In which I just remember some stuff I need to remember

I miss my blog.

            There is something about the regular reflection on an intense experience that becomes an important aspect of the experience, an aspect of its narrativizing I guess, that the blog served such an important function for. And while in past trips abroad – aside from a college-year in London, my longest exit before Indonesia had been a seven-week Central American jaunt in the late 1980s – I have been able to shape that experience in the telling, a little, after I return, it’s been harder to do that with a year abroad. I feel like I need an hour or two a week in which I schedule someone to come and listen to me, and my family too, talk about what happened over there. But it’s hard to suggest that, honestly.  And the result has become, now, that at the time when I finally want to talk about my year, I don’t really have a venue to talk about it. And by now, I assure you, our return to Bozeman is, for the most part, old news. (“Didn’t you go somewhere last year?” people might ask, when they see me – or – “I haven’t seen you forever – where have you been?”)

            So:

            There was a toddler – a little girl of about two – the daughter of the couple who ran our favorite sate stand, up the street from where we lived about a kilometer. Once a week or so we’d head up there to pick up a bunch of chicken sate, with lontong (rice compressed in banana leaves with coconut water) and an incredible peanut sauce. Every time I came there, this little girl would fall apart, weeping inconsolably. Her sweet older sister, who was not frightened of me, would do her best to calm her, but ultimately the toddler had to get moved from wherever she was stashed around the sidewalk stand – covered with tarp and canvas for the rain – and lodged on her mother’s hip. Usually I would arrive, place my order, and then disappear somewhere else for five minutes – the Alfamart up the street for a couple of cold Bintang, for example – in order to keep peace at the sate stand, but sometimes I stayed, the entire time striking abject fear into the heart of this young girl, her parents seeming, only to me perhaps, slightly annoyed, more at me than their daughter, more at the hulking bule who arrives unpredictably and upsets the relative order of their work.

            With the daughter perched on her hip, the mother would run through the steps of preparing the chicken for grilling – the marinating, the basting, and so forth (all the cutting and skewering had been done off-site, presumably somewhere with the most rigid sanitary standards assuring healthful meat – in any case, best not to create that image) – and then the preparing the finished sate for the customers – putting 10 sate sticks in a laminated paper wrapping with some hot peppers, the sliced lontong, and a scoopful of the sauce (this was a Madurese sate, which was somewhat distinctive and more spicy than the Javanese one). The father had a giant Hibachi-like sate grill, with an electric fan attached to keep the coals hot, and he’d be grilling, fanning, turning, moving, overseeing the process with 50 to 100 sates going at a time. The screaming infant was not a useful addition to their workload.

            At the place with the best nasi goreng (fried rice) down the road in the other direction, in a street stall attached to a small store, Graham became fairly good friends with the owner, and, as was his habit in kitchens throughout Indonesia, would perch himself by the cooking space and ask questions about the cooking, the food, and whatever. The couple who ran the place always greeted Graham with enthusiasm and had him, by the time we moved, cooking at the wok the batches of nasi and mei (noodles) that we the specialty there. The man – who became increasingly unhealthy over the time we visited the stand – took a shine to Graham, and together they would hold up ingredients – garlic, peanuts, various vegetables – and learn the Indonesian and English words for them, and he always remembered the English words Graham taught him, which he made sure to use the next time we returned. (He would make jokes to Graham like, “Tidak ada kacang, tapi kami punya peanuts” – which meant “There are no peanuts, but we have peanuts.”) Going to that stand for the 20-30 minutes it would take to get our dinner was always wonderful time spent, sipping a Coke while I watched Graham do his thing. Of course, Graham behind the counter was a great conversation piece in general, and we met a lot of interesting people at that stand.

