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.
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.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 1:22 PM
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