Singkawang, Jakarta and Elysium

Singkawang, Jakarta and Elysium

These past two weeks I have been in Indonesia visiting new places and meeting new people. This trip came about not by plan, but by a chance meeting with Dr. Sunny Lie at a conference in Nebraska last year. I presented a paper on my past study of Taiwan’s “foreign brides” and she was in the audience. After the talk, she said her family came from Singkawang (山口洋 in Chinese), and that it is a place notable for the large number of young women who married Taiwanese men. As part of my research I had long wanted to visit such a place, and we began to talk about the project that now is being carried out.

Last week I was in Singkawang, assisted by Sunny’s cousin, Ulung Wijaya. He was the perfect man for the job, fluent in English, Mandarin, Hakka, and Indonesian. Through him I came to know members of his family who all helped, most especially his brother-in-law AThong. I also met his other brother-in-law, Steven, who led us on a one-day trip to the city of Sambas, and a place I hope to visit again next year. The people, food, scenery, pleasant weather, and experiences were all highlights. It also gave me a far deeper understanding of the impacts of this kind of marriage migration—positive and negative—than I had from the time I spent in Taiwan. I plan to write findings from this trip in a chapter of a book manuscript that I am working on and hope to finish soon.

The first few days of my trip to Indonesia were spent in Jakarta. In addition to meeting with Professor Aimee Dawis who had visited me in Macau this past April, I also met with people she knows, and Iwan Santosa, the reporter for Kompas. Iwan has been most generous and gracious, explaining many things to me. He has treated me to meals and took me on a memorable trip to Tangerang, an ethnic Chinese community near Jakarta. For some nice pictures of local temples see here. And to learn about the beautiful Benteng Museum, owned and run by the gracious Udaya Halim, see here.After the week in Singkawang I am back in Jakarta, revisiting with some and meeting others for the first time.

While there is much that is enjoyable, and wonderful to see and experience in Indonesia, there are also challenges. The biggest is traffic. In Jakarta, the traffic situation is worse than I could have imagined; traffic jams begin early in the morning and last until late at night. In most parts of the city it is dangerous to walk as there are no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are so poorly maintained or occupied that you must walk on the road. And the constant flow of cars, buses, and motor scooters makes walking on the road unpleasant and dangerous.

Singkawang: City of a Thousand Temples

In Singkawang, fortunately, the traffic volume is much less and getting around town is much less of a problem. Yet the roads that link such places as Singkawang and Pontianac, or Singkawang and Sambas, are two-lane highways that are far too narrow, and inadequate for the types of vehicle users and traffic volume. As we were traveling on the road, a passenger car may be traveling at 80-100 km (50-60 mph), but suddenly have to slow down to avoid hitting an elderly person walking on the road, or a child on a bicycle, to say nothing of the thousands of motor scooters that weave along the road. It reminds me of Taiwan’s situation 20+ years ago. However, at the time Taiwan was also constructing many roads and highways—projects that make travel in Taiwan much better now than the past. In Indonesia I saw no such signs of road building. It is unimaginable to see a country totally ignore the transportation needs of the present, and seemingly turn a blind eye to the increased traffic needs of coming years and decades.

Jakarta and Elysium

Jakarta is a city of some 20 million inhabitants, that has a rich and varied history, and mix of styles of architecture, from towering new office buildings and apartments, to the villas and beautiful homes built during the Dutch colonial past, to the shanties, shacks, and small residencies that were put up by the millions of poor people who moved to the city in recent decades. It has its places of beauty and squalor closely juxtaposed, a hodge podge of architectural styles spread across a huge city landscape.

