Spelling Birds

In my first week, I thought I'd start off simple.
With a sort of writing exercise.

I'd just read a book by Australian author Kate Grenville, The Idea of Perfection, in which she'd spelled out birdsong as the characters heard them. She did it a lot. Too-wee! or Weet! Weet! Weet! Things like this. A simple enough device. It gives some sensory depth to a scene. For the rare birder in the audience, it might ever offer some particular delight in recognizing a call.

Now I don't know if I'll actually do this in my own book or not, but either way, as I was going through my day, I decided to pay particular attention to local birdsong & take phonetic dictation for whatever the birds said. Just as Grenville did. Phonetic spellings. I carry a little notebook with me wherever I go for just such endeavors. Then, at least, I'd have a list of such details should I wish to use them.

So I step outside into the bright winter sun, the sky a clear blue above, & listen. Nothing. Mild traffic sounds. A breeze through the sycamore. I start to walk.

Pretty soon I come to a stand of gum trees along the road & there in the highest branches are a half dozen rainbow lorikeets. Beautiful, manic bird, who love to hang upside-down & swing about. Whistling.

I pull out my pen...but I'm not sure how to spell this. In fact, I can't spell whistles. Sometimes lorikeets make spellable sounds. They go: Bleep! They go: Wheet! But right now, they're just whistling. More, they're all whistling their own individual tune at once, very rapidly up & down their high scale. So rapidly that, even if I were to spell it out, the rate at which you'd be able to read the phonemes on the page would be far too slow to be accurate. It would just be annoying.

Okay, so that was too hard. I would come back to them. I moved on.

It was the 190th anniversary of the Hyde Park Barracks. The museum had brought in a bunch of re-creationists in costume to celebrate. They'd set up booths demonstrating period crafts & tortures in the courtyard. I spent a long time with an enthusiastic "18th century" surgeon in his leather apron demonstrating surgeries. He let me rummage through his medicine trunk. I picked out a leaden glass jar of mercury--supernaturally silver & too heavy--which we once put by drops under our tongues & smeared in salves on our tricky bits to treat venereal disease. These were the days before anesthetic. He told me about a nearly spiritual rapport between surgeon & patient that some period doctors termed
"The Rights of Pain." He handed me a bone saw & directed me to 'cut off' a volunteer's leg. Be swift, he advised. Be pitiless to his screams. For the sake of your patient: swift & pitiless.

But more on that later. Right now, I'm trying to spell the birds.

Outside the barracks, a crew of red-coated marines were going through drills for a crowd. From a 'cell' on the second story, I opened a window just in time to hear them shoot a volley with muskets. Big blue plumes of smoke for every shot. At the first shot: a big flock of white cockatoo exploded from a tree & made a low pass over the courtyard....strafing the ground with their calls. People actually ducked. They sounded like Godzilla.

Exactly like mini Godzillas. Deafening, raucous, chord-splitting cries with a little yodel underneath. Can you spell that? I can't spell that. Any attempt would only be foolish.

Sometimes cockatoo say: WRECK! With a broken, rough voice & drawing out the short "e". They say it loudly & often enough that sailors must have hated them as bad luck. Wreck! Wreck! But this time, at the barracks, a flock of cockatoos' full-throated cries maybe sounded like Tarzan's call combine with a caught-chicken. But I can't make those comparisons, of course, because neither Godzilla nor Tarzan were around in the 18th century.

I had nothing.

Okay, so I went to the botanical gardens. The big white ibis, with its unmoisterized naked head & a long, down-curving beak that's tempting to grab hold of when the cheeky buggers walk up hoping you'll feed them---they say nothing. Or, they held their peace for me. Also, they weren't here in 1790. Neither were the 9 thousand flying fox killing trees in the Domain, who can sound like 9 thousand squabbling siblings up there, all poking & objecting & calling for mom's justice. But again: they weren't there. And I can't spell that sound either.

On a tour of the flora, I met an intentionally homeless man, a red-haired rogue sort calling himself Damien, who claimed to be studying 'revelation through hardship.' I buy this guy lunch because he sounds interesting & we talk (about his) cosmology for an hour or so. He believes in a circular, endless reincarnation, beginning with dirt, & has a theory about men & women's souls. He's writing a book, he says, called "Damien Challenges Satan". He's just spent a month at a Buddhist ashram in the hills & lets the crows eat our crumbs when we're through in a gesture of Love to All Creatures.

While we're talking, a man with a green parrot on his shoulder stops to look at the silent ibis at our ankles. We look up at the man with the green parrot & say hi. The green parrot looks right at me & says, "Hello!"

Ha! Where's my pen & notepad? H-E-L-L-O!
I can spell THAT. Fantastic. That's one!

All day, the only one I could really spell were the crows. I don't know where Kate Grenville was hanging out, but the birds there clearly speak a different dialect. Or, maybe I'm simply not a good enough speller. (I've always been tragically ungifted at spelling bees. Only makes sense that I seem no better at spelling birds.)

The crows, the sycamores' carnivorous whiners, sound like nasal, nauseous toddlers bawling by themselves, as if without hope for relief: Owww. Bah. Engh. Bau.

A flock of kookaburra--aka The Laughing Jackass bird--can sound just about exactly like monkeys. The stereotype of monkeys: oo! oo! oo! ah! ah! ah! But when they all go together, the group energy of it ramps up & up just like a band of monkeys working themselves up to make a raid, a crowd about to turn mob, until I start to look around thinking maybe I should find shelter. Then the wave of it crests & falls & there's just this one bird: laughing at me for the thought.

