Unblemished Asian:

A Narrative of Postcolonial Love (Part I)

Author's Note:  Autobiographical fiction (ABF) is a genre of writing that my teacher Jack Smith says "breaks the habits of being taken captive by autobiographical facts."    As a writing genre, ABF writers love to "break conventions, a great hybrid of creative nonfiction and fiction." Sean Glatch, the New York-based poet, storyteller, and screenwriter, advises ABF writers to take an "apophenic approach" ---- a state of mind in which we connect two things that have no relationship with one another.  Doing so helps the writer to find magic and mystery in your and our lives, and "who's to say the connections you develop aren't true?" How to Write Autobiographical Fiction | Writers.com

The story below is based on, but not bound by, fact. 

He sauntered to the porch of a handsome Dutch-Indonesian villa where Christian missionaries and spice traders once congregated in the days of colonial expansion.  He stared at the imposing facade, feeling awe and admiration.  He marveled at the intricate details of the architecture and the lush gardens.  He savored the scent of exotic blooms and imagined the stories and secrets hidden within the walls.  He knew he had come to a special place.

Possibly, he was connecting with his heritage, reviewing the historic (mis)adventures of his ancestors in this country of 17,000 islands.  To him, I must have seemed an uninterrupted thought that dated back to the 1700s, a combination of fragility and exoticism that surfaced his ancient desires for protection, occupation, and conquest.

Let's call him Henk, a lanky Westerner of Germanic stock sitting across the breakfast table one January day in a Jakarta Protestant guesthouse.  While quietly digesting my breakfast food, Henk chewed on an appetizing idea.  Would he come over and say hello?   

 He did.  Soon after, he regaled me with tales of overdeveloped Europe and underdeveloped Bangladesh.  A verbal dance at self-presentation and flirtation, I was quick to discern.  Meanwhile, I graded students' papers.

 He had just finished a five-year sojourn in a subcontinent rocked by poverty, hoping to do some social apostolate in his lifetime before the lure of fame and money seized him.   

I checked the logical sequence of ideas and the strength of argumentation in my undergrad student papers.  His preoccupation was to impress me with hard-core poverty in a rural village and his commitment to the underbellies of the world where British colonial intrusion cruelly bypassed progress.  I stuck with my papers, determined to finish them before the semestral break was over.

We moved to the patio. Glancing into the garden of fuschia-colored bougainvilleas, he threw the first dangerous bait, "How about dinner?". 

 "The roadside vendor sells cheap sop buntot (oxtail soup), spiced with nutmeg fragrance and the sweetness of parsnips," he persisted.

 It was excellent strategy, this dangling of local knowledge through food, an instant and effortless ethnography that appealed to my anthropological impulses.  Besides, I was a penurious graduate student, and Javanese street food was far more appetizing than the street corner five-dollar pizzas at Harvard Square.  So, I succumbed. 

 "Yes, okay," I replied.  "Meet you at 7 p.m. on the veranda." 

 I got up from the sofa.  Henk watched my tiny feet as I sashayed to my room like a paper lantern, barefooted, clad in an oversized t-shirt and batik sarong.

White men are fascinated by Asian women's feet, I was convinced.  It was one of those hilarious, irreverent tidbits about White male fetishes I learned in grad school among us amateur aspiring anthropologists bantering about silly what-nots.  Someone else argued it was the lips: pouted, pursed, and pulpy — all of which emulated the………. c’mon, use your imagination.  I continued walking with tiny steps, assured of my oversized ability for verbal sparring despite my undersized feet.

 And so his odyssey into my emotional world via a roadside diner began.  A hanging canvas roof sheltered us from light rain.  It was an evening re-enactment of Bali Hai.  The night was spiced up with nasi goreng and the obligatory peanut sauce in our shared gado gado salad. 

 We talked about poverty and underdevelopment against a background of motorized becaks and vendors' voices.  I argued from my conceptual armamentarium on the desperate measures with which we judge the world's progress.  He recounted tales of hard-core village squalor ---  filthy floods,  domestic violence underneath women's saris,  and the desolation of poverty reduction work. 

 "Sundays were toughest," he said through grayish-blue eyes.  "How much music can one listen to on a slow Sunday?  After five years, I had memorized all the songs of Carla Bonoff and Jackson Brown."

