by Tiffany Tsao
They wrote letters to each other at first (Tante Sandra didn’t go into details about the content), but as the months went by, he wrote less frequently until he stopped writing at all. It was understandable, she told herself. He had a lot to handle. He had to support his mother and younger siblings. His father’s supervisor had kindly let him have his father’s old job at the margarine factory, but then his mother came down with a mysterious lung infection and there were doctors’ bills to pay and medicines to buy.
She knew it was unreasonable to demand more attention from him, especially since their relationship had barely begun when he’d had to leave. She hadn’t told her parents about him, and now she wasn’t sure if she had anything to tell. She planned to visit him when she was in Jakarta, but she didn’t get there until over six months had passed—she’d already planned a trip to New Zealand with her friends for the upcoming break, and the long break after that had been promised to our family. (That trip to London, where the photo of her at Buckingham Palace had been taken, where she’d plowed through pigeons and offered us hot chestnuts.)
When she met John again, in Jakarta, she was a term into her third and final year. He greeted her stiffly, as if there had never been any romance between them, or even friendship. Not only that, but the toxicity she’d overlooked on that magical night had already begun eating away at him. Months, that was all it had taken, triggered by the steady shower of unfortunate events that hadn’t stopped pitter-pattering on his head since his father’s untimely death. He told her all about it when they met at the coffee shop around the corner from where he worked—at a different job from when he’d last written. He’d been let go from his previous position. The margarine company had been bought out by a Chinese-owned conglomerate. They’d enacted a massive restructuring, which resulted in him being made redundant, and it had taken him some time to find employment elsewhere. To pay for his mother’s medical treatment and keep up with the rent, he’d resorted to borrowing money from a loan shark. Even though he had a job now—as a foreman in a mosquito-repellent factory—it paid less than the previous one, and that made it hard to keep up with repayments.
He spoke calmly enough about it—or, rather, he spoke softly and low, avoiding eye contact as he stirred the coffee in his glass mug, bringing the sugary black grounds swirling to the top. In her naivete, she reacted dramatically: “That’s terrible! How can I help?”—something like that. It was a mistake. He sank his head between his shoulders, muttering that he was sorry for mentioning it, he wasn’t asking for help. He would manage just fine.
“You could find another job with better pay,” she suggested. She immediately felt stupid for proposing something so obvious.
Sure enough, he responded with a sneer: Yes, that had occurred to him. But it had taken so long to find this job he thought it would be better to stay put. The last thing he could afford was another interruption to his pay. He was about to say something else, but seemed to think better of it. He closed his mouth. After a few seconds, he opened it again and said it anyway: He suspected it had taken him so long to get hired because the interviewers thought he was Chinese. It was hard to ignore how he looked.
He could apply to Chinese employers, she proposed awkwardly after a silence that lasted too long.
He’d tried, he replied in all seriousness. But they always figured out quickly that he wasn’t one of them. The shift would be subtle but always detectable—a fading warmth, a stiffening smile, a slight shrinking inward like that of a fearful snail.
He made a feeble joke about Sandra being the only one he’d been able to fool. Then he looked at his watch and said he should get back to work. As an afterthought, he asked her what she had planned for the rest of the day. She said she didn’t know, though that was a lie. She was going to the beauty salon with her mother, to get their hair done for Vera Sukamto’s wedding reception that night. But she felt that to tell him the truth would make a mockery of the hardship he was suffering.
He asked when she was going back to Melbourne. In a week, she said, before asking tentatively if he’d ever be able to resume his studies there. He shook his head. No, it had been selfish of him to force his father into squandering all that money on an overseas degree. If only his family had that money now. He looked at his watch again. They wished each other the best and parted.
“And guess what?” said our middle-aged aunt, her voice full of scorn for her younger self. “Even after that, I didn’t get the hint. Would you believe I still wrote to him from Melbourne, even though he never replied? Would you believe I suggested we meet again the next time I was back?”
“Why?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Who knows,” she answered, taking the last cookie on the plate even though Estella and I hadn’t eaten a single one. As she bit into it, she frowned. “Maybe it was too hard to let go of what we had. What I thought we had, at least. And once I was back at university, our differences seemed so small again: So what if he wasn’t Chinese, so what if I was rich? It didn’t seem right to abandon the relationship, at least not without a fight.”
At the end of this reflection, she appeared for a split second like the naive Sandra of the tale we were listening to. Then the Tante Sandra of the present reasserted herself.
She and John met three more times after that, the next two meetings occurring on visits home during her final term in Melbourne. Both times they met in the same coffee shop, and against the unchanging backdrop the alterations in him seemed more pronounced. It was like seeing a cliff collapse, she told us. Each time, a new chunk had fallen off. The second time he told her to stop calling him John. Going by a different name had been stupid and pretentious, he said.
He told her that his mother’s lungs stayed in bad shape no matter what the doctors prescribed, but he’d found extra employment to help the family scrape by. The work was beneath him—washing dishes three nights a week at an upscale seafood restaurant. But he couldn’t be picky. Every bit helped.
Lots of Chinese customers, needless to say, he added offhandedly. Her people did well for themselves. Her family included.