The truth is, there's almost nothing here in Sydney that's the same as it was in 1790, though it's been fun trying to read between the lines of the present day. I went to an art exhibit of early landscape paintings made in the earliest years of the colony. "Visions 1788" it was called. When I'm researching fiction, there's something much more satisfying about finding my source images in paintings, rather than in photographs, the latter being somehow too blatant & close. What's left is only available to imagination.

Similarly, there's something wonderful in realizing that the only authentic, unaltered voices that are still around from that period in history are the BIRDS.

Oo! Oo! Oo! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Parts Unknown Beyond the Sea

Two hundred & seventeen years ago this week the Second Fleet of ships carrying convicted criminals out from England's over-crowded prisons & hulks arrived here, in Sydney Cove.

They called it Port Jackson. New South Wales. The Cumberland Plain. The continent of New Holland, terra australis, the antipodes. It was the land of the Laughing Jackass Bird, now called the kookaburra.
They did not call it Australia.

In 1790 this was a place with no fixed name of its own.

Back home in England & Ireland, people called it Botany Bay.
But that’s 7 miles south of here. Even when this was understood—that Sydney Cove was just a much better location from the start—the papers kept calling it Botany Bay anyway. Those sentenced to exile—to Transportation, as it was called—were officially sent to “Parts Unknown Beyond the Sea.”

"Circular Quay" in 1788

I stand here along a jagged line of bronze disks embedded in the sidewalk around Circular Quay. The disks mark the original shoreline from 1788. I’m trying to imagine what it must have felt like to look at that the northern shore of Port Jackson knowing that there was absolutely no civilization as you understood it anywhere else on the entire continent. Odds are you’re a city boy, not given to walks in the woods. You ain’t never seen anything like this. Odds are you’re a teenager, too. Or barely in your twenties. Maybe you’re sentenced to be here for the rest of your life.

The Second Fleet was the most notorious ever to bring convicts to Australia. It was contracted by a company that ran slaving ships & the masters were paid only for every head that embarked, not for any head to land; almost a third of its convicts died. But not you. Somehow. When the survivors started their lives over again here, they started from death’s door.

There are no bars & few chains. If you wanted to sneak away, you could walk for days, weeks, even months in any direction, walk until you hit the ocean again, & all the way there you’ll find no one but the black wild men who carry spears & clubs like some prehistoric nightmare. It took you 6 months to get here if your ship was speedy & so even if you were inclined to run—to try for “China”, say, as some wiser sorts swear exists 5 days to the north—you’re half starved & badly out of shape. You’ve got scurvy for sure. Frankly, you’ve never been in the woods. And you’ve just seen a spider as big as your hand.

Maybe you’re literate, you might even be brilliantly clever, but you don’t know your geography here, because NO ONE knows the geography of this place. This place hardly even exists on world maps. It’s just the southern land mass that geographers always hypothesized MUST be there, because something had to balance out the land masses in the north!

The Dutch found the west coast. Then Captain Cook found the east. He hauled over, hopped out, took a pee, sniffed the botany, shot a wallaby & declared it a fine land indeed. His buddy made a book of pressed flowers & some awfully nice watercolors of pretty birds that in reality scrawk! at sunrise louder than any dawn rooster. And there are flocks of them.

You’d like to tell Captain Cook to kiss your fine ass indeed, to stick it up his Parts Unknown, this fine land indeed that His Excellency, governor Phillip, claimed for England TWO DAYS before the French arrived & conceded in a gentlemanly handshake that it seemed they’d missed their chance to claim the land for France.

Didn’t that part bode ill? Wasn’t that a little dodgy? That the French—the French—just shrugged, Aw shucks, lads, you beat us, we’ll just pick some flowers & be on our way? Best of luck with the penal colony? Didn’t Governor Phillip wonder at that handshake, just a little? A fine land indeed!

Maybe it didn’t happen quite like that. But you’re this 19 year old guy transported to 14 years Beyond the Sea for receiving a stolen candlestick, or something. Sounds good to you.

In 1788, parts of the country's coastline are still partially guesswork, mapped with dotted lines. On one map the cartographer has very gently described Man's ignorance by smoothly blending the tan-colored north coast into the ocean's blue. No one but the natives have been anywhere but the coasts & you don’t speak their language.

Wilderness looks very different when there’s nothing on the other side. The possibility of getting lost means something different, too. DARK means something different. Weird sounds in the night could mean anything at all. You don’t even recognize the stars; you are on another planet. This morning you heard someone remark that this view across the harbour is beautiful! You’d thought he’d lost his effing mind.

He’d called it Eden, this man.
He’d called the wild men the ‘unfallen’.

So we brought em a penal colony? What, to shove the unfallen over the edge as late-comers to sin, as mere dawdlers? There’s piety! You know Man isn’t supposed to come back to Eden. That’s like trying to climb back inside the womb. If that man is right, then there’s also an angel here set to strike us, for the only thing a sinner’s presence can augur is the Fall.


Of course, I’m eating a donor kebab as I’m thinking about all this. To my left the bustling wharfs trade ferries. A series of high fashion sales in the boutiques just behind me. There’s an aboriginal man in a red loincloth right here who’s painted himself with white stripes & accompanies hip-hop music on the dijeridoo for dollar coins.
Things have changed a bit.