            There was a mie ayam (chicken noodle soup) stand down the street that I finally stopped at about 6 weeks before our year ended there, part of my renewed enjoyment of street food as our trip came to an end. After my bout with some sort of outrageously painful intestinal virus somewhere around last October, I kind of held back on a lot of street food (the two above remained old stand-bys) but my visit from my friend Michael, in early May, turned me again. Michael would eat anything, all day. When he saw something for sale, on the street, he bought it, and ate it, unconcerned by the fact that the cook pulled a bowl out of a bucket of standing water stuck in a cabinet on the rolling soup stand. I think he did, in fact, get sick, but he also brought gin and bourbon from the duty-free in Singapore (inadvertently smuggling in one liter more than he was allowed) so perhaps our regular night-caps, many of them on a rooftop balcony overlooking the city center of Yogyakarta, helped fend off the worst of it. That mie ayam place was amazing, and I got a delicious meal, which I would now consider, in the United States, a small snack, for around 50 cents.

            These places became our routines, and the people our touchstones of stability. They were members of the community  who recognized us, who knew that our arrival would cause the baby to cry, or bring the sick owner out from the back to talk to Graham, or add extra spice to the soup because he knew I liked that.  Most of their names I never learned, but I will find those stands again someday, and say hello, and some of them will remember me (as the father of one of those two kids, I imagine). Something about the routine movements around our neighborhood – the walks to the small store up the street for gum or kecap manis (sweet soy sauce), the tire repair place where I took my motorcycle when it got a flat (this happened all the time, and it cost 50 cents, where ever I went, to get fixed, in an incredible process that involved a large tin can and kerosene – I loved getting flats, actually, because it always meant a good conversation), the place where I would buy the occasional pack of clove cigarettes (which are way better, and much worse for you, than the clove cigarettes you buy here – and I am glad, because I did learn to enjoy them, and I don’t really need them, and if I could buy them here, it’s not inconceivable that I would - but I would like one on occasion – I confess something about the nicotine spurred on many a blog entry…) – this was the mundane part of our life, and when we lived it, it seemed mundane, not the reason we were there, which I would have connected more to the grand adventures we had, or the teaching, or the road trips – but it was those mundane trips and all those people that are the heart of our year abroad. I miss everything about them.

            One more note, since I seem not to return here very often and I have been wondering about it. We were woefully unprepared to travel with kids, and there were so many times (as readers of this blog will recall) when I thought, as my son loudly abused me on a public bus, for example, that there was nothing pleasant about this experience, that the whole thing had been a grand mistake, and that I was frankly sorry we had gone to all the trouble and expense and hassle and disruption of doing this. I’ve become curious about the experience of families in situations like this, because the bonding I thought we would do, we did not do – that is, we didn’t become better at solving problems, or not being irritated by our irritating habits (I am told I have one or two as well), we didn’t learn to find our family as a self-contained unit that could face any hardship with goodwill and mutual reliance, full of appreciation for the fates that brought us together.  But we did all those things together – we saw so much, and met so many people, and engaged in loud arguments in the most unlikely of places (inside a royal palace, or a train station in Surabaya, or on a Hindu temple overlooking the most extraordinary Central Javanese valley) – and now, in ways I cannot understand, even those times that were genuinely miserable and unpleasant, the times where I wondered if I would ever really like being a father again, are part of a story that ends with me knowing my kids better, and myself better, and my family better. I’m not sure we’re any happier – I still can’t talk to Seamus very well about math, or sex – but I like the three of them a little more, anyway. I’ll have to write a little more about that too perhaps. I’d be curious to hear from other families who traveled abroad for so long like this, unless you had a Brady-Bunch-aren’t-we-special-and-team-like experience, in which case you can save it for someone else.

            I don’t know what that year meant, and I won’t know for a while, I suspect, if ever. But it matters that I figure it out more than I have, in part because it looms so large in my mind, a presence in my life that has changed who I am at home, even though I cannot, in any articulate way, say how.

            I could go on – but time does not permit, and I have reached the limits of a decent blog entry. I have missed you all, though, whoever you are (hi Roz!) – and I’m glad to say hello again.

            

Saya Kurang Tahu

            In Montana summers, locals wear these quaint things called sweaters to protect against what seems to me extremely frigid temperatures, the kind of temperatures that would send most of the people I know in Java into some sort of immediate hypothermia.  It’s colder today that it has been for me in over a year, and it’s the second day of September. Alas.