Our aunt could have sworn she saw a thin smile cross his face; then it vanished. He explained: He’d read a newspaper article about synthetic textile manufacturing. It had mentioned Sulinado Group, its founder-patriarch, and the five children who helped run it. He’d remembered she had five older siblings and put two and two together.
She didn’t think it mattered, she said, feeling guilty all the same. The omission wasn’t deliberate; it had just never come up. He supposed, in a quiet voice, that it didn’t matter—at least not in Australia, not back then and there.
He rose to his feet to go. She stood as well and bade him good-bye.
They met for the third time after the end of her final term, once she had returned to Jakarta for good. To her shock, he was the one who proposed it, in a letter. The letter came as a surprise too, congratulating her preemptively on finishing her degree. It was hardly warm, but it was civil, and in it he mentioned they should meet once she was back.
Their last meeting had left such a sour taste in her mouth that she’d sworn off trying to maintain their bizarre and estranged relationship. He obviously couldn’t stand her anymore, and the way he talked about the Chinese made her squirm. Yet after reading the letter, she found herself relenting. Maybe his hostility had all been in her mind. So what if he’d mentioned that finding work had been difficult because he looked Chinese? And so what if he’d faced discrimination when trying his luck with Chinese employers? That was the reality of life in Indonesia, and she’d simply never felt it because she was rich.
So what if he’d found out her father was Irwan Sulinado, the rising textile tycoon? It was true, and arguably she was at fault for not mentioning it sooner, thus making him think she had something to hide. It was probably true too that a lot of the patrons of the restaurant where he worked were Chinese. Even if the implication was that a lot of Chinese had money to spare, that was undeniable a
s well: Her people had made good in Indonesia. In short, John—or, rather, Jono—had simply been stating the facts. She was the one who’d been sheltered from them all her life.
She decided to write back telling him when her flight home was and saying that she’d like very much to meet.
“By the time we met at that coffee shop again, I was convinced that I’d been the one in the wrong.” As our aunt said this, she shook her head at her younger self’s idiocy. “Foolish, I know. But can you blame me for trying to believe the best of him after all he’d been through? His father’s death, his mother’s illness, having to pull out of university and scramble for a job? And let’s not forget his little brother and sister. He had to support them too, make sure they weren’t forced to drop out of high school to find work. Going through all of that would be enough to make anyone bitter. He’d lashed out. He couldn’t help himself. I thought I should give him another chance.”
Estella and I stared silently into our mugs. I felt suddenly ashamed of our presence there, our prying open of the life of this woman we’d presumed to know and love, whom in actual fact we had never really known at all.
Of course the meeting with Jono had been awful—made worse because she’d hoped for the best. He’d lost so much weight he was barely recognizable; there was nothing left of his face except those cartoonish buckteeth and slitty eyes.
Things weren’t going well, he admitted, averting his gaze. But he was happy she’d made time to meet him. He offered his congratulations again and asked her what she was planning to do next. She was about to tell him, but he cut her off: She’d work for Sulinado Group, of course; her father probably had a high-ranking position ready and waiting for her. As with the observations he’d made previously about the Chinese, it wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it, and how it came out of nowhere before disappearing into thin air, leaving her wondering if she’d misunderstood.
That pretty much summed up Jono’s behavior: sustained attempts at being pleasant interspersed with flashes of bitterness. “Attempts” because the strain showed after a while. Gone was the tendency to dwell on his own unfortunate affairs. When she asked him how things were, he answered succinctly and moved on, obviously thinking hard about questions to ask her and then trying to look interested in the answers she gave. It wasn’t like him at all, not even when they were in Melbourne, when he’d been spare with words in general but always genuine when he did have something to say. The contrast between that and this desperate geniality couldn’t be starker. And then there were those occasional jabs, blurted before he could stop himself: one about how nice it must be not to have to worry about finances; one about how she probably didn’t have many other pribumi friends; one about how making money seemed to come naturally to “her kind”; one about how, thanks to his appearance, he experienced all the drawbacks of being Chinese without any of the perks.
She was completely drained at the end of it. And then he dealt the final blow. He finally stopped talking and looked down at his hands, which were fidgeting in his lap. He coughed. He had a favor to ask—one he felt he could only request of a true friend like Sandra. He’d mentioned at the start that things weren’t going well. The truth was, he was still having trouble paying off his debts. The loan shark who’d lent him money was charging interest rates that were through the roof. He’d tried his best to keep up, but, slowly and steadily, he’d fallen further and further behind.
That’s terrible, she said. She was so sorry. She meant it, but at the same time she felt her stomach caving in.
She waited for it. It came: He needed to borrow some money from her. Not much—not to her, given who her father was. He winced after he said these words; he hadn’t meant to sound so mean. He tried to recover as best he could, but the result was a blend of sullenness and mortification. He didn’t know where else to turn, he said. And he wouldn’t ask if it weren’t for his mother and siblings. He named the sum and added that it included the plane fare he’d borrowed from her more than a year ago.