Two evenings past, on Monday, after spending a busy day in other parts of the city and meeting people, I returned to my hotel late in the evening. Since I had not yet eaten, I decided to walk through the neighborhood hoping to find a reasonably priced, and sanitary looking place to eat. Yet as I walked along the streets of this neighborhood, all the places that I saw looked very unsanitary. I finally came to a street side vendor who was serving fried rice that looked good, and was doing well as there was a line of customers waiting to be served. I decided to try it. I waited, and was eventually given a serving that was wrapped in wax paper and put inside a plastic bag. It cost me only 8,000 rupiah, or the equivalent of about 75 cents (USD). This is the kind of food consumed by the millions of poor residents of Jakarta on a daily basis. The next day I went to a mall in downtown Jakarta, Central Park.

I met Sunny and her cousin there, Henry, and we talked about differences between Jakarta Chinese and Chinese from Singkawang and other parts of Indonesia. They claimed there is a bias, that Chinese Indonesians see themselves as part of the center, the cultural elites, or neidao 內島, while all others are seen as unrefined, coming from outside, waidao 外島. This is an interesting observation.

My second observation was to compare the place where we were—inside this amazing mall—with the previous evening’s meal from a street vendor. While the latter was serving his food outside, in the heat, in a neighborhood bordered by the stench of an untreated, open sewer, the former was inside, air-conditioned, in an opulent and beautiful mall. The malls of Jakarta are far bigger, opulent, than anything that I have seen in the US. (The mall in the Venetian and Sands of Macau is comparable, but different in design.) At the lower level, on the inside part of the mall, you could walk out into a park (like Central Park) that was open, with trees, benches, music. People were walking around and enjoying themselves. There were no scooters or cars to dodge. There were no unpleasant smells from the sewer, or fear of being robbed by thieves. There were many young people in the mall, people who were fashionable, beautifully dressed, beautiful in appearance. They contrasted greatly with those walking on the alley way of the previous evening, many of whom were elderly, children, or the ubiquitous seedy and dangerous looking male youths who ostensibly do not work, and as Iwan told me, may be taking drugs.

On the far side of this park was a row of restaurants and cafes. Many were chains from the US, such as Starbucks, Dante Coffee, etc. These were not the most expensive kinds of restaurants, but compared to the food offered by the street vendor very expensive. For dinner on Thursday I ate a serving of garlic bread, small pizza, and a Lychee tea. It cost me 170,000 Rupiah, or about 15$ (US). Thus, it was more than 15 times the cost of my previous night’s meal.

After dinner I went to watch a movie in the mall’s cinema. (If I left earlier, I would have been stuck in traffic. After the movie ended at 10 pm, the taxi ride to the hotel took about 20 minutes. Yet an ealier departure would have meant a ride of at least an hour.) I watched Elysium (the ticket cost me about $3 USD), the film starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster that portrays a struggle between a post-apocalyptic population on earth, controlled by machines, brutally suppressed, and the rich and powerful people who live on a space ship in the sky, Elysium. The latter is a perfectly controlled environment inhabited by beautiful people, revolving around the earth, visible but unreachable by those on earth. While those on the ship have all that they want, have access to amazing health care, beautiful surroundings, those on earth live in a destitute environment, lacking all but the most basic health care. The movie is driven by the desire of those on earth to be healed, with treatment given only to those who are “citizens” and reside on Elysium.

As I watched the movie I could not help but see comparisons between the fictional world of the future and present-day Jakarta. This is a city of two worlds living side-by-side. One part of the city is occupied by millions of poor residents, who live in substandard housing, must navigate a dangerous traffic situation, have few safe public places for recreation, and very limited access to health care. The other part lives in nice, beautiful housing, is transported from place to place in air-conditioned, large private cars, recreates in beautiful, air-conditioned malls, works in places that are guarded by security, and may go elsewhere, to “Elysium”—Singapore, Australia, Thailand—to receive health care. Today’s Jakarta is the embodiment of a post-apocalyptic world of haves and have nots. It makes it understandable why violence breaks out cyclically, over the course of decades. There must be an underlying resentment, a desire among many of the poor to have what the rich possess, that given the right conditions will lead to violence and the attempt to take by force what is not provided from the beautiful, controlling, and corrupt rules of Jakarta.