I have been trying to understand the visceral way I reacted to last Tuesday night’s meeting with my landlady for about three days now. Over-reacted, I now think, though I was correct in the assumptions that drove my over-reaction.
Though we never agreed to this when we entered the verbal agreement with our landlady, and though we have learned that it is not standard practice, Laura and I agreed with our landlady previously that we would pay for minor work on the house – mostly painting, because our children appear to enjoy rubbing their dirty hands and feet all over every wall in the house. We did so because it seemed the right thing to do, and because we knew that it wouldn’t be very expensive, given the price of labor in Indonesia (which runs about $5.50 a day for skilled work). Our landlady came over on Tuesday to discuss this with us.
I haven’t written about our landlady, whom I will refer to by the name Ibu Ibu (that is what we called her when we didn’t know her name after we first moved here). She is the mother of one of my colleagues (a colleague I like very much) and the house we rented was the only house we were shown, taken here by the dean of the faculty on our first day in Salatiga. We ended up making an agreement to rent the house, convinced by the dean that the price was reasonable and that it would be difficult to find another house, even though the house was far too big for us. Even so, and even given the fact that we have since discovered it was rather over-priced, we have been happy in the house. (Over-priced here for rent is still so absurdly much lower than rent in the United States that it’s not worth complaining about.) Later, Ibu Ibu wanted us to pay in rupiah instead of dollars (we’d agreed to pay in dollars), which would have added about $450 to the initial agreement, but we paid in dollars as we’d agreed (but not with new, unfolded $100 bills as she initially requested, as though I had stacks of Benjis handy in my desk upstairs).
Anyway, it has become clear to us that Ibu Ibu is, first and foremost, a business person, which I cannot begrudge, and that she is making a fair, nice, if higher than necessary profit off of us for the house (which I also do not begrudge, honestly, though I did for a few days last September when I came to understand the price [which I came to understand because no one feels any compunction in Indonesia, on first meeting you, to ask you a question like, “How much are you paying for your house?”]). So perhaps I should not have been surprised when Tuesday evening, she said, after frowning about the walls and how damaged they were in the children’s room from the tape the kids had used to hang stuff up with, that we would pay $700 for painting. (I misheard her initially – hearing “dua” somehow instead of “tujuh” – as saying $200, which I thought seemed a little too expensive but which I immediately agreed to.) When I reacted to her number with the appropriate shock, she quickly lowered it to $500, which is still absurd (I direct you to the earlier figure of $5.50 per day for skilled labor; imagining, liberally, $100 for the cost of paint, she was budgeting for around 100 days of labor to paint the walls, perhaps about 70 at the $500 price).
Of course I said we would not pay this price, and she agreed to come back later with her daughter, my colleague, so that we could have this conversation more directly (her granddaughter, who speaks fine but not fluent English, was there to help, and my Indonesian is fine, but far from fluent – still, I felt as though we understood each other pretty well). But the more I reflected on it, the more angry I became, because this was obviously seen by her as an opportunity to make an outrageous profit off what I had assumed would be just a simple payment for labor and supplies, one made in goodwill for the minor repairs to the house.
It was in that spirit of anger and annoyance that I reacted a day later, Wednesday, sending an angry email to her daughter (who has been our main contact about the house since we arrived, because Ibu Ibu does not speak English) and to the dean. To her daughter I withdrew the offer to pay for damages, because the spirit of the offer had been wholly violated, and I made it clear how annoyed I was, and cancelled the meeting with Ibu Ibu. To the dean I wrote a letter complaining about the process of helping us find housing and suggested (stupidly, stupidly, so stupidly I hesitate to write a blog entry about it) that I would recommend that Fulbright not send scholars to this University anymore. By Friday, I had come to regret that, and before he even replied, I sent a letter withdrawing that, saying instead that I had some concerns about the process that I wanted to discuss with him before I wrote my final report to Fulbright. (I have been happy at this University, and this situation does not require such animus, frankly.) I was stupider in further exchanges with her daughter, suggesting that the process of finding us housing had been dishonest and somewhat nepotistic, and I know now that I offended her and, worse, hurt her feelings, because she has been kind to me. I also don’t think it’s fair, what I wrote. I have apologized to her as well, but I am not sure whether it is too late, and perhaps went too far already.
Some people have seen me react in this fashion before (hi, Linda) but it’s not my best feature, I admit. I have come to see it as partly a personal characteristic, but here I’ve also understood it as cultural too, what I have referred to in earlier entries as “American indignant.” I remain angry – now less than angry, just annoyed and irritated – by Ibu Ibu, because there is no doubt to me that her price is not even close to realistic, but I wish I had handled it far differently. Chances are we still won’t pay anything – if we do, I will demand, now, an itemized list carefully detailing each charge, and I may also get an estimate myself. All of this is reasonable under the circumstances.
Alas, I wish there a moral to this story. Perhaps it is like a Vietnamese fable, which a Vietnamese student in Seattle once told me doesn’t have a moral to it (I don’t know whether this is true, but I do prefer fables without morals). Perhaps I refrain from typing a moral here because the moral is so obviously very narrow and pointing only to me. In any case, it has been a darker moment for me here, a sad turn of events that I wish I could replay. I could have done the “American indignant” thing, I think, just in more directed and more fair fashion.
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