He was right: It wasn’t an enormous sum at all. She’d bought handbags that cost more without so much as a second thought. She also realized that she’d forgotten entirely about the money for the plane ticket; it might as well have been loose change that she’d misplaced. Still, her insides crumbled away entirely. They had laughed together once, whispered in each other’s ears, kissed and held each other’s hands. Now, nothing remained. Worse than nothing: a creditor and debtor.
Of course she’d help, she said, forcing a smile. She would get the money from her parents. It was no trouble at all. He mumbled his gratitude, unable to look her in the eye, and they arranged to meet in a few days so she could give him the cash.
The conversation left quite an impression on her. She looked so pale and shaken when she got home that her mother—our oma—insisted she take to bed. That was the problem with living abroad for too long, opined Oma. Your stomach forgot how to digest the food at home. Tante Sandra didn’t mind the enforced rest. She welcomed it, in fact. It allowed her to take refuge in endless sleep. As the baby of the family, she was the only one of our uncles and aunts still living in our grandparents’ house. Oma was pleased to have an excuse to be maternal: to stand over the stove making plain congee and herbal soup; to sit by her child’s bedside stroking her brow and humming lullabies. Tante Sandra couldn’t play the invalid forever, though. With several days to spare before her next meeting with Jono, she resumed normal activity and asked Opa for the money. Finding a plausible pretext was easy: A good friend was heading to Paris, and Tante Sandra wanted to ask her to buy something from Chanel on her behalf.
“There wasn’t even the slightest hint that your opa thought I was lying,” our aunt said with a bitter laugh. “Or that he knew about Jono at all. I was so naive back then. Such a stupid, stupid fool.”
She waited in the coffee shop for Jono for a full two hours. He never came. Her initial anger turned to worry. What if the loan shark had done something to him? What if her help had come too late? She went back home and stayed on alert, waiting for him to call her. Days passed. Nothing. She forgot how upset their last encounter had made her and started panicking instead. She imagined, at best, that he was in the hospital with broken bones. She imagined, at worst, his throat slit and his body thrown into a canal. Unable to stand it any longer, after dinner one evening, she jumped in the car and told the driver to take her to Jono’s address.
She didn’t think she’d had any expectations of what his home would look like. He’d never spoken about it. Nor was she familiar enough with the city’s humbler neighborhoods to draw any conclusions from the mailing address he’d given her before he’d left Australia for good. The car circled the area for half an hour before she eventually told the driver to wind down the window and ask people on the street for directions. A man pulling a wooden cart full of trash directed them to a narrow alleyway barely large enough for the car to squeeze through. They rolled down it, and the driver made inquiries again when they reached a small snack-and-sundries stand cobbled together from plywood planks. The shopkeeper shook her head when the driver asked about the address, but our aunt called out Jono’s name from the back seat, as well as the names of his siblings, which she miraculously remembered. The shopkeeper pointed a finger down an even narrower lane bordering her stand.
There was no way the car would fit. Tante Sandra ordered the driver to wait and walked down the lane, into a world that she knew existed but had never encountered firsthand: narrow dwellings of crumbling concrete and exposed brick pressed together in tight rows; windows and eaves hung with lines of laundry and curtained with cheap fabric or yellowed lace; gates of rusted iron and peeling paint, or sheets of corrugated zinc; tiny verandas of cracked tile crowded with birdcages and plants in plastic buckets. She was dimly aware that these living conditions were more than respectable—those of the city’s lower middle class. But the spoiled rich girl within her kept hissing, Poor. This is what it’s like to be poor. The shopkeeper sen
t a boy running after her to show her where to go. Overtaking her, he trotted to a stop in front of a house with two green plastic chairs out front. He lingered expectantly. She fished around in her purse for a coin and pressed it into his palm.
It was Jono himself who came to the door when she called out her awkward “Hello” instead of the “As-salamu ‘alaikum” she’d overheard Muslims use. He had a split lip and a swollen black eye. There were gashes on his forehead and cheeks.
She asked him what had happened, even though she thought she knew. The loan shark had obviously sent his goons. Jono stared at her and said nothing. She reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope of cash. Was it too late to give him the money? she asked. She apologized for not trying to find him sooner when he had missed their appointment.
He still didn’t say anything, still kept staring at her, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. At long last he spoke, the words dripping with disgust: She could keep her money.
Her blood froze. What did he mean? she asked.
He laughed. She didn’t know? he sneered before proceeding to enlighten her: an ambush on the way home from the restaurant the night before they were supposed to meet. A blindfold. The back of a van. Four men in army uniforms. And once the beating had finally stopped, a warning on behalf of Pak Irwan Sulinado to find some other rich girl to milk for cash.
She’d better go, he told her. Then he tried to close the door.
She pushed it back open, tears streaming down her face, swearing she hadn’t known, that it wasn’t her fault.
If she really wanted to help, he yelled, she would leave him alone. Then he shoved her away and slammed the door shut.
She sat down in one of the green plastic chairs and cried some more. From inside the house a woman’s croak drifted, thick with phlegm. It must have been Jono’s mother. It sounded fearful: Who was it and did it have anything to do with those bad men? No, just some crazy woman who had the wrong house, he said. And that seemed to be the end of that.