The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  Saul took us into a forest where men in trees, mostly barefoot and without harnesses, were batting down clusters of fruit from branches, some of the clusters, he told us, weighing close to a hundred pounds. Under the trees, teams of young boys and girls held onto large pieces of stiff canvas—like fireman’s rescue nets—into which the clusters fell, and Hans explained that they’d begun doing this fifteen or sixteen months before—had learned it from one of our engineers, a Turkish man who’d observed the technique when he’d worked in olive groves in southern France. This was giving us an edge on our competitors, he explained, because it minimized the bruising of the nuts and fruit, which, when the clusters fell directly to the ground, had been an ongoing problem during harvest time.

  I’d arrived near the end of the harvesting, and the haul this year, Hans said, had exceeded expectations. Although palm oil trees could produce their nuts and fruit within three years, they didn’t peak until they were about twenty years old. The grove of trees we were looking at was eighteen years old, and according to Hans was now producing nearly nine thousand metric tons of oil per hectare.

  Within a little more than two hours, when we stopped to rest and get out of the sun—Saul, sensing that the heat was wearing me down, had begun shortening his explanations—I’d gained a tangible sense of what, until then, I’d only read about: how the process worked from start to finish—from the harvesting, fermentation, sorting, boiling, mash pressing, purification, digestion (releasing the oil from the nuts), to the purification and drying of the product for storage and shipping.

  The machines, large and small, including boilers that were one to two stories high, ran mostly on diesel generators, the generators housed in old, windowless, yellow school busses. Some of the processing was still done by hand, and Nick was at pains to point out that though there were mechanized, steam-driven hydraulic systems that could and did perform most basic tasks for us, the company also paid teams of young men (boys, really, no more than ten or eleven years old) to do the manual threshing: to cut the spikelets from the bunch stems with axes and machetes, and pass the fruits of their labor on to elderly women and small children who sat at long tables and separated the fruit from the spikelets by hand.

  The company used battery-driven golf-cart-size cars to transport most of the nuts from the forest to the village, but there was also a steady line of men and women coming in with large baskets of nuts balanced on their heads—another way, Nick pointed out, we were taking initiatives to employ as many local people as possible.

  “And with full equality for women, children, and senior citizens,” I said.

  “Of course,” Nick said. “We help the local economy while building a strong sense of community.”

  “You, me, and J. P. Morgan, right?”

  “I think the sun’s begun to fry your brain,” Nick said. “All that air-conditioning in Singapore must be turning you soft.”

  While we rested in the shade, Saul switched on the kind of moveable cold-water air-conditioners they’d had in the tent at our first stop. On two ping-pong size tables—in order to educate the workers, he claimed, and boost morale—he’d prepared a small exhibit of the uses to which palm oil could be put: for cooking oil, engine oil, medicines, biofuel, industrial lubricants, food additives, soaps, detergents, and cosmetics, and I acted as if this was all news to me, and refrained from asking why he didn’t have a container of napalm next to the other goods.

  When it was my turn, I took out charts and papers, at which point Saul beckoned to a young man of about twenty, to whom he showed the papers, which they discussed in whispers, and I became aware that for all his articulateness—his charming British accent, his impeccable courtesy and impressive vocabulary—he could not read.

  When I asked where the workers lived and slept, Saul assured me they were well cared for, but Nick laughed and said Saul was being discreet when there was no need for discretion. “Most of them sleep in the fields,” Nick said. “Much cooler, and that way we don’t have to deduct housing fees from their pay the way other companies do.” In his ongoing campaign to persuade me our company was environmentally enlightened, Nick also pointed out that the massive amounts of sludge collected from the bottoms of our boilers and purifiers were used to kill weeds, and he had Saul show me ways we recovered fiber and shells from the early stages of the process and used the residue as fuel for the boilers.

  By the third day, when we’d flown forty minutes further inland to one of our smallest operations, a facility that, Nick said, had predated Singapore Palm Oil Technologies Limited’s existence, I was feeling achy, dizzy, and nauseated. The constant heat and humidity, and the absence of anything resembling air-conditioning in a village of fewer than three dozen families (an elderly woman would occasionally wipe my face, neck, arms, and shoulders with a damp cloth), made me woozy and faint by midday, and seeing me stagger, Nick put an arm around me, led me back to our plane, laid me down across two seats, had the pilot turn on our air-conditioning, and told me the same thing had happened to him—that he hadn’t even lasted a full day his first time here.

  “You’re stronger than you look,” he said.

  “Smarter too,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s why you said yes to coming here to work with me.”

  By the time I woke, the sun had slipped below the level of the highest trees and there was a slight breeze. Back in the village, Nick had a group of men and women put on a show for me, demonstrating the traditional method of extracting palm oil—washing the fruit mash in warm water, then squeezing the mash by hand to separate the fiber and nuts from the water-and-oil mixture. Next, they passed the mixture through wooden colanders to filter out dirt and debris, after which they placed the mixture in a large iron pot, along with firewood, and set the whole thing boiling.