            I came home from Indonesia in somewhat of a state of shock, which confused me at the time. I think I stared a lot, and when people tried to engage me in conversation no doubt I gave off signals that I didn’t want to talk to them. I avoided doing an interview with a local journalist about my experience until it was too late, and then I was sorry, because by the time it was too late all I wanted to do was talk about my year in Indonesia.

            That transition, from something you are doing to something you did, was completely strange. Within 48 hours, I went from a frantic circumnavigation of Singapore seeking my stowed luggage, buying luggage straps in a packed six story emporium, cramming in a last meal in the Little India food court, to sitting on my porch in Montana, and people asking me, “How was it? How was your year?” I can’t think of anything else people would say to me upon my return, so I can’t fault the question, but “how was your year?” for most people under any circumstances is a hard question to grapple with.  But it was impossible to understand it, yet, as something that had happened and was no longer happening. I just couldn’t manage the past tense, for about a month, I think.

            I was grateful to come home in the summer, not on contract at work, a few weeks to clear brush, get my dog on a fitness program, ride my bike around, spend time with my friends, read, and sleep. For the first three weeks I slept like I have never slept before. I overslept on several occasions, something I believed I was physically incapable of doing.  But by mid-August, my lack of a daily agenda seemed to compound the problem of adjustment, and by the time my unavoidable and fairly arduous duties began as the semester commenced – the first thing I had to do was run a week-long workshop for new Graduate Teaching Assistants – I found myself uncharacteristically grateful for the schedule. It was, actually, a turning point for me, a moment when my feet started feeling planted, and I could see my home again, and begin to gain perspective on the year in Indonesia.

            The blog, during all this time, was rather difficult to return to. I figured I might write about re-adjustment, but all I could muster were stoner observations along the lines of “Those clouds are amazing.”  The culture shock wasn’t organized around any critique of Western excess – I’ve been adept at that one for years now – but around an inability to articulate anything, an inability to describe what it was like being home, an inability to describe what it was like in Indonesia, and the blog seemed absurd then, another occasion to recoil from my sudden muteness.

            I had believed, I think, that the year in Indonesia was long enough that the experience would organize itself, on the ground in Java. I mean this: I am accustomed to travel experiences of several weeks at a time, experiences where what the trip meant only becomes clear in the telling, where the narrative finally overtakes the experience, which is really the only possible trajectory, I suppose. But it actually isn’t true.

            The other night in my graduate seminar I introduced my students to the phrase “Saya kurang tahu,” a phrase which reflects the Indonesian anxiety to actually use the word no, “tidak.” “Saya kurang tahu” translates literally to “I less know,” which Indonesians use, regularly, instead of “I don’t know.” It sounds less rude, less direct. It’s my favorite phrase in Indonesian, though, because I love the ground it covers. I am home from Indonesia after a year, and I am far from being any kind of authority on Indonesia. But it’s not fair for me to say that I don’t know Indonesia either. So: I less know. Saya kurang tahu.  It fits in so many situations, and I think it might be the best phrase to describe that false sense that I know, really, much of anything. Still, I think I might get by, for the most part, on less knowing.

            I am not sure if this is a blog sign-off, or if that idea is even a little bit optimistic, given that I perhaps have no readers remaining. But I have stories, and they are sliding back into my head, and I hope I will use this venue to piece through a few of them, to figure out what that thing I did means, in relation to anything, really.

            In the meantime, merdeka!

"Has your life changed?"

            At the Bozeman airport, we were met by my mother-in-law, naturally thrilled to have us return, and my neighbor, who had a pick-up truck that could handle our load of luggage. When I got into his car (my family went with her), he asked me, “So, did it change your life? Are you completely different?”

            I confess that the question stymied me a little. It fit into a narrative structure I couldn’t quite inhabit. I wanted to say yes – I am supposed to say yes – the answer to the question, probably, is yes. But I didn’t – jet-lagged and awestruck by the landscape I truly do love, I muttered something I cannot remember.

            But Laura hit it on the head the other day when she said that it is not leaving that changes you, it is coming home. I still can’t answer my neighbor’s question – I still don’t how I am changed – but I know that I could see nothing until I landed in Bozeman, until we started mustering the energy to re-engage with our lives, our friends, our work.

