As difficult as it is to wrap my mind around, I have just over a month left in Palembang and Indonesia altogether. It feels as though I have been here for both a much longer and shorter time simultaneously. I can hold those two perspectives in my mind at once. From a strictly linear frame of mind, in which one marks time on the straight line of the calendar, time has moved very fast indeed. That I am one year older and have been out of the United States for 11 months, it feels as though I’ve just gotten here. On the other hand, I have become so comfortable with this new life I have, and so surprised by just how I’ve adapted to this new place, that seems to me that I’ve been here much longer.
There has been no thunderous change in my personality, as far as I can tell. But immersing myself in a culture not my own has revealed to me the latent aspects of my personality that I knew were there all along but couldn’t utilize in any meaningful way back home. My capacity for solitude, as one example, which I certainly made use of in the U.S., has become one of my more valued traits. It really comes in handy during these foreign situations in which I often find myself, and brings to light related sub-traits when I most need them: patience when I know I must relinquish control, and assertiveness when I know I can reasonably improve my situation. These things show themselves in myriad small ways, and it’s often only after I take the necessary action or inaction that I realize how important this is. There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous mantra-like quality to all of it—recognizing the power one has to change in balance with the acceptance of the things one cannot.
A few months ago, I found myself in the very same Jakarta airport terminal I had departed from when I first arrived last September, on another nighttime flight to Palembang. I recalled how out of place I felt, with the eyes of so many people on me wondering, just as I was, what I was doing there. Fast-forward several months to the flight a few months ago, and how much I had changed became readily apparent as I was able to renegotiate my seat on the flight to an exit-row aisle with the airline clerk in Indonesian, broken Indonesian but Indonesian nonetheless. And I made my way to the same gate and sat in the same seat I had when I first arrived and considered this tiny victory.
In a certain light this is non-sequitor. Of course after months in a country comfort levels and language fluency will improve. How could it not? But it was the circling back to the same terminal, being in precisely the same place at the same time, that amplified all of this. How I reacted to this situation had changed completely because I had changed slightly. If people’s eyes were on me, I didn’t feel them as I had before. If their thoughts were on what I was doing there, mine weren’t. I was simply a man in the world waiting for a plane to get back home.
What must be stressed here is that I did not get to this level of comfort on my own. I’ve had a lot of help along the way from damn-near every Indonesian I’ve come across since my arrival. It is a hospitality that puts my own country to shame in most ways. The city I chose to live in, however, likely plays a large part in that. If I had lived in Jakarta, that behemoth of a developing megapolis, I very much doubt my experience would have been the same. For one, the sight of a foreigner in Jakarta is old hat, and the engulfing population level, which ebbs and flows with an often migrant workforce, leaves little room for quaint niceties. Likely, I would have fallen into a bubble of fellow expats, with shared language and cultural norms, and would have been far more reluctant to stretch out on my own.
And yet, that I am a creature of certain forms of routine has been reinforced here as well. I find myself in Palembang frequenting the same cafes and restaurants again and again, and, while there’s a limiting quality to this, things have opened up in other ways. The cafe nearest to my home is called Liberica, and it has become my rumah kedua, my second home. I imagine I’ve paid the light bill many times over during my stay. Liberica is a popular place, with beer and live music several nights a week. It is in the style of many western coffeehouses, with plush chairs, exposed brick, soft lighting, and a waitstaff sporting hipster-ish haircuts. European league football plays on a flat-screen TV in a continuous loop and top-40 songs pop through the speakers.
I can’t say that I expected to find a place like this here in Palembang because I didn’t know what to expect at all. But its existence does illustrate a potentially troubling global trend that stems from Western culture. In a recent article from The Verge, writer Kyle Chayka diagnoses the what’s occurring in cities all across the globe with what he labels as AirSpace. Technology, Chayka posits, is not only shaping our online world but the physical world as well. Online communities and apps such as Foursquare and AirBnb have influenced people towards a homogenization of taste and aesthetic, one in which it’s very possible to find the same kind of places all over the world. Not surprisingly, these tastes are most often influenced by trends and values from Silicon Valley. High-speed internet, lighting choices, exposed brick and reclaimed wood tables, choice in music, are all placed at a premium in these new modern spaces. Even the word “space” itself has come to take on a new meaning, or at least a new context. It’s become hipsterized. One’s desk has become one’s “work space”, and so on. And the ideal, as Chayka points out, is to find a space while traveling that is at once foreign and familiar. It’s now rather easy to traverse the globe and never leave AirSpace, never sit on a sofa that’s not minimalist, drink a cappuccino that’s not artfully put together by a funky-haired barista, or stand for long outside of industrial-style lighting. This is one by-product of the now charged term “globalization”, but one that is often overlooked. Cultural imperialism by Wi-Fi. Do we really want to travel from city to city and have the experience be diluted such that one place is barely recognizable from another?
