I’ve told them over and over again that it took me years of piano lessons to play the hymns, but nobody listens to me. Maybe they would if I started speaking Xhosa.

Plus, I’m totally unqualified. I admit this freely: just because I can play the piano doesn’t mean I can teach others to play it. So I’ve been set an impossible task, and, moreover, one that I couldn’t accomplish even if it were possible, and I’m responsible to intense parents for its completion. That’s just not a happy situation.

Hanging out with these little boys, though, is a happy situation, the one bright spot in a dark Saturday evening. After the real lessons are over, but before the lesson time is up, meaning whenever they get tired of pretending to try and I get tired of pretending to have control, we play, and I don’t mean the piano. Last week we wandered out of the church building and looked for smashed frogs on the street, poking them with sticks when we found them. The week before we had wheelbarrow races across the chapel. The week before that we ran around trying to stomp on each other’s feet, a game that continued during the weekly Thursday night adult dance activity, and which got me in big trouble with the other adults, since we may have, um, crashed into a few couples trying to dance. These kids now think I’m the coolest thing ever, that rare adult who never tries to make them sit still and be quiet, but who, on the contrary, has fun ideas for new mischief, and I think they’re the coolest things ever, mostly because they give me an excuse to poke smashed frogs with a stick.

I think the moral of the story is clear: I should bring forth men children only--but someone else should teach them piano lessons.

Coming Of Age In Indonesia

I have undergone an Indonesian rite of passage. It’s not circumcision. (I’m not a twelve year old boy.) It’s not leaping over a large rock. (I’m not from Nias.) It’s not sexual promiscuity. (That’s Samoa, not Indonesia.) It’s much simpler than all these: I have travelled.

Remembering how miserable the trip to Bali was, and having heard some good news about my future finances, I opted to splurge, somewhat, and fly home. However, there are no direct flights from Denpasar to Semarang, so I booked a flight to Surabaya and figured I could catch a bus from Surabaya to Semarang.

Mistake! As I sat in the airport for over five hours, waiting for my delayed plane, I rifled through my Lonely Planet again and realized, with a sinking feeling, that Surabaya is not three hours from Semarang, as I thought, but, depending on who you ask and what you ride, either five, seven, or nine agonizing hours.

I ran downstairs to the ticket offices, hoping to find a flight from Surabaya to Semarang. No dice. I called the bus station to ask about approximate distances—yep. Nine hours, putting me into Semarang at, roughly, four in the morning. I called the train station to ask about train times. My plane would be too late to catch the five o’clock, but maybe I would get lucky and on the seven o’clock. The train was clearly the way to go—I could take a taxi from the airport, hop on the train, and sleep until Semarang.

After much questioning in the Surabaya airport, though, I realized I would have to pay more for a taxi to the train station than for the train ticket itself. I changed my plans: ride a public bus from the airport to the bus station and ask about buses. Done.

Once at the bus station, though, I learned that, first, there were no luxury buses to Semarang, meaning I wouldn’t have airconditioning for those nine hours, and second…well, actually, that’s it. I mean, come on. Nine hours. Without AC. I just couldn’t do it.

I changed my plans again, wandering around the bus station until I found a guy with a motorcycle willing, for a price, to give me a ride to the train station. I balanced precariously, for about forty-five minutes, on the back of his motorcycle, clutching my bags tightly less they fall, and me with them, into Saturday night traffic in Indonesia’s second-largest city. At the train station, I paid him the $2.50 the ride cost, ran to the ticket counter, and bought a ticket for the seven o’clock just minutes before it was about to depart. After leaving Ubud around twelve noon, I arrived in Semarang at one in the morning, giving me a solid half-night’s sleep before waking up to teach Sunday School the next morning.

I’ve simplified the story somewhat, but in any case, this was a trial by fire: an epic journey, the kind that could only work because I can speak (some of) the language, and, therefore, successfully ask people for directions/rides/to stop staring and get the hell away from me, and I feel inordinate amounts of pride in having accomplished it. What’s more, I survived the whole trip without breaking down in the airport and paying $7 for People Magazine, without losing the Zen calm I’ve been practicing, and, what’s even more impressive, without breaking Lent and eating any of the chocolate I so desperately wanted. Now that’s real maturity. Give me the tattoos, driver’s license, alcohol, or whatever this culture uses to mark entry into society: I have passed the test. I have fought the good fight. I have come of age.