by S. L. Lim
Andie was proud when he talked like that, even though she didn’t really understand him. He never did succeed in finding a job as an economist. So he continued to drive taxis, body withering, self-respect slowly atrophying. At forty-five he looked like he could be sixty. He would grow angry for no reason; the air would go dark, and Andie and her mother would creep around the house, terrified of speaking or knocking something over or otherwise incurring his rage. Though he never touched Andie, sometimes the mere sight of his wife going about her business was enough to send him into paroxysms. Once, unhappy with her cooking, he turned the dinner table over with their dinner still on it. ‘Can’t you do anything?’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you even do anything right?’
It was unclear what error Andie’s mother had committed. Actually it was quite the opposite: he was offended by her competence in navigating this alien society. She, a country woman who had not finished primary school, was earning more than him; she had a business, a social life, friends. Sometimes Andie experienced an impossible tenderness towards her father. It did not occur to her that May might deserve even more sympathy. Hurt, pity, weakness, failure: these were not emotions you associated with May.
Besides, May was much harder on Andie than her father was. Her daughter’s early success at school had spoiled May, turning her greedy and unreasonable; she made ever more strenuous demands on Andie’s level of academic achievement. In Year Ten, Andie topped every subject besides visual art. ‘What happened there?’ her mother asked. ‘You got lazy, that’s what happened. You refused to study. You thought the subject was beneath you.’
Andie was so angry she could barely breathe. Not trusting herself to speak, she turned and walked out of the room. But when she looked back, she saw her mother had clenched her fists, grimly victorious.
So the Gunawan family went on, alternately admired and despised by the native population, and dreaming of being somewhere else.
#
Real Difference, just like everyone else these days, wanted to expand its operations into Asia. A shelter for battered wives based in Yogyakarta, a Catholic group with an impressive website, was looking for international donors. The members of Real Difference voted and declared themselves keen on the idea, subject of course to an on-site inspection and a detailed econometric study.
It was Elinor who broke the news to Andie. ‘We need someone to work out what’s been happening on the ground,’ she said, emphasising the last three words. Andie tried to imagine the alternative: hovering a kilometre or so above the surface, pointing out the project’s flaws via Google Earth. ‘You’d be perfect for the role. Right qualifications, right background, right experience. You speak Indonesian, don’t you?’
‘Bahasa,’ Andie corrected her, but Elinor waved her off.
‘Well, that sounds about right,’ she said. ‘Get packing. You might as well take a holiday while you’re at it.’
Andie found herself to be oddly, childishly excited. She rang her parents, who immediately spooled off a list of relatives it was imperative for her to visit. They insisted on loading her suitcase with all kinds of bewildering products, bags of rolled oats and milk powder addressed to individuals unknown. ‘You can’t just turn up to their houses empty-handed,’ her father said censoriously, as if Andie were in the habit of showing up unannounced and eating all the cookies.
The oats and milk powder weighed her down. At the check-in counter, her suitcase was exactly nineteen kilos and nine hundred and seventy grams. ‘Congratulations,’ the attendant said, smiling. ‘You must have an extremely accurate set of scales.’
The flight left her sleepy and dehydrated. Her fellow passengers were an eclectic bunch, a mix of business travellers, migrants heading home, and buck’s nights going to Bali to get drunk. One group looked like a football team: strong, blond and enormous, like Nordic gods. One of them leaned over and tapped the stewardess on the shoulder while she was serving drinks. ‘I’d like to take you home in my suitcase with me!’ The stewardess smiled at him, totally unperturbed, and went off to secure some apple juice for a crying baby.
A printed line on the customs form read: THE PENALTY FOR DRUG TRAFFICKING IS DEATH.