Nevertheless, I’m here for one month to do some on-site research for the book. For the month of June, this is my job: right now, during the same weeks that my fictional characters arrive in this real place, I’m going to look at the land, the flora & fauna. I need to get a solid sensory impression. I need to locate some scenes in real places. To attend the giant annual Sydney Writers Festival. To talk with historians, visit botanical gardens, comb archives, tour museums & historical houses, meet some excellent writers & get a lot of specific questions answered. And finally: to make a plan for how to tackle the revision.

Circular Quay, Sydney Cove today

Singapore Sling!

We met in Singapore to celebrate!

PBH is an old friend & expat writer in Hong Kong, so the Writers’ Bar of the Raffles hotel made a happy middle ground. We’ve both been working on a first novel for years now & that can be isolating work. So it’s not outrageous to me to fly once around the world to meet up with the rare, non-imaginary colleague. Just to talk a little shop & remember that we’re not the only one in these woods.

Also to toast! These months in Jakarta were working months for me. I had to make a choice when we came: I was either going to learn the language & play for adventures, meet lots of people, travel far & wide to Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi... OR: I was going to finish a draft of my book. I couldn’t do both. So while my stories of Jakarta weren't quite so exciting as they might have been, there we are: the indomitable PBH toasting Singapore Slings to DRAFTS.



It needs a lot of revision. That work will fill the months ahead.
But for now: Huzzah! With the McKnight fellowship, I will even be salaried for the research in Sydney & all the work of revision. The first check arrived at the end of May.

ONWARD!

Frog Porridge

The following are short excerpts from letters about FOOD between myself (AC) & my generous hosts, KK & LCT, in advance of my visit to Singapore. In all, I think they wrote to me 15 separate times about food. We had a delicious time together.

Eating in Singapore may be the most adventurous thing I've done this year. I enjoyed it very much, but am looking forward to resuming vegetarianism when I return to the States. Click on
"More of the Citradel's Photos" to see a 'Singapore FOOD' photo set.
____________________________________________

KK:
What would you like to eat? There's our famous Chicken Rice, Chilli Crab, BAk Kut teh ( some herbal pork ) etc. Or you could choose a type of asian cuisine, chinese, thai, malay, indian and we could bring you for dinner. Let me know.

AC:
So many choices! All of that sounds good. Both the crab & the pork sound great, & not things I'll find so easily at home.

KK:
Is there anything that you want to avoid? Allergies??

AC:
I would rather not eat octopus, snails, feet, or animals that are still alive. Because I am a wimp. But other than that, I feel open to most options. Certainly everything you listed are familiar cuisines.

KK:
I forgot to mention frog porridge too? you keen on that?
And what time are you suppose to meet your friend on Friday? We could have durian on friday in stead cos we should end work by 6.30pm on Friday.

AC: [deeply unnerved]
Hmm. Frog porridge. That sounds legendary. Yes, I'd like to try that, though maybe I shouldn't commit to it as an exclusive dish. I'm game, to try it, though.

KK:
can you take spicy food?

AC:
Yes!


LCT:

Hello Anne,

Don't think that I have forgotten our durian date. You are very lucky - it is in season now!!!

--LCT (who LOVES durian. The stinkier the better.)

Hexagram

The Hindu temple in Singapore is cartoonishly bright. Even moreso to me after the strict monotheism & austerity of mosques. Mosques can be rich enough, but all the decoration is functional. You won't find representations of anyone in painting or sculpture anywhere inside.

All the more fun to enter the endless & thoroughly represented Hindu pantheon. What you see here is part of the interior temple's roof.




Inside the temple we met a kindly Indian man wearing a chunky gold ring. The ring was marked with what I think of as the Star of David. The Seal of Solomon.

This is sort like finding a swastika in the Buddhist temples. Here in Singapore, I'd already seen the Star on a couple buildings & fountains around town, & wondered. It seemed unJewish to be so flashy with a symbol.

As it turns out, the hexagram is also an ancient symbol: the Hindu Shatkona, related to Shiva. The link there gives you some information, but I like better what the man at the temple had to say:

The '^' part of the star represents Mankind's spiritual quest, an upward appeal to the divine.
The 'V' is divine grace responding.

Everyone's a Philosopher

Here's a telling anecdote told to me by an American expatriate in Singapore.

AD was traveling in rural Cambodia. She's browsing through a market, when a little girl about 6 years old comes up to her. The girl is hawking bracelets for her mother's stand nearby.

"Where are you from?" the little girl asks & AD tells her.

At this answer, the child--who may never have left this 5 block radius of rural Cambodia--casts her eyes upwards as if deeply considering her own thoughts & opines:

"Ah, America: Good country, bad president."


I've told this story a number of times now to break the ice in international groups, especially when attention turns to me as an American per se. "What shall we do now," said one author. "Ah! I know! Let's make fun of Anne!"

When the US elects a president, just about everyone's life is affected. Sometimes more than our own. As my fellow istri EJM said of being swept along to Sulawesi with her husband, It's all well & good for [the grantees who chose it], but "I didn't choose this. I'm just along for the ride & it's a rough ride."

People I meet abroad—even here in Sydney this week—express concern that maybe Americans don't fully realize this, that sometimes our president is sort of their president, too. And that the world is watching our polls, invested in the outcome. That 100% of us don’t vote is a global mystery infuriating to many who would like themselves to vote in our elections. Who sometimes, because of corruption or dictatorships, don't even get to vote in their own.