  A few hours later—they’d arranged things as if they were putting on an exhibit at a county fair, so I could see all stages of the process one after the other and not have to wait until each stage was completed before going on to the next—they would take out the firewood, add herbs, and when the mixture cooled to just under a hundred degrees—to the body’s temperature—they’d skim off the palm oil with a bowl. The oil, which had a reddish hue from the large amounts of beta-carotene in it, was easy to store and transport because, high in saturated fats, it became semi-solid at moderate temperatures.

  The villagers also showed me what they saw as a more modern way of extracting palm oil—using a large screw-press to break down the nuts, then filtering the crushed nuts and shells through a screen. After boiling the mixture, they let gravity do its job, allowing the brew to cool in a large tank so that the palm oil, lighter than water, would separate on its own and rise to the top. In the final stage, the oil was decanted into a metal tank, then re-heated in ordinary cooking pots to remove any remaining impurities.

  I slept like a dead man that night, and when I woke in the morning—I was in a small tent made of fine, sepia-colored mosquito netting—Nick was sitting on a stool on the other side of the tent, drinking coffee, and talking with three elderly village men.

  I joined them and they immediately began telling me what a good friend to them, and to their families, Nick had been. He’d brought them work, books, medicines, and cell phones. He’d arranged for sons and grandsons to be enrolled in secondary schools in Banjarmasin, and for daughters and granddaughters to be employed as workers and guides in resort areas.

  They showed me photos of children and grandchildren, the photos taken at schools and resorts where the young people, in uniform and smiling happily, lived and worked. At the same time that they praised Nick, they also lamented the fact that young people were leaving villages like theirs, and that when their generation died these villages would disappear.

  Given enterprises like ours, your villages may be gone sooner than that, I thought of saying, and Nick talked about facilities our company was developing where workers could vacation, and where they could, if they’d worked for u
s long-term, live out their lives.

  “Just like Florida or Arizona,” I said.

  Nick ignored me, but one of the men touched my hand and said that although Nick refused to take credit, what he said was true, and that these programs had been Nick’s idea and no one else’s.

  I looked at Nick. “I sent in a few proposals, and the company’s interested,” he said. “We’ve taken over some old hotels and hospitals and are renovating them to create what I guess could pass for low-end vacation condos. It’s a modest start, but it’s a start.”

  “This is true,” one of the men said. “Thanks to Mister Nick, my mother and aunt are already living in a home near Turtle Island.”

  “It’s not all altruism,” Nick said. “There are ways to do this that will make these places profitable.”

  “How so?”

  “Setting up charitable foundations and using them to process liquid assets we prefer not to have to account for in more visible ways.” He stopped. “But look—when we get back to the office I can fill you in on our CFO’s plans.”

  One of the men handed me a photo of his granddaughter, a girl whose face, nearly obliterated, looked like those I remembered seeing in pictures of Vietnamese children who’d been burned by napalm. The girl had been looking into a pot to see if the palm oil had risen to the top when something in the boiling oil—most likely metal shards that had flaked off the inside of the pot—exploded. On the day of the accident, Nick had arranged for the girl to be flown to a hospital in Singapore.

  The girl was eight years old, and would never regain sight in her left eye, but everything else about her, the man stated, as if to reassure me—he showed me photos of her face in various stages of reconstruction—would one day return to normal.

  “Saint Nick to the rescue once again,” I said.

  “Just good business practice,” Nick said. “Good will breeds good workers. It’s what I learned in China—the factories that treated their workers like garbage got garbage for results. The factories that treated their workers like human beings made out okay.”

  “Speaking of which,” he added, handing me a manila envelope, “we’ve decided to treat our executives well too.”

  I opened the envelope and found plane tickets, brochures, and an itinerary for ‘Crowell’s Great Jungle Adventures.’

  As soon as Nick explained that the company was paying for four days of R-and-R for me—they’d done the same for him after his first two months—the three men began raving about the wonders I’d be seeing, wonders they themselves had seen rarely if at all, but about which their children and grandchildren had told them.

  Nick, his arms around the shoulders of two of the men, was grinning happily, and I had to wonder: Who was this guy I’d been hanging out with on and off for nearly two decades? And I thought, too, about something Max often said: how little we ever really knew other people.

  I looked at the cover of one of the brochures—a photo of two orangutans, mother and infant, and of a bird identified as a Scarlet-rumped Trogon, the smallest of its species, along with, in bold-faced print, a promise: that I would see endangered species and vanishing cultures while relaxing in a luxury hotel.

  I showed the brochure to Nick.

  “True?”

  “You bet,” he said.

  Once I’d seen some of what the men had told me I’d see—orangutans (astonishingly graceful), a monitor lizard (more than seven feet long), a clouded leopard (beautiful beyond beautiful) —and then rivers, jungles, rainforests, underground caves, and not only dozens of endangered species, but a fair number of species (trees, flowers, birds, animals) whose existence had been discovered only within the last decade—I was hooked, changed, transformed—whatever: you name it—and I knew my life would never be the same. And I could admit, even then, that what made the difference—what made the experience so extraordinary—had to do with what Nick talked about: the fact that this world of astonishing natural beauty would soon be gone.