As Andie stepped out of the airport, the wall of humidity struck her full-on in the face. She slid into a taxi, and spent the next hour accreting preliminary observations from inside this airconditioned egg. The shopping centres were enormous, which did not depress her in the least. After all her parents’ talk of poverty, it seemed remarkable there were things to buy and people who could buy them. From the highway you could see abandoned buildings, half-completed and then left to gradually dilapidate since the financial crisis. She saw homes, too; tiny dwellings with metal roofs, which would surely be referred to as ‘shanty towns’ or ‘slums’ in the official language. Yet the people she saw living in these slums did not seem particularly abject. Their clothes were well fitting, their T-shirts clean and bright, often adorned with international logos. In a garment-manufacturing nation, even the poor can dress quite well, Andie reflected. She passed through these landscapes, hermetically sealed inside the taxi, and smiled when she saw a great billboard advertising Milo.
At the hotel, she allowed herself to fall luxuriously back onto the bedspread, marvelling at the freshness of sheets when washing them is someone else’s problem. From the window, you could see lines of cars backed up the interminable highway. There was water, too, winding like a river in a storybook except that it was completely brown. You probably wouldn’t have wanted to smell it up close.
At the Urban Women’s Refuge, as the centre was called, she was treated with a mix of condescension and obsequiousness by the staff. She was met at the door by a woman called Agnes, who led her here and there on an official tour, all with constant commentary lest Andie prove incapable of forming her own judgements.
‘Here is where we treat for medical facilities. It’s not much – for a real emergency we try to take them to a proper hospital. Here is where the children can enjoy themselves, because some kind people have donated many toys. Here is where the women sleep – unfortunately, there is just one pillow each; we are grateful for what we have though we are running out of supplies.’ She stared balefully at Andie. It was obvious she thought this visitor had a surplus of money and a deficit of sense.
She took Andie around to see the residents as well. They went into the kitchen, the resting area, even the bedrooms after a perfunctory knock. The women stared at them blankly; it did not seem to occur to them that they could refuse. Andie asked about official records, and whether the refuge kept in touch with women they had sheltered after they went back home.
Agnes shrugged. ‘Most of them end up going back to their husbands,’ she said. ‘We try very hard to give opportunities. But, although we want them to be safe, many of the women here are not so empowered like you are used to.’ She spoke with a wave of the hand. The gesture might have conveyed either exhaustion or contempt.
Andie tried talking to some of the residents. ‘How are you finding it?’ she asked Nurul, a young woman who had been boarding there for three months. Among other things, her husband had taken it upon himself to burn her arm using a cigarette lighter.
Nurul took her time in determining her answer. She appeared to be deeply immersed in her allotted morning task of peeling rambutans, twisting away the hairy tops to reveal the damp white flesh beneath. ‘Very good, ma’am,’ she said at last. ‘Although –’
Andie tensed into alertness. But then Nurul inclined her head with prohibitive courtesy. ‘The ladies here are very kind. I am grateful for their help, which is a gift that has been given to me by Allah.’ She fixed Andie with a stare of glassily pious opacity.
It was hard to tell whether she was being honest or not, since no further detail could be extracted from her. Andie wanted to ask whether the refuge had ever engaged in Roman Catholic proselytising. While the refuge was open to women of all faiths, they held daily prayer services and derived the bulk of their donations from
Christian groups. On the wall of the office there was even a list of Christian converts who had been ‘saved’ through their time at the centre. What did this mean for their Muslim or otherwise non-Catholic clientele? And how might this reflect upon a secular institution like Real Difference?
Andie soon discovered, however, that her Indonesian language skills were manifestly inadequate for questions of this nature. Her Bahasa could not handle anything ambiguous, abstract or flexible; she was fluent only in her parents’ domestic interrogations: ‘Have you eaten?’ ‘What’s for dinner?’ ‘Are you cold?’
In the end, she decided to hire a translator. At short notice, someone from the university recommended an undergraduate named Maryam, who also happened to be the most beautiful woman Andie had ever seen. Maryam had anime eyes, perfect lips, and a heart-shaped face prettily draped with a headscarf, which over here was called a tudung. She was studying at the University of Indonesia, with a double major in finance and accounting. She didn’t think much of the lecturers there, though. She hoped to do a master’s overseas, possibly in Brisbane if her parents could afford it. She did her job well, but was obviously disdainful of proceedings at the refuge. She carried an iPad at all times, which she mostly used to watch music videos. Sometimes she would offer Andie an earbud, which she dangled invitingly between the most elaborately decorated nails Andie had ever seen.