This is not all anti-Bush, though. The on-going war in Afghanistan--the one that is more clearly & from the outset waged against the causes & spread of terrorism--has visible supporters here in Australia. And Fulbright itself just received monies to improve US foreign language skills. It’s this Bush-allocated money that is sending so many of the young, Indonesian Fulbright grantees to the US, to study their specialty & to teach Indonesian.

I met two foreign spouses of Americans through Fulbright, adults with successful careers & happy citizenship in other nations, who nevertheless changed their citizenship to American for one reason only: to vote.

The God of Wealth

English is the official language here, though Singapore’s primary ethnicities are Chinese, Malay, Tamil, & Eurasian. Nearly a full fifth of the population are expatriates, mostly here for business.

As such, Singapore hosts the most densely mixed variety of religions I’ve ever seen. Indian women in parrot-bright saris, Tamil men with flecks of gold leaf at their foreheads, Sikhs in colorful turbans, Muslim women in flowing hijab, Buddhists burning joss sticks, Christians, even a synagogue, &—finally—nothing. People who are openly not religious.

After all, business is the primary religion of Singapore. It’s an idealized extreme of capitalism here. In the Chinese temples, they literally worship the god of Wealth. Among many, many other gods. Here's a picture of him:

The god of Wealth is very busy here. New businesses sprout up all the time. On Clarke Quay it’s all high concept & quick turn over. Everything looks big budget, shiny & new. Illuminated metal lotus leaves umbrella the narrow strip between quay-side clubs. The air is so bath warm, the night sky so mottled with colored lights, that I wasn't always sure if I was inside or out.

Take the C-Clinic bar, for instance. This corner joint is set up to look like a hospital clinic. Appetizing, no?

Outside you sit in waiting room-like benches with silver cushions. White scrim partitions separate the low metal tables. Brightly colored drinks (many of them blood red) are served from tubes running down from real IV bags, which hang on IV poles along the sidewalk. O2 tanks blow misty, refrigerated oxygen outward from the doorway, through which orderlies in white can usher you to be seated at operating tables, complete with big circular sets of adjustable lights overhead. Silverware arrives on instrument trays.

Does anyone have good associations with hunger or eating & hospitals? Maybe just the desire to drink.

We settled instead at the Kandi Bar, in candy-apple red seats outside, a live drumming performance just across the road. My Singaporean host ordered me a mojito.


The God of Wealth has been good to my hosts as well. My first night away from Indonesia I stayed with a gracious couple we’d met on a bike ride in Ubud, Bali. I dropped my luggage at KK’s general medical practice—called: The Medical Practice—where one can have one's body cured, depilated, impregnated & Botoxed. Maybe all at once? Singaporeans like efficiency.

Her penthouse apartment is huge, pristine & empty of the ‘stuff’ that clutters my own house. The guest shower alone was a stone garden complete with potted plants, windows on two sides (one opening oddly into the bookless, teak library) & nearly as large as my Jakarta study.

A wall-eyed Pekingese dog named Puffy guards the domain. In our absence, it deposited solid statements about its solitude on the parquetry & marble.

They have just purchased "landed property" however, a rare thing indeed in the world's second most densely populated nation. This means they'll soon have a house with a yard.
LCT's first order of business, he says, is to get a Labrador.

Singapore: Entering the First World

Landing in Singapore, I saw that I’d only now entered the first world for the very first time. By this I only mean that it's super high tech, scrubbed bright, safe at any time of day or night, & highly efficient--from its airport to its medical care to its shopping.

Enhancing Singapore’s splendor, of course, is its stark contrast with Jakarta. Suddenly: the sky is so BLUE! The sidewalks: so exquisitely FLAT & walkable! Buildings look painted yesterday & their corners are all so square. There’s no garbage anywhere. Everyone & their grandpa seems to have a cell phone / blackberry / iPod...more than in the US. Even the pretty Flame of the Forest trees lining streets look painted & perfect. The government is so...large. Superficially, the visible standard of living appears universally high (as even unsightly poverty is tidied away).

My hacking cough—which had grown chronic in the last month breathing Jakarta’s outdoor air pollution & indoor AC pollution—disappeared within an hour.

Best of all: I’m back in the English speaking world.
It took me two days to stop saying, Thank You in Indonesian to every cabbie, waitress & stranger giving me directions.

I'm writing this from Sydney, of course, where I’ve been for a month. I'll tell you about that soon. E is there now, however, in Singapore, & just wrote saying the same thing, in the same words:
The First World.

He’d had to see a doctor for his own third world complaints [he is now fine]. As we’d heard numerous horror / frustration stories, he did not want to go to a clinic in Jakarta. So he’d been holding out. In Singapore, he not only saw a doctor the same day, had zero wait time in the hospital, first class facilities, & immediate results—but he paid USD $32 for it. It wasn’t anything complicated, but still: that was the complete & total cost of the appointment & medications.

A functioning public medical system! Now that is first world. And we haven't even talked about the public education system yet. I doubt I’d vote for Singapore’s government, but there’s definitely something admirable going on here.

The government does limit our freedom, 4 or 5 strangers spontaneously volunteered to me in cabs, elevators, waiting rooms & lobbies, as if I'd voiced concern. As if they were still trying to convince themselves. It builds wherever it wants & censors some things, but...life is good. It doesn't take advantage.