  There were eight of us on the tour—an elderly English couple, three middle-aged German businessmen, and two young American women (Alicia, a lawyer, and Amanda, a pediatrician) —and we sat in straightback chairs like schoolchildren, trying to take in what our guide, Tamika, was telling us: that the island of Borneo was home to more than fifteen thousand species of flowering plants, more than three thousand species of trees, and to more than six hundred species of birds. In the past dozen years alone well over five hundred new species of animal, bird, and plant had been discovered on the island. Borneo was the only natural habitat in the world for several endangered species, the Borneo orangutan most famous among them, and Tamika passed around glossy photos of some of the others: the sun bear (the world’s tiniest bear), the Sumatran rhino, the pygmy elephant, the proboscis monkey.

  Our tour group was staying at a five-star Hilton Hotel in Kuching (which called itself ‘the cleanest city in Malaysia’), and my executive suite, on the fifteenth floor, had a magnificent view through floor-to-ceiling windows of the Sarawak River. The high-tech work station was as well-appointed as my office in Singapore, and the bathroom, done in cool shades of gold-flecked marble, had a bidet, a whirlpool, a stereo system, a large flat-screen TV, and a computer-fax console. The hotel itself was an easy hour away by mini-van and boat from Bako National Park.

  Tamika, a breathtakingly beautiful woman who appeared to be in her early thirties, and who was several inches taller than I was—at least six-one or six-two—wore crisp, freshly starched khakis like those American forest rangers wore. Her skin was light tan, her eyes green, her hair a deep brown and braided down her back, and her smile, enhanced by dimples in each cheek, enchanting.

  “This woman is surely one of the island’s natural wonders,” I whispered to Alicia, “though I’m curious: do you think she’s an endangered species too?”

  “She’s one of a kind, for sure,” Alicia replied, “but not endangered.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone quite like her,” I said.

  “It’s why we’re here,” Alicia said.

  On the boat ride across the Sarawak River, Tamika had been warm and friendly, asking us about ourselves, where we were from, why we were there, and what we’d done before coming to the Far East. And of course it turned out she knew Nick, and thought the world of him.

  “You know Nick,” I said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Well, who doesn’t know Nick,” I said.

  “He told me you would be coming,” she said, “and he warned me about you—about how charming, intelligent, and curious you were—curious about the world, not curieux in the way the French use the word. He said you were anything but odd or strange.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Nick is a good man, you know.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  She laughed. “You are on good terms with him, yes?”

  “He’s not only my best friend,” I answered, “but he seems to be my only friend.”

  “Then you are a most lucky young man. Nick has performed more good deeds for people than I could ever count.”

  “A veritable Robin Hood of the Far East.”

  “Robin Hood?”

  “Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.”

  “Oh not at all.” She laughed again, her hand resting on mine. “Nick takes care of numéro uno first, last, and always. You may count on that.”

  “Did you know him in Singapore?”

  “Yes. And in Hong Kong before that. And I visited his family in Maine.”

  “You visited Lorenzo and Eugenia?!” I said, taken aback not only by the fact that she had visited them, but by the news, yet again, of how seemingly generous Nick had been to yet another Asian woman.

  “Yes, and Nick’s wife Trish—his former wife—and their child, Gabe, who certainly is a curious young man. It was through Nick that I found work in Maine—in Brooklin, not far from Trish and from Nick’s parents. I had one of your twelve month work visas, which also came with an additional mo
nth for travel.”

  The Englishman was holding forth about the number of times he’d been in Borneo, the hikes he’d been on, the headhunters he’d known, the animals he’d killed, and the sights he’d seen. Tamika turned away from him and listened to the Germans talk about the shipping company they worked for—one based in Jakarta, registered in Liberia—and asked if they knew Nick, and if they’d ever transported palm oil for our company.

  “It is possible,” one of them said, and inquired of the other two, but neither of them recognized Nick’s name or the name of our company.

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “Nick hasn’t helped them the way he’s helped you and your friends—women in need, yes?”

  “Give it a rest,” Tamika said.

  “It’s why I’m here,” I said. “To give it a rest.”

  “Exactly,” Tamika said. “And what I think is that you should try to be a bit less cynical, for I am beginning to fear that what Nick said about you—how exhausted—how disillusioned you have become—is true. So: if I can be of service in your time of need, you will let me know, of course, yes?”

  Even though her breath was on my cheek, and I could smell the sweetness of her skin—a light, lemon-thyme fragrance—there seemed nothing flirtatious about her. Her directness, in fact, seemed as strange—as curious—as it was genuine, and this quality—the ability to be friendly without inviting more than friendship—unsettled me, since it was a quality I’d rarely encountered in women, especially beautiful women.

  Bako was the oldest national park in Borneo, Tamika informed us, and with an area of about forty square miles, it was also one of the smallest. It possessed the widest range of climate zones of any of Borneo’s parks—seven discrete and complete ecosystems—and thus was home to virtually every type of vegetation found on the island. But before we started on our visit—we were sitting on benches just outside the park’s entrance—Tamika said that since she had, the day before, learned something about each of us, she thought it only fair that we should know a little about her.