While proximity dictates my rather clockwork-like patronage at Liberica, I realize that I’m also splitting the difference between my culture, this AirSpace culture, and Indonesian culture. I’m choosing comfort and relative familiarity over riskier propositions that would likely be more singular, or at least more unpredictable. This division leaves the feeling that a place can be at once authentic and novel, and prosaic and dispensable. Liberica’s food menu is in English and has Western fare. There’s a fairly robust drinking culture in the evenings, in which bir Bintang and Heineken flow from beer towers and are pulled from ice buckets. If you fancy a Corona with a lime, they have it. In these ways Liberica is a sort of Diet Indonesia, or Indonesia Light. There is also the sense of liberalism in the air, thus its name has a twinge of irony. A cross-section of society walks through the doors daily. Liberica’s owners are ethnic Chinese (as many, if not most, of the business owners are), and so naturally that demographic is well represented. But Muslim Indonesians come too. And, on occasion, I’ve seen women in hijab sharing tables and beer with each other. So there’s a permissive quality to the place that I like.
Yet, Liberica has been a springboard into more authentic, singular encounters. I have befriended much of the waitstaff, become somewhat a part of their extended work family. From all of the countless hours I’ve spent on staff at various restaurants and points in my life, I recognize their sense of camaraderie. They joke and jostle with one another and their talk with one another is surprisingly free from restraint. I’ve become privy to much of this and they’ve become teman-teman, my friends. One waiter, Jamil, and I have spent more time together than I have with the others. Jamil is a tall, gangly fellow, with big crooked teeth, a lurching, hunched gait, and a revolving door of terrible hairstyles. His goofy physical presence, however, hasn’t diminished a gregariousness and forwardness of character that my female colleagues can find off-putting, but I simply find hilarious. He is prone to Borat-like bursts of basic English, and his mind rooted in the gutter, always, and he’s on a relentless quest to get us all laid.
“Woman, Phil.” Jamil says, the moment a few walk in, and purses his lips in the vague style of a terribly awkward kiss. “Pushy, Phil. Ya.” By which he means pussy.
“Pushy gratis, Jamil?” I ask. (Free pussy).
He doubles over, laughing. (I think I’m the first person to use this phrase here.) “Noooo, Phil. No pushy gratis, Phil.”
When more ladies enter, Jamil counts them off. “Woman. Woman. Woman, Phil.”
I understand completely why the women I work with find this talk distasteful: it is. But there’s universality to it too that cannot go unnoticed. Much like the construction sites and other restaurants I’ve worked in, women and sports are a quick way to spark conversation.
Jamil and I have gone off on our own from time to time, and he loves to take me to a nightclub called Princess, which is located in a seedy strip of town where what appear to be brothels share walls with mattress shops. Jamil prefers to take me there, after I’m sufficiently lubed up from beer to ride on his motorbike without my heart in my throat, because people know him there and he can get us in for free. I believe he quite likes ushering me around, no doubt in large part because I’ll buy the beers once we’re in.
I suppose it’s important at this point to make it clear that I have not entered these places next to the mattress stores. I’ve thought it over a time or two, but thankfully the better angels of my nature have won out each time. I cannot take being at Princess more than a few hours. The electronic dance music often sounds like what I imagine a constipated robot would sound like, a high-tech buzzsaw of tension and release. It is utterly incompatible with what I refer to as music, but Indonesians (and many people everywhere, I guess) love it.
Why do I go then? An appropriate question. Between Jamil’s level of of English and my level of Indonesian we are forced to communicate in shorthand ways, in which he will speak to me in broken English and I in broken Indonesian. Nevertheless, we are able to communicate pretty effectively, and I’ve gone hours without speaking any English at all, which I did not foresee before my arrival. No doubt, whatever small amount fluency I may have in Indonesian now is due in large part to trying to communicating with Jamil. Plus, he’s a good guy, funny, and looks after me. It doesn’t get much more authentic around here than riding around on a motorbike in the middle of the night, after leaving a club, and winding up at a food stall that serves Indomie (instant noodles) until morning light begins to bleed into the eastern sky.
Wayward 