True: the trains run on time here, as it were. Even in Indonesia, we were actually hearing people casting back to the days of the (popularly overthrown) Suharto regime, which had--along with many abuses--brought a temporary prosperity to the land. People's tolerance for huge governments & even terrible abuses is greater when it raises the standard of living.

The 2nd most densely populated nation, Singapore has the globe’s highest number of executions per capita.


I spent three days in Singapore: not only to take a tour of the first world, but to meet up with the indomitable PBH & celebrate the drafts of our books. Also to eat. Because for all this first world talk: what you really go to Singapore to do is EAT.

Medium Rare

Before tiny Heavenly Nymph Island became a modest ‘pleasure isle’, host to white weddings & day trippers, it was a leper colony called: Sickness Island.

Say what you will, but this makes me like the place more. So does the fact that they lend burly red mountain bikes for touring a completely flat island that I’ll hazard to be less than 200 yards across.

The pale ground, just as you'd hope for on a pleasure island, is strewn with fallen blossoms.




We took a walk, E, MF & I, each at our own pace. I rounded a leafy corner to find E sitting alone in a clearing, on a bench by a tree. He held a finger to his lips & then pointed:

a sea turtle was laying eggs in the sand.

For those of you who have never seen a nature documentary, sea turtles are endangered, defenseless & tend to lay their eggs only in the middle of the night. So we thought this was very exciting & a delicate thing. I sat down to watch, too, giving it a wide berth so as not to bother it. The magic of nature & so on.
We kept quiet.

Moments later, a fully decked-out bride, bridal party & photography crew tromped right through the clearing to take pictures by the tree. They paused & cooed, inches over the turtle, took a few pictures of it, then set up right in front of E. Then a second photo crew arrived at the beach—directly in the turtle's presumed route back in--& began to shoot pictures of a dashing young couple rolling over & over & over one another in the surf. Seconds later, 4 guys on mountain bikes skidded to a halt, surround the turtle & hunkered down with their toes at its heaving shell to watch, poke it & take pictures.

E, behind the bridal party, is now examining the heavens, looking extremely non-plussed. I’ve jumped up & am hovering around the bikers, imploring them to please back away & leave the turtle alone. Amused at my concern, they do.

The turtle, to its credit, seemed completely unaware of all this. What with the efforts of egg-laying. So I got closer & started taking pictures, too.

At last, the hare-lipped deckhand from our little boat hiked up to tell us it was time to go. The sun would set soon. He seemed really happy to see the turtle, too. He hooked a thumb at it & said to me, “They lay about 100, sometimes 200 eggs at a time.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I think it’s really rare to see this by daylight.”

He nodded. “They’re delicious. When you roast the eggs? Really good. I’ll have to remember this spot, come back later tonight.”

EPILOGUE:

Not mysteriously, here's the only other wild species we saw on a tour of 4 islands.

Harassment Class

Sexual harassment made for a keen discussion topic amongst the female Fulbrighters & company. Until I got to a 5-star hotel & a population of wealthy men—men closer to my own socio-economic bracket—this issue has happily not come up for me here.

Traveling with a husband, & in cosmopolitan areas, cuts down your chances of sexual harassment in any case. The worst I received in Indonesia was mild commentary from bands of resting ojek (motorcycle cab) drivers, who will toss remarks from the shade as I walk by. It’s southern-Italy lite: “I love you! Marry me. Pretty baby, do you want to cuddle?” Things like this. Just about every western woman has heard this here. Usually I ignore it & walk on by.

Obnoxious as that sounds (is), these are not dangerous men. They are not going to touch me or even get up. These guys are a little bored & likely under the vague impression, as many people are here, that all westerners believe in “free love”. A concept made even more exciting by its ambiguities.

The ojek guys don’t have a plan, they probably just want to see what the bule girl will do. When I’m in the wrong mood it can be annoying (or drive certain people I've met into a rage), but it’s not threatening.

Sometimes what they say is so over-the-top (to me) that it's almost funny. Sometimes I smile & open my hands with a gesture of: You've got to be kidding me, guys, at which they tend to shrug & smile back, as if to say: Hey, it was worth a try. Then we part ways. It's not awkward. Twice, when the mood felt right, I played for laughs & got them: No, I love YOU. No, you cuddle with him, he’s much prettier than me. I can't marry you now, I've got to meet my husband by noon.

These foolish lines may only get laughs & not cause offense because I’m an alien. People write off odd behavior to the mysteries of cultural difference. If I’m reacting strangely to them, well that's expected of a bule. Everyone's intentions are friendly enough & maybe that's all that matters. For my part, it’s a little easier for me to brush aside harassing commentary from ojek drivers (than it is, say, from a colleague), because we are from such totally different cultures, separated by race, class, religion, language, socio-economics....

What’s harder to take is the sexual joking that I’ve seen at public forums & on television talk shows, where the all-male commentators make friendly but gently demeaning, objectifying jokes about the pretty looks or availability of a woman in the audience or even a panel member, as was more common in our own culture a generation back. The people involved are more familiar to me culturally. They dress more like me, have academic degrees, & speak in the cadences of international television. Audiences laugh & that’s the bar of a joke's success, but to my ears its sexism seems inappropriate & regressive. I feel more free to judge it, & I do.