            I don’t want to trivialize an experience I cannot empathize with, but let me just say that the return has given me a new appreciation for the displacement and weirdness a veteran returning from war must experience. I have had nothing of the intensity of combat, so I don’t mean that, but every day – several times – I have these visceral images that pop into my head from my time in Indonesia. It’s like I am there again, and it is nothing profound or overwhelming, except in the directness of it. I remember the small door, on the third floor, where I would sit sometimes, while a deluge came on the balcony beyond. I remember the smell of the sate stand, or the sound of the chicken noodle soup seller, or the mountain, vivid and neatly outlined in the sunrise, or a conversation with Ibu Yani at the store down the street. It’s a deep physical memory, and I have never experienced anything like it. I never had this experience in Salatiga, about Bozeman, perhaps because Salatiga was so strange to me, such work to even negotiate, that I didn’t have time. But when I return to Bozeman, the normalcy of everything, the familiarity, gives license to the most vivid imagistic memories I have ever had.

            Today I spent my time banging on my back patio with a sledge hammer, breaking down the concrete so that we can put up a usable space back there, protected by the sun – hard work that I could have spent $5 to have someone do for a day in Indonesia. (I’m not bragging, or happy about it – it’s just the price there.) I’m also doing things like planning my fall class – like reading scholarly stuff – but I don’t know yet how returning has changed me. I just know that here I am, and it is the coming home that is more jarring than anything. I didn’t believe it when people told me this, but I think it’s true.

            I didn’t expect to write much more after we returned, since, after all, the experience is over. But I suspect I have a little bit more to say, and at the risk of being overindulgent, I will go ahead and say it. Perhaps it will be tedious, and mundane, and normal – but I am realizing that no matter how reflective I was while we were in Indonesia, it’s almost as if the story of our year began again, when we landed. And the worst thing would be if the year simply dissipated, like a dream you see only the smallest shape of. I hope I won’t let that happen. So bear with me, or stop reading. That would be okay too. 

Clearing Brush - or - Pirates of the Caribbean 2

            I’ve spent hours in our garden since we’ve returned, clearing brush, as George Bush used to call it, pulling out the giant weed plants that have sprung up since we left. (Note for the next year abroad: black plastic cover.) It’s about the most intellectual thing I can muster up right now, though I have a deal of work to get started on, and I have managed in quick spurts to do things in my office at school.

            Everything is very familiar here, almost as if I lived here for eight years already. I recognize people, and places, and I know my way around completely. But I haven’t remembered how to be here, quite. It’s slightly disorienting, because I have a routine I struggled to lose that I need to acquire again, even as I also work to hold on to some of the perspective I gained in Indonesia. I haven’t lost any ambition, I don’t think, but I hope I’ve lost some of the angst about it. Perhaps my reluctance to commit to re-entry has to do with a concern that the whole ocean of my previous life will surround me as soon as I dive in. So I’ve just been dangling my feet, sometimes pulling them out and retreating to the garden if the water gets too unwelcoming. There, I watch the weed free places grow, taking spatial satisfaction in doing work that I would have, two months ago, paid someone $2 a day to take care of, and my body is sore, from squatting and pulling and lifting and digging, those physical tasks I was protected from as an expatriate elite in a servant culture.

            Seamus the other day described return as like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 – “the first one was so great, and you get so excited about the second one, you build it up, and you think about it, and you rush out to see it, and it turns out it just isn’t as good. It’s a little disappointing.” I wouldn’t describe my return like that – I don’t feel disappointed, for example, in the same way Seamus is feeling, because Laura and I have been welcomed home by our friends with enthusiasm and curiosity, and I am glad to be here, but I understand the sensation of strangeness, when you return to a place that you know and it turns out things have shifted a little, but you can’t pin down how.  Those shifts must feel a lot larger for my kids.