A wall of the office was devoted to news articles about maids or ‘domestic’ workers’, who comprised a good portion of the women at the refuge. The stories were invariably depressing and lurid. One girl was branded in the face with a hot iron by her employer; another fell from a tenth-floor window while hanging out the children’s clothes. One maid, driven insane by her boss’s aged mother’s unrelenting bitchery, had smothered the bedridden old lady and then swallowed an entire packet of Panadol, causing liver failure. She had been placed in a medically induced coma; in the event that she woke up, prosecutors planned to seek the death penalty by hanging.
‘It must be the boredom that drives them up the wall,’ Andie wondered out loud. ‘Maybe we could give them iPads, or something. Cheap tablets, smart phones. Maybe then they wouldn’t feel so isolated. They could always talk to someone, even if it was only on an online forum.’
Maryam gave her a withering, pitying look. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said, in a tone that brooked no great hope Andie ever would. ‘You have to know where these people come from. Most of them are barely literate. They are born on these tiny farms in the middle of nowhere. They’ve probably never even used a computer before.’
Andie marvelled at how casual it was, the way Maryam was so quick to dismiss any semblance of commonality between these women and Andie herself. To us, she thought, it is trivially obvious people are the same all over the world. To Maryam, it is equally obvious that the differences are insurmountable. Am I a more empathetic, compassionate person than her because of it? Or am I able to sustain these delusions of universality precisely because I am one of the dominant ones, the Western middle classes? Moneyed, educated people, physically and intellectually mobile, who make movies and music and write and are written about. Everybody else learns how to understand us, not because we are so lovable, but because they have no other choice. Because we are rich they learn to mimic our language, and we, meanwhile, delude ourselves into believing that we understand them.
Andie signed off on generous funding for the refuge. Agnes wept with gratitude, which surprised and touched Andie, so much so that she did not object when the older woman pressed her hands warmly and said that she would pray for her. Andie told Maryam to get in touch if she ever came to Sydney. Maryam smiled and blew her a kiss from the car window. Andie grinned when she remembered the unconvincing coyness with which Maryam had talked about the University of Queensland – ‘if they are willing to accept me, that is.’ Bullshit, Andie thought. With her clever mind and her languorous body, her busy passport and her well-stocked wallet, Maryam knew she was welcome anywhere. She would, you felt, go wherever in the world she liked.
May rang Andie from the family home in Sydney. She sounded wistful and tried to disguise this by lamenting the cost of the phone call. She asked about the heat, and whether Andie had had the chance to eat an ice campur and told her to be careful of bag snatchers. She talked a lot, asking dozens of questions without giving Andie time to speak. It was as if she was afraid of what new and damning judgements of the country might fall out of her daughter’s mouth.
It took Andie six hours to drive from her hotel near the refuge to her uncle’s house. The traffic was enough to give you fantasies of bullet trains and teleportation. She kept stopping at roadside vendors for different fried snacks. Her favourites were the bananas, goreng pisang, comprising batter and oil and approximately zero nutritional value. Once she was standing outside a mosque, licking her fingers and clutching the square of greaseproof paper. She heard the call to prayer, the ululations reverberating through her very bones. A group of men walked by, one of them nodding as he went. People walked differently here, with looks of concentration, possibly the result of the not inconsiderable risk of falling into a hole, a gap in the pavement, an exposed stormwater drain with the cover rusted through. Does it make them cleverer than us, she wondered, having to be constantly aware of risk? Does it make you smarter, wiser, more observant, or does the strain of it, the unceasing cognitive load, detract from your ability to consider the higher things in life? How can you learn about science and art while you’re consumed by the immediate imperative of not tripping on the cracks and faceplanting in the gutter?