Then I got to the hotel. Being in a 5-star, western-style hotel, I wore white sandals & a brown skirt that I’ve only worn inside of such hotels because it falls just above my knees. It’s not a sexy skirt, just higher than my ankle. Lots of (Christian) women wear such skirts & tighter pants on the street, but I’ve been playing it more conservatively here.

As I crossed through the wide lobby, which had several groups of international guests milling about, a middle-aged, Asian business man with a brief case & an expensive western suit squared to me, to catch my eye. Then he delivered a long, sexually malevolent, head-to-toe glare whose dominating power, judgment & predatory fantasy was as obvious & physical as a blow. When he’d finished, he watched me.

I have not had someone do that to me in a long time. And to do it so brazenly, in public...An outrage welled up in my stomach & into my chest. Forgotten curses in Indonesian & Arabic sprang to mind. The capacity for violence tingled in my palms. The presumption of it, the debasing, malicious intent....The anger stayed with me for the rest of the evening. Perhaps exactly as intended. I hated being so vulnerable to this.

In the moment, I did not stop walking or even change my stride. I’ll never be half so graceful, but Italian women once taught me to keep my chin up, my pace even & not to meet the wolf’s eye--no matter your desire to drive it out.
I could feel his eyes on my back all the way up the hall.

It’s hard to explain the effect of such a thing to people who have not experienced it without seeming overly sensitive. A single look, like a single word, is given force by its tone & intent. But it gains much more force—made into a deed—when it’s sent by someone who claims power in your home turf.

All things being equal, no ojek driver could deliver me such a look, even possessed of greater malice. He could frighten me, but he couldn’t manage such a personal violation with just a look. Wherever we were from, this business man & I, our cultures--our class--intersected a little here in the lobby of an international hotel, where we were not really in Indonesia.

Have you experienced any harassment here in Jakarta? the women asked me later that night. Besides the ubiquitous ojek men, they meant. They wanted to know as some would be here a while.

No, I said, still seething. I haven’t. Not in Indonesia.

Prayer is Better Than Sleep

22 April
This will be my last post on the adzan in Indonesia.
Click here for a clear, simple explanation of the calls to prayer.
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“Prayer is better than sleep” is the line concluding the Sunni calls to prayer at dawn. At times deeply under-slept, I’m ready to make a deal: at this point I’d settle for either.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about, so you don’t mistake my subject for, say, an objection to Islam or to prayer. Or attribute it over-much to some unfortunate, personal nervous condition. What moves me to write is the use (& abuse) of loudspeakers, not my host country's faith.

Here’s 48 & 49 seconds of two very different & moving calls, which we heard just about every night for several weeks. The sound may be a little muted. These are clips from one 9 minute recording, made at 3:30 AM during the Month of Lamentations:









Many forces created these sounds, not only faith & beauty & love of God, but also politics at the pulpit & the headless, sometimes frightening momentum of religion. A will to control plugs in a bank of speakers at 3:30 AM, as much as a good man's earnest evangelism. I say: call away! But Godspeed to the multitudes of Muslims who (secretly, justly fearing reprisals) also object to the loudspeakers.

"That Is Most Unusual"

As I’ve discovered through minaret hunts & formal interview—including my standing a ethno-musicologist with a degree in Sacred Music on my balcony on Friday at 6 pm—what we hear from the 30th floor of our apartment building can be a total aberration. It is not normal. Sometimes it's an eddy of echoing noise that is representative only of bad acoustics, an unfortunate number of minarets with competing loudspeakers, some egos & some desperately untalented voices.

To quote my appalled expert, who wears jilbab to work & had initially given my description that skeptical sideways squint you reserve for people you suspect might be insane, aggressively ignorant, or bigots: “That sounds TERRIBLE!!”

That’s all I wanted to hear. That & an Indonesian cleric's daughter (one who, like her revered father, deplores loudspeakers) remarking, "That is most unusual." Here’s another, very different, 50 second example from the balcony, taken during a magnificent sunset lightning storm on Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence:

The Wild Woman of Borneo

AK lives in a bustling household on stilts in remote Kalimantan, with no phone service, electricity, or running water. If things get dicey on the ground—as in the old days of tigers & tribal warfare--you can always pull up the ladder.

This is the southern part of the island of Borneo, a place I knew growing up because my mother would call us—a compliment--
“the wild women of Borneo”.

AK studies agriculture & has socked herself indefinitely deep into the Indonesian bush to study the effects of oil palm plantations on the land & local economy. A blue-eyed blond, she’s understated & reserved, but with a lot to say. Her husband, N, has a grant from NSF to look at forestry in the same places. She moves between two towns, one of 600 people & one of 2000, both of them hours from the cities from which motorcycles bring in vegetables & butter. Recently she’s been laboring in the rice fields with local women. Perhaps to better understand the culture & economy from the seedlings on up. It's very hot, though, & she can't keep up with the locals.

“There’s nothing like honey water after a day cutting rice,” she says with evident relish. This is boiled river water flavored with wild honey from the forest trees, the best honey she’s ever had in her life. Her blonde’s tan is newly dark & the women she works with in the fields joke that her husband won’t want her now that she’s stopped being white.

Here are some details of her story that struck me:

• The river is everything: you drink & cook from it; wash in it; play in it; dispose of trash in it; defecate in it; fish from it. She’s been in country over a year & claims to have never gotten sick.