            People talked about reverse culture shock as a phenomenon of return from a year like this, and I believed it, but I didn’t know what it meant. It took me far longer to get my sleep back to its neurotic normal rhythm this time, so that was part of it. There is nothing like a sense of disgust at American excess (unless I eat the whole meal) or disdain at how we do things here. It’s a more personal experience than culture shock in Indonesia was: there, it was simply a sense of exhilarating displacement, a lack of clarity about how to physically move around spaces I had to map from scratch in my head. There was discomfort and uncertainty, but of course there was, because nothing was familiar. Here, I am in a place I supposedly know how to be in, and where everything is familiar, and it feels like it should be normal to be home. And so far, it isn’t quite, though the sensations are becoming less strange and more pleasant as the days continue, two weeks after return, as the garden becomes cleaner, as the piles of garden waste grow, as friends aren’t surprised to see me again. I know this place, and to be honest I can’t pin down, quite, what makes it feel so weird. But I feel it in my body.

            I’ve connected a little with a group of Middle Eastern students who are part of a program at MSU I used to help organize – I delivered a lecture to them on Monday, and met with them on a couple of other occasions; they are smart driven students from parts of the world that will need them to be on, now, as sweeping changes move across the Middle East. A Bahraini student was expelled, just as her course of study was completing, because she protested against the royal family. An Egyptian student stood in Tahrir Square in Cairo, helping edge out Mubarak. A Yemeni student complains because no one is paying attention to the 5 month long revolution against a president who has been an ally to the United States in the “War on Terror,” a phrase I can only type in quotation marks.  And of course sitting in the middle of it all is the Palestinian-Israeli quagmire. Talking to them, in my bucolic, green, spacious, wealthy home city, reminds me of how deeply connected my life is to the lives of these students, to the lives of my former students in Indonesia. Perhaps that is the basis of my sense of displacement upon return; perhaps I brought those spaces with me, and I am trying to understand them, overlay them on this space, recognize them together, try to figure out what those connections are. That’s a long project, and it will happen again when I step into a classroom, or go to a conference, and at times and places I cannot even anticipate.

            I need to go clear some brush.            

Home

We've been home for week now, though I have been away again, four days in DC to help next year's Fulbrighters get ready for their year, something we didn't have last year.It was quite pleasant, with a coincidental overlap with my brother Duncan, who was in DC on Tuesday, and whom I hadn't seen for two years.
I got stuck in Denver last night, because my plane sustained hail damage, not a bad deal because my parents live in Denver, so I spent the night with them. Now I'm at the airport waiting to board.
We had the most marvelous spontaneous greeting after we arrived home last Thursday. Word got out that we were back, and within an hour Seamus was off with friends, Graham had a gaggle of friends going through his new treasures, and Laura and I were drinking one of the many beers that showed up with our greeters. It was great, even after 26 hours of travel and ridiculous jet lag.
On Tuesday I gave a 3 minute address at the Indonesian Embassy, during which I was actually heckled by the Indonesian Ambassador. (He yelled out, after I greeted the crowd in Indonesian and thanked him in particular, that he had no idea what I just said. It was quite funny). I realized, as I helped prep next year's grantees, that I had a lot to say, and a lot of ideas about the process and about getting around in the country. When I spoke at the Embassy, I plugged the work I hope to continue doing writing workshops in Yogyakarta, as well as just praised the program.
There is no doubt micro-diplomacy like this works, and works well. As I said n my talk, my children will be lifelong lovers of Indonesia, and I'll never see the world the same either. I'm wary of using words like 'transformative' - maybe I'm too cynical - but it's a different world for me in some ways. On a small level, when I am driving on a road where the speed limit is 25 miles an hour, and it's a wide road, and there are no other cars, I have to study the speedometer the whole time or soon I'm at 40 miles an hour, my instinct from Indonesia to make up for time I have already post or am about to lose. And everything engenders visual flackbacks: the water cascading down the side of the highway after a DC downpour brings up the road, outside our house, when it would become a river.
Last night I went to dinner with my parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, Cupcake, and I ate the entire plate I was served, a massive hamburger and French fries and onion rings, for reasons that are not clear to me, except for old habit. It was quite gross really, enough food for 2 or 3 people, at the portions I've become used to, and it helped explain the general girth of my fellow citizens, which is one of the first things you notice upon return. I felt sick for about 3 hours.
I'm so glad to be home though, I can say that much. And I think I'm over jet lag. But the reverse culture shock, I suspect, has only just begun. My plane, it appears, is boarding. Mari.