Her aunt and uncle were waiting at the gate when she arrived. They greeted her with cries of pleasure and various compliments, all of which were convertible to insults if you looked at them too closely. ‘Quite tall, but even better if you stand up straight!’ They descended upon her with chilled water, cans of soft drink, platters of freshly cut fruit. She handed over the oats and the milk powder, which they fell upon with cries of lust. ‘So cheap! Such good quality! You cannot get such quality over here.’
They asked what she thought of Indonesia, and were clearly not satisfied with her uncontroversial and carefully redacted replies.
‘What do you think of life in Yogyakarta?’ her uncle asked, and then, not waiting for her to finish, ‘I’m telling you, this place is going to the dogs.’
Her aunt cut in. ‘Do you carry a handbag? You should not do that over here. Someone will grab you from the side of the road, and you will be dragged along and killed.’
Her aunt and uncle, Andie noticed, liked to exaggerate her own naivety about life in a Third World country. They issued declamatory statements like ‘There is no future here’, and then looked at her reproachfully, as if they expected her to take notes.
She met Lisa in the kitchen. Lisa was her aunt and uncle’s live-in maid. At least there was no pretence of referring to her as the ‘help’, as if she’d dropped in one day to clean the kitchen on a whim and decided not to leave. She worked seven days a week, finished her chores at midnight, and giggled with terror every time Andie spoke. The previous maid had been fired after it was discovered that she had a boyfriend. ‘We caught her kissing him right outside the house!’ Andie’s aunt informed her in scandalised tones, as if this was self-evidently a sackable offence. Andie was wise enough not to enquire why two adults kissing outside the premises should be a problem.
Later, in the kitchen, she coaxed monosyllables from Lisa. She learned that Lisa was twenty-one years old and had been working in the household for two years. She slept in a small tiled bedroom at the back of the house. One morning she left the door open, and Andie looked curiously inside. The room was sparse but well lit, with a mattress on the floor and a poster of a Korean boy band. There were six Koreans, boys in their teens or early twenties, so good looking as to be almost alien. Their clothes were futuristic and they had impossibly buoyant hairstyles.
Her aunt and uncle had a thirteen-year-old called Val. She played the piano and
looked like a skinnier, younger edition of Andie. She was extremely quiet, but a sarcastic sense of humour was revealed when you got to know her. Andie admired how articulate she was and told her parents so, and they turned bright with ill-concealed pleasure. To compensate, they began to heap stinging criticisms on their daughter. She was too highly strung, she became emotional about small things – some people said it was just a girl thing, but they had a friend whose daughter was not like this. She was a spendthrift with no concept of money – can you believe it, the other week she wanted to go and see the same movie twice! Andie told them that there were worse things she could be doing.
They were sitting on couches in the living room, drinking tea and discussing the relative rankings of Australian universities, when Val came running in.
‘Come quick! I think there’s something wrong with Lisa.’
They found her with her cheek pressed to the ground, gasping and shaking. A vein was jumping in her throat; her eyes rolled deliriously back into her head. Andie’s aunt gripped her by the shoulders and shook her body back and forth, yelling, ‘Where does it hurt? Where does it hurt?’ Seizing Lisa by the torso, she hauled the girl to her feet like a sack of meat. Lisa’s lips fell open, while saliva gathered at the corner of her mouth.
‘Do you think that it’s an asthma attack?’
‘Does she have epilepsy?’
‘Oh my God!’
They laid her on her side on the floor and covered her body lightly with a blanket. Val ran to fetch a pillow but Lisa fought them off, conveying through gestures that she couldn’t get her breath in that position. They carried her to a chair and sat her down; Andie’s aunt pressed water to her lips, which dribbled down her chin. Andie held Lisa’s body, supporting her torso in case she should lurch off the chair and hit her head upon the floor. Lisa’s flesh was solid and hot, but also curiously inert. It was hard to connect this object with an actual human personality.