• Every part of life is public, but modesty is essential. People know to look away, but she had to learn to change clothes & bathe in a sarong. "The sarong shimmy." The women laughed at her clumsy first attempts: ‘can’t even bathe yourself!’

• Those in the small village still hunt for wild pigs in the forest. Some use guns, but many still use poisoned blow darts!

• This is deep jungle, terrain historically beloved of missionaries. Almost all the villagers are Christian.

• Unlike EJM’s town in Sulawesi, most women AK knows in the Kalimantan villages are on birth control (& very interested in discussing it). They get a shot from clinics in the city every three months.

• Inside the houses on stilts, there’s no plumbing. When women need to pee, they squat over a crack in the kitchen floorboards.

• High in the karst cliffs, men gather swallow’s nests, the special spit-made nests that the Chinese prize for swallow’s nest soup. Merchants pay millions of rupiah for a single teaspoon of genuine swallows nest. Men scale frighteningly high scaffolds of bamboo, climbing without gear to harvest them. The nests are so valuable that pirates will kill crews for them, forcing village men to ‘hire’ companies for armed protection & the use of climbing gear. They end up giving a huge cut to these companies, & then eventually just working for them.

• The older generations grew up with the forest as a source of food, medicine, building materials, fuel, solitude, spirituality & sense of self. The younger generations want civilization.

• It is 200 times more profitable to sell timber illegally than legally.

• It was a woman with no electricity who informed AK of the Virginia school shootings one day. She’d heard it on a battery-powered radio, broadcast all the way out to the Kalimantan bush, & ran over to tell the American. One Indonesian was among the dead.

• The head man of 2K person village made a deal with the oil palm company 20 years ago, which is the amount of time it takes for oil palms to reach maturity. The 600 person village’s head man, still in his ancestral forest, is thinking about making a deal. Thus the comparison study. Palm oil is used primarily for cooking, but is an ingredient in all sort of things. Now it’s starting to be billed as a bio-fuel. It is not a very efficient fuel.

Once you plant oil palms, you can’t plant any crop there again. The Jakarta Post writers hate oil palms. Articles excoriate the species & plantations every week for their ruinous effects on the ecology. The companies clear cut the forests (Indonesia is about to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for the fasted rate of deforestation), promising a dedicated percentage of the land for the village’s own trees. Sometimes they never plant that part; AK has seen the promised fields still barren a decade later. Sometimes the numbers don’t add up; she has read the contracts & done the math.

When you speak to the headmen of the smaller village, I ask her, the one considering the company’s offer, do you tell them what you see happening in the large village?

Never, she says. If they want to know, they can go see it themselves. If the palm oil companies even suspected her of influencing a village against them, AK would be labeled a provocateur. The least that happens to that sort of provocateur is deportation, she says, never to be allowed in the country again.

The villagers end up working in the plantation at base wages. But they have motorcycles, digital watches, & plastic. From a distance, environmentalists & human rights activists find the deal & the product patently appalling. “But who are we to tell them no?” says AK. “To say, ‘I’m sorry, the globe needs your biodiversity & primitivist culture more than you need a cash economy, so you need to stay hunter-gatherers.’?”

What could stop it?

Nothing, she says with a degree of emotionally equanimity I envy. They’ll take the deal eventually. The forest will be leveled & their culture will change forever. Is this a tragedy? She shrugs, “They will lose their honey trees. But they will have civilization.”



Here’s this small person in the middle of a jungle with lots of knowledge (& 5 languages) at her disposal, no power & no particular plan. She knows the entire forest & village she lives in will be gone one day. A strange sort of home, that. This is not a person with an agenda. She knows what she knows, but she doesn’t know how to make meaningful data out of it yet. She is a young, independent scholar right now, her expertise representing no one. She conspicuously lacks methodology. Her opinions are personal & only dangerous.

So she labors in the rice field, perhaps waiting for inspiration. She reads contracts, interviews headmen & company men & the women who advise them in private. She measures the soil & crops, & looks at ‘civilization’, which she seems happy to take or leave. She records her findings on a laptop. Or when the generator is down: a notepad. She's looking for what she needs to know. And--maybe separately--what needs to be known by others.

Later that week, I saw on TV what I thought at first was a nature program: sweeping aerial views of dense, super-green forests & free, charismatic mega-fauna with gleaming eyes. “Malaysian Palm Oil,” soothed the announcer. “Good for Nature, Good for Life.”

Women have asked her to bring them recipes from Jakarta. They want cakes that they can bake in wood stoves & without milk. They made pineapple upside-down cake one time in tin cans, just like we used to do in the Girl Scouts over the coals. So she’s scanning the internet in the evenings at our hotel, looking for recipes.

The Istri

There’s only one other istri--“wife”--in the Indonesian program this year & she’s an unhappy camper. Wife in the sense of an adult dependent whose reason for being in Indonesia is wholly about her husband’s research. Camper in the sense that they have no running water for the year in their south Sulawesi village.

When we met at breakfast in Jakarta’s 5-star Alila hotel, EJM went on about clean sheets, real showers & laundry service liked they’d just been invented. It takes them 3 hours to do their laundry in the river, which is not close. They hired someone to do their laundry for awhile until their clothes started disappearing. Her easy-going husband’s opinions of different fabrics—resistance to stains & odors, quickness to dry—has become philosophical & exacting.