Fourth of July

We're in Siem Reap right now, the home base for Angkor Wat tourism. We got robbed on Saturday, at the main place, Angkor Wat, lost a pile of money, but recovered quickly because the atm card showed up, and because the place is spectacular, giant beautiful temple after giant beautiful temple, evocative and amazing even with the hordes of tourists everywhere, and the people hawking.
     We've been three weeks on the road now, after leaving Indonesia, two week in Vietnam and one in Cambodia. Funny thing about travelling like this, after a year in a community like Salatiga, is that it seems like a rock skipping across the surface of a very deep pond, only it never sinks. As soon as we arrived in Hanoi, it felt like we were on a tourist program, and everything felt a little pre-ordained. You have to work hard, in a place like Vietnam, to not get sucked into the program, but the program flattens everything. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me after living for a year in Salatiga, where there were no tourists, ever. I learned a lot about Vietnam, and now about Cambodia, but very little about Vietnamese or Cambodians. Of course I cannot speak Vietnamese or Cambodian (I could never speak Vietnamese, I am convinced. Impossible to hear those tonal distinctions), so that makes it harder. Still, it has been incredible to visit these places, and I am really glad that we had this opportunity.
    We leave here on Wednesday morning, fly through Singapore, pick up our bags and my machete there, and leave from Singapore at 6 AM Thursday morning, home home home. We'll be back by Thursday afternoon. It's a strange thing to write that, like I could make dinner plans in Bozeman for the weekend (this is not a hint, by the way. I don't know if I will be able to move when I get home). It's just so odd, so surreal, to think about home, about Bozeman, about our life there, about how things just get turning again, cycles, habits, frames of mind. I can't wait to see my friends again, and I'm even ready to get back to my job, but I also am not sure what any of that means.
     I will write more in this blog after I get home, more reflections about returning, about the year, about the things that I have learned taking my family away. As it has been before, I will write it mostly for myself, to process the experience. Only I have loved that people have read this too, and it has changed the way I write it, and I never thought I could sustain a blog, or enjoy writing one, and I loved it. So if you are one of those people who reads this when I write it, or check it every now and then, thank you. I have been grateful for the chance to share this year with you. I don't know what it looks like as a narrative arc, from this end. Maybe someday I'll read the whole thing again, and see. I don't know if anyone will care about what I have to say, once I get home. In any case, thanks for reading this far. It's a lot of pages, and if you'd seen it in book form I don't think you would have picked it up. So I am glad that I tricked you.
    Today, the fourth of July (they have the fourth of July here too, but they don't capitalize the F), we are taking a break from temple hopping, which we've been doing in the jungle heat for two days, and will do again tomorrow. We slept in, we'll do some laundry (i.e. have someone else do our cleaning), wander around Siem Reap a little, eat some more food (Cambodia does meat really well), ride bikes, maybe go to a silkworm farm, just stuff like that. I hope you have a lovely Fourth, or, if you're not in the US, a good fourth. See some of you soon. See the rest of you when I see you. If you're in Indonesia, I miss you already. If you're in the United States, I can't wait to bore you. Trust me, we will be insufferable companions for about three months, and if I were you, I would avoid me. Cross the street if you see me coming. Pretend not to be home when I stop by. Maybe this is old habit already. Soon, though, one of you will be saying, as I launch into another paragraph about Javanese neighborhoods, "Well, better let you go."
   I better let you go.

Genocide

Today I stood with my family in a school turned into a prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of people from 1975-1979 were photographed, measured, weighed, imprisoned, tortured, and then killed. Seven of them survived. And I stood next to my 11 year old son, by a tree against which Khmer Rouge soldiers swung the heads of babies, so that they would not grow up to take revenge against their parents' murderers. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 million dead, in 4 years.
Maybe a bad parenting moment. But how do you hide from this? We gawked our way through the Vietnam War museum in Saigon too, displays of Agent Orange birth defects and photographs that haunted my own childhood. We stood by a B-52 bomb crater that helped mostly destroy a 1000 year old Hindu temple site where the US Army mistakenly believed the NVA were hiding. How can you explain this? Why should you try? I don't kmow. I hope I didn't mess this one up...