“Wherever you go, there you are.”
– Unknown
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.
– Simon and Garfunkel
As a nation of free men we will live forever, or die by suicide
– Abraham Lincoln, 1837
Three days before the 2016 New Year, I found myself staying alone in a small, cozy house owned by my co-worker’s uncle on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. The house faced an open green field, with tree-lines of palms and the faint outline of a mountain off in the distance. Yogya, (djog-jah) as it’s known, is near the southern coast of Central Java, Indonesia. I had traveled there by overnight train, down from the West Javan mountain city of Bandung. I hadn’t slept. I arrived, two hours before dawn on December 28, bobbing with drowsiness.
The co-worker’s uncle, a painter, was away on holiday in Bali, but had generously offered his place to me for four days before I was to fly to Singapore. When I arrived by taxi to the house, the young Indonesian man who was looking after it while the uncle was away brewed me one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had. Rather than invigorate me, the coffee warmed my insides like hearth fire. After which I slept very well.
All that sounds rather dreamily nomadic, if not downright pastoral. But the underbelly of the truth is that long-term travel, as opposed to the episodic and packaged nature of tourism, is often a struggle through waiting, boredom, and loneliness. At least the sort of travel I had been doing after I moved to the Indonesian island of Sumatra in September. Despite all the forward physical motion, the promise of a new day in a new place, and the edgy excitement in which you can lose yourself for a while, there are also massive amounts of downtime. You catch back up with yourself: self-consciousness as inescapable as a shadow.
And there I was, sitting alone in the Yogya train station at four, five, six in the morning, reading a book on etymology by Bill Bryson entitled Made in America, and waiting for a sketchy restaurant to open so I could eat a terrible meal. A teenage boy sat down next to me and struck up a conversation so he could “practice his English.” Not an uncommon occurrence, one in which I most often welcome, but I struggled to remain engaged. Sensing my aloofness, he stood and thanked me for talking with him, and I felt guilty. But it had been a long week. I had spent Christmas alone in Bandung, where I ate well and, after much beer, taught a woman of the night how to beat-box over karaoke songs. And I would spend New Year’s Eve alone and without regret in a red-walled house with two cats, oil paintings, and good coffee.
But, of course, it is a great deal harder to be in true solitude these days. Entire industries that appear now to make the world hum along are dedicated to the notions that you are not alone. Or don’t have to be. YouTube has become my most important pipeline to the world. And so one evening, after a cheap dinner of bakso, I searched around aimlessly on YouTube and came upon a debate between writers James Baldwin and William F Buckley. It occurred at Cambridge University, England, in 1965, and the topic concerned whether the American dream came at the expense of the American Negro.
A great many things struck me about this debate. First the question itself, at once bold and plain-spoken, could not have emanated from within American borders during that time, at least not for public broadcast. No doubt the question had been brewing in some circles, black and white alike, for quite some time. But it was put forth on this broadcast, in those antiquated introductory graphics, in such a way that it was merely posited—an honest, complex, and incisive question that required honest, complex, and incisive consideration. It was, and remains, a question that needed neither flash nor sound effect, alert nor melodrama. For all of its weight, its burden, and its urgent necessity is there in the interrogative itself, and the highly fraught question was brought forth calmly. Imagine how such a question might be posed for broadcast today. Or the knee-jerk and dissolute rhetorical rioting that would result.
This is not to say that one should necessarily remain calm when faced with a society in which a question like this needs to be posed in the first place. Indeed, 1965 might be seen as a tipping point year after which more militant protests occurred because it was all talk and no action. The “dream” Dr. King spoke of didn’t square with any reality of ordinary people. Yet the longform style of Baldwin-Buckley debate, unimpeded by interruption or objection or jockeying for screen time, in many ways illustrates the devolution of public discourse in our current ratings driven, last-word-freak, ad hominem attack forums.
As far as I’m concerned, James Baldwin crushed William Buckley. A total rout. This should be so, of course, because Baldwin was on the right side of history. But from a strictly objective rhetorical point-of-view, he also dominated. In short, I was awestruck by his oratory on every possible level. My question thereafter was simple: How is this speech not among the most famous in American history? And why wasn’t I taught this in school? Baldwin is that good. His argument: “(O)ne’s response to that question—one’s reaction to that question—has to depend on effect, and in effect, where you find yourself in the world, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions we hold so deeply as to be scarcely aware of them.”