EJM had been very eager to meet me, the other Istri, & seemed disappointed that I was not long-suffering. Having had nothing else to do, her Indonesian language skills are impressive. Back in Wisconsin, she was a newly minted lawyer, fresh out of a one-year clerkship & raring to join the bountifully employed, when her husband—yet another ethno-musicologist—won them a ticket to Tana Toraja.

“What do you DO all day?” she asked me with a force suggesting she’d been waiting many months to spring this particular question on someone who would understand.

When I told her that I was pretty much working all day, she deflated like I’d ruined her morning. I didn’t want to tell her we also had a nice apartment with a washing machine.

They had a rooftop shower set up for a while, but then a water buffalo (what else?) stepped on the hose & broke it.

Over the largest, most chocolatey (non-avocado) coffees we could summon for her, she asked: “How often does the water run here?”
In parts of the world (& some say much of the future), the water is only turned on for a few hours at day.

I hesitated before telling her: “Always.”

Tana Toraja, Sulawesi is a Christian area, so much so that the 'Muslim = terrorist' bias can come up in causal conversation, suggesting a confidence that most everyone will agree. It’s remote enough that a white woman—especially a cute young one who likes to jog—can strike some people as hilarious. A phenomenon. By her own admission, many of EJM’s language skills developed through her attempts to engage roadside peanut galleries in confrontational dialogue, which never once went anywhere.

She’d stop short, round on the laughing men or children & demand in Indonesian, “Are you laughing at me because I’m white?” Pinching up the flesh of her forearm to shake at them, “It’s just skin, see? I’m a regular person. I’m just like you.”

What did they say to that? For, the ways in which even I know this is unhelpful are too numerous to list.

Either stunned silence or bemused incredulity.
“Mostly they gave me a look like, ‘Whoa, it TALKS!’”

EJM can’t wait to be a lawyer. She fantasizes about 80 hour work weeks & wearing suits, drinking fancy coffees & working out in a gym. She has felt her liberal arts values challenged beyond their breaking point. She no longer feels the open-minded respect she was taught to extend to experiences outside her ken. She knows what she likes & she doesn’t like Sulawesi.

“Some things are just bad,” she declared. Mostly she’s talking about things like garbage in the streets & rivers; toothless governments allowing extortion & empowering religion unto public stonings & moral vigilantism; plastic wrap taken as a sign of civilization; laughing at other people for being different; having to wash your clothes in the river where everyone defecates. The simpler truth may be that EJM is just extremely uncomfortable & bored, as anyone so far out of her element might be.

Being this much of a dependent has taken some getting used to. We two istri depend on our husbands not only for their income, but for their language skills & all of our social contact. Our contemporary egos are unaccustomed to being this isolated & dependent. I’m flexible enough & happy to be here, but glad it’s only 5 months. I’m daily grateful for my exquisitely portable book (& the small income for it), which has made this a working trip for me, too.

"I've come to hate 'cultural events'," EJM admitted evenly, thinking of ethno-musicology research. It was all well & good for AK, our other friend here, an agriculture grantee located in an even more remote part of Kalimantan, "But she chose it. I didn't choose this. I'm just along for the ride & it's a rough ride."

Just to have something to do, EJM taught English lessons for free for a few months until it became clear to her that kids were just showing up to gawk & laugh at the bule. She stopped. She’s stopped jogging, too, & now she’s really stir crazy.



So we went around Jakarta the city for a day. We walked a lot, the roar of traffic deafening. Then we caught a bajai to the cathedral. As we sat down in the cramped, rickety, back seat of the 3-wheeled, orange, beetley cab, the driver instructed me to hold the door shut with my hand so it didn’t fly out & strike passing motorcyclists. As we zipped off in a puff of black smoke, I said:

“I've been meaning to take one of these for months. I'm so glad I'm finally doing it.”

To which EJM responded: “I've never wanted to get inside one of these & now I wish I hadn’t.”

I laughed; she didn’t. That summed it up pretty well, I thought.
We were different sorts, us two; I was the sort who had running water. Thank you, E, for not studying the theatre of central Borneo.

We toured the cathedral & then (in a death-defying move) crossed the street to the Istiqlal mosque, the largest mosque in southeast Asia. It has a capacity of 200K. EJM had never been in a mosque, which only went to show me how large the country really is.

I wore the blue jilbab. She wrapped a brown patterned shawl over her hair. The mosque was virtually empty. A few men stretched out napping on the cool tile. Four men exchanged vigorous massages in the open corridors. One person sat cross-legged before a large, illuminated Koran supported on a wooded reading stand. The central mosque area is vast, ringed by 5 stories of balcony & crowned with a 45 meter diameter dome. The sheer size, steel columns & shafts of light all give it a slightly futuristic splendor.

“You’re from Mexico!” the guide declared to us for reasons known only to him.

"Si!” I agreed.

“No!” said EJM.

I wrote “Heloise Shinglewit,” in the registry, as I do in most registries, adding: “From Mexico.” She stared at it, then looked at me, then cautiously wrote a pseudonym of her own: Elizabeth January. As the guide could not speak English (or Spanish), he spoke in Indonesian & Ms. January translated.



She did not return to Tana Toraja. Her husband had only 2 more weeks there & the travel alone wasn’t worth it. She set herself up in their apartment in Jakarta & immediately began volunteering 40 hour weeks to an international law office, proof-reading the English legalese. She also scheduled a pedicure, a crème bath & a massage, & then sent all their clothes to the cleaners.