Coronavirus Sends You Home: Where is Home for an American Indonesian Girl?

christina-indo (49)in #indonesia • 4 years ago (edited)

Every 24 hours, another country closes its borders. Singapore. Malaysia. Expats and tourists scramble for flights and emergency stay visas. At least they had their passports. Four days before my visa extension, my agent's dog chewed my passport to pieces. I laughed, and then I froze, and then I cried.

I looked at my ceiling, my four walls..This is all I ever needed. My sister is in the house next door. Our four dogs in the garden. Ibu Putu and Rio in the room next door, and my mother in the jail down the street, where I can visit and bring her food every week. This is home, this is the comfort and security I had desperately craved all my life. It just so happened to be in Bali, Indonesia - this wasn't my choosing, this is just where we all ended up, together. My family, my home. I know that nothing is promised, life can change in an instant - but I didn't think it would happen again so soon.

Last night I as I lay face down on my bed, drowning myself in worries about my mutilated US passport, my visa expiration and the impossible complications of traveling amidst coronavirus border shutdowns - my father’s face appeared. My memory started extracting moments of my childhood and shifting my mindset into a completely new direction - the past.

We were on the bed, propped up against the headboard and I was about 4 years old. We had the Hooked on Phonics book open and he was teaching me, having me fill out the blanks and repeating the sentences after him.

When I was a teenager, after a couple jack and cokes he’d say, Christina you shocked the teachers in kindgergarten because you already knew how to read full sentences, and they didn’t know what to do with you. He chuckled and shook his head. But what did that have to do with me - any child with a dedicated father like him would have achieved the same.

My memory took me to another moment. I couldn’t remember where we were, but he was upset. He was on the phone, and then he was talking to my mom, and he was really distressed. I don’t remember the details, I was a child, but I remember the feeling.

What happened was, when his work status in the oil company changed from full-time employee to contract worker, they refused to let him keep certain benefits. Those benefits included living in the Caltex base camp in Rumbai, health insurance, and for the right for your children to go the Caltex American School.

I realize now, that from the moment I was born, my dad had my future planned out. It was an American future. He prepared everything from day one - from making sure the hospital wrote WNA on my birth certificate, to putting me in an American kindergarten in the only Western school in that entire province of Indonesia. I know now that that feeling, that time of my dad’s distress, was him scrambling to figure out where I would go to school so that I would be prepared for a life in the United States 10 years down the line. ‘How could they do that to you’, he once said. It must have been a last minute change for him to feel so wronged.

So the next thing I know, we were moving into a MANSION! We went from a small two bedroom home in an expatriate suburb where every ticky tacky house looked the same, to the biggest house I had ever seen, in the center of Pekanbaru city. This house had a drive way! You had to enter the gate of the front of the house, and then drive along the left side to the back of the house, where there was a huge open lot that looked like a professional badminton court. There were so many different gardens..small gardens with water fountains..big gardens with open grass..medium gardens with starfruit trees and papaya trees and palm trees.. There were 8 rooms in this house! Two of them were servant quarters. There was an indoor kitchen, and an outdoor kitchen. The outdoor kitchen had it’s own water well!!! I remember looking down and thinking what IF I ever dropped anything down there…my mom would kill me..and I got scared just thinking about it and avoided that well at all costs. There were two living rooms. One was the wide open TV/Couch/dining area living room, and one was the Darts/Bar/Adults only living room. Lastly, there was a section of the house that was 2 stories high. 2 and a half, in a way, because the roof was a flat, open area. That was where my dad taught me the constellations. But this two story section of the house is important. The first floor became a storage room. And the second floor..the second floor became my classroom for the next six years. Apparently, contractors didn't get the same employment benefits, but they made a hell of a lot more money.

So now I had my own classroom. What next? Well..my dad, he somehow found the only white lady in the city of Pekanbaru who had left England with her only daughter for a better life (in Pekanbaru Sumatra Indonesia!) and said, ‘so you teach English? ok you’re hired!) Samantha. Not Mrs Samantha, not Ibu Samantha, but Samantha. She was amazing. Chain-smoking, sarcastic, unphased, tough, scrawny, dirty blonde haired Samantha.

Then he ordered a homeschool curriculum package from Maryland, Calvert, and had the paperwork mailed to Indonesia, filled it out, mailed it back, they mailed back some learning packets, and boom - suck on that Caltex. From those packets Samantha taught me everything - geography, math, science, English, history - and sans those packets Samantha taught me everything else. I remember her taking a long drag of her cigarette and telling me how cruel people can be, how she thought life in Indonesia would be different from England but it was all the same, how Lucy would - ah Lucy :) Her daughter, Lucy, was everything I wasn’t. She was gangster. Fearless. She became my best friend, my escape from the ‘mansion’. We ran the streets of Riau together, two little white kids riding angkots, looking for cute boys from the Catholic schools, throwing our sendals at the preman who bothered us then running home barefoot. But that’s a whole different story.

6 years of being an only student and reading every Sweet Valley High book had me starving for classmates and a normal school life. But we were living in Pekanbaru, Sumatera. What in the world would my Dad do now?

I’ll tell you what he did. He sent me to Jakarta to apply to the Australian International School. Except the Australian curriculum starts in January, and the American curriculum starts in August. So I had a choice, skip 6 months ahead or fall 6 months behind. But if I wanted to skip 6 months ahead, I had to know algebra to pass the entrance exam. But wait a second..Samantha and I never got to algebra!

And for the most miserable summer of my entire life, every day after work my Dad sat me down at the dinner table and taught me algebra himself.

I moved to Jakarta with my mom, passed the entrance exam and started school at AIS.
'What about you Dad?’
‘What about me Christina? Someone’s gotta pay the bills and work!’

My mom was never there either. She would check on me every couple of months and stay for a few days, but she had a household to run in Pekanbaru. I could look after myself, right? I was already 12.

AIS to Cita Buana, Cita Buana to BIS, BIS to Austin Community College, Austin Community College to University of Texas. He made it all possible. I was spawned from my mom’s stubborn refusal to have another abortion, out of wedlock, an international affair kept from his wife and daughters in Texas. How did I go from an unwanted mistake, to a child of privilege?

Look at all he did for you Christina. Look at the loopholes that he found, the hoops he jumped through, to give you such an incredible education. He made calls, he researched for days, on a dial-up computer when one webpage could take five minutes to load. He spent so much money that could have been used for other things. Did you ever think about that when he was alive? Did you ever thank him, REALLY thank him?? You could have gone to a local public school. Imagine how much easier that would have been for him. You could have gone to a local private school. STILL so much easier. All he wanted was for you to have the same opportunities his other daughters had, but look how much more effort he had to put in for you.

And here you are in Indonesia, avoiding at all costs the one country he wanted you to thrive in, to succeed in to become truly great. You have a country that’s demanding for your return for your own safety, and you’re searching for every loophole available to stay in Indonesia.

Indonesia, where doctors could have saved him from a heart attack but fucked it all up. Indonesia, where the corrupt court system sentenced your mother to life in prison. Why are you so committed to this country? What are you doing with your life?

Your father wanted you to do more than this. He prepared you for greatness. But here you are.

Here I am.

But... I’m home?

My father and I, Halloween in Rumbai, Pekanbaru