Where I Find Myself in the World:
I find myself, strictly speaking, living outside of the United States for the first time. In Palembang, South Sumatra. I’m 34, unmarried, no children, and the only things tethering me in any way to my country of origin are the three members of my immediate family, a few friends, and student loan debt.
I sold my car, donated most of my clothes, and cancelled insurance policies. I fit what was left of my material life to 55 pounds of luggage and two carry-ons. I own three pairs of shoes, three pairs of pants, seven or eight presentable shirts, four pairs of shorts, and some socks, t-shirts and underwear. I have a camera and a laptop, gifts from my parents each. I am fluent only in English. Apart from two of my co-workers, I can go weeks at a time without seeing another person with white skin. Thus I find myself in the world alone in many ways.
But I do not feel alone, not really. Modern life and the culture from which I come, such as it is, works to prevent me from feeling that way. Internet connection, obviously, has become a tie that binds. I can contact my family instantaneously if I wish. I am up to date on the news, relevant and irrelevant. I find this both comforting and troublesome.
The reasons for its comfort are clear enough. But the reasons I find this troublesome are far more nebulous. This is because it has to do with my reasons for wanting to leave America in the first place, each of which are two-sided if I am to tell the truth. I wanted very much to see more of the world. I had not travelled any more than a few hundred miles from the front door of my childhood, saving a week in the Virgin Islands. I envied friends and acquaintances who had studied abroad, or backpacked, or took off after college and were living a peripatetic life.
But it is also true that I was not adapting well to life as an adult in the U.S. My life was static, and I could see no clear way to change it, short of something drastic. I had no promising career or romantic prospects. Many of my friends were becoming mere acquaintances as they settled into their new lives as husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, secure in their careers, with different sets of adult problems: mortgages, 401K’s, desirable school zones, and so on. I woke up one morning, in a Kafka-esque way, and discovered myself to be a giant bug—a misfit—boomeranging in and out of my parents’ house. I was drinking too much, working as an adjunct professor by day and a waiter by night. I often found myself describing specials to young happy couples celebrating one occasion or another—an anniversary, birthday, or promotion. I saw an alternate version of myself in their faces, a mirage of a life that I would likely never lead. And so the easy connection to this old life of mine is fraught with bittersweet nostalgia, an unhealthy collection of what-ifs and if-only’s, and the people I have left behind, and the life I have abandoned and run away from. It won’t leave me alone.
I came to Indonesia, to a city where few foreigners travel, because I wanted to experience life as a minority in every way I could imagine—racially, religiously, and culturally—and in every way I could not. I wanted to feel staring eyes and understand what it felt like to have one person jab another in the arm over my mere presence, to be pointed out. I wanted to live in an Islamic country and experience what that means. If only to turn my gaze back on America with fresh eyes.
I have experienced, and continue to experience, all of that. But a part of me is beginning to believe that short of finding myself in the remotest places on the planet I cannot live as a true minority. Demographically and religiously, yes. Culturally, no. My native (if I can even use that word) culture, in its ubiquitousness, accessibility, and downright bravado, if not dominance, prevents a lack of preconception from the people here. It is at once comforting and jarring. When I walk through the supermarket, searching for soap, I have to be sure to check the label carefully because many of the body washes here have skin-whitening agents in them. And there it is in plain view: the mass commodification of my complexion. It is something sought after here, whiteness. When I say to people I meet that I need to get a tan, that this is the whitest my skin has ever been, despite the sun and the heat, they look at me as though I were crazy. Point blank they ask, “Why would you do that?”
I find myself with a new component to my racial identity in Indonesia, though it’s only new to me because I had never seen it so clearly. I have heard of (but never been called in earnest) cracker, honky, whitey, pecker-wood, blue-eyed devil, and the rest. None of that ever bothered me. Why should it? I had to come to Indonesia to be called something I had to wrestle with. I am bule in the city. It is a catch-all term for white Westerners. The literal translation: albino.
Wayward 