 I dug into the oxtail soup while my frizzled hair expanded even more under the weight of Javanese humidity.  

 "What about other expats?"  I asked, waving a strand of hair gone astray on my cheek.  "Surely there must have been others there?"

 "They were all in Dhaka, so I had to take the riverboat if I wanted company.  I did on many weekends.  None of them visited me.  I was too far away.  Dhaka was tough enough.  Who can relax in a poverty-stricken village anyhow?" 

 He recounted the sudden anger of the crowd one afternoon when the urge to escape to Dhaka was un-postponable.  There was no apparent reason other than that there was not enough room at the riverboat.  They complained that he occupied too much space — all his heft, breadth, and height — and so he must be left behind.

 Henk protested.  "I have a ticket," he shouted above the voices, "like everyone else." And then the surliness of a few turned into the resentment of many.

 Here, a few voices raised to a higher decibel, threateningly.  Slippers were waved across his face, less than an inch from his nose.  "I could smell the earth and their feet.  These guys were seriously going to harm me." 

 "It must be that I was white and carried all that privilege and status on my skin.  The riverboat was theirs, and just this once, I would not be allowed to use whiteness as my escape route."

Hmmmmmm, anthropological reflectivity. Live, flesh and bones, not an abstraction from a published monograph. This conversation was getting interesting. And I was getting hooked.

 "So then?"  I sounded sheepish in my hesitation to conduct an ethnographic interview, hampered by my absence from underdevelopment.  Whereas there he was in the flesh, faced with local rage on the river's landing pier.

 "I stepped off the boat, of course, as nonchalantly as walking out of a crowded restaurant."  He bit the meat off the oxtail and slurped the delectable soup.  "Either that or a hundred slippers across my face."

  He was suddenly saddened as he mused on his past lonely life as a missionary of progress --- the Western version, of course, his version, the white male version, the one that came out directly from my course syllabus.  I remembered my development measures between spoonfuls.   Indeed, mine was the luxury of understanding village poverty through journal-browsing and book-buying at the Harvard Coop.   Never mind that they were all Western narratives of prescriptions to save the hapless natives from desolation.

 We walked back to the well-appointed guesthouse — a few patrol cars parked at the end of the short street.  The men inside smoked away the boredom of the evening.  He pointed out to me the home of former President Sukarno, then under house arrest.  This was Indonesia of the 80s, a region of military men and hushed voices.  

 He seized upon the suggestion of a sarong-clad conspiring Ibu at the guesthouse to escort me on the overnight bus to Yogyakarta --- the old capital city and ancient sultanate of Indonesia.   Dancing through shadows of innuendo like a wayang plot in the offing, she and Henk mused on the unfailing wisdom of a male escort in the face of unwarranted danger for any lone Asian female traveler.   Henk's co-conspirator was a wise and witty romantic addict.  This East-meets-West communion across the Javanese countryside was pure Kunderan magic.  

 On the multi-colored bus that left Jakarta one humid evening, Henk watched me like a jealous hawk.  On various stops, he bought food from the countryside, peppered by the midnight chatter of rural cooks.  He shut the windows just enough for the country wind to ventilate the space where my lean body sat.  He offered his right shoulder to rest my head.  Our buttocks turned raw on rough wooden bus benches while the Indonesians perfumed the cabin with the aroma of kretek cigarettes.    After sixteen hours of him gazing at my sleeping profile, we arrived in Yogyakarta. 

 One evening on the rooftop of our rural guesthouse, he offered me moonbeams, the same ones he crowed, that shone on my long, lustrous hair.  It was a blessed moment when love was eager to be born amid tranquility.  The spell overtook me.

During the day, we walked across paddy fields to chance upon a village wedding in progress.   An omen, he declared with glee.  "The bride looks just like you," he spoke in an almost hallucinatory tone.

 The children surrounded us in a small village temple ruined by time and disuse.  They alternately touched my brown skin and his blonde hair, drinking in the curiosity of our contrasts.  They shrieked their names to us in a game we played while we clumsily tried to pronounce them.  A final snapshot of me pinning my hair behind my ears as we walked down the endless Javanese rice fields as he photographed what he (mistakenly) took as the essence of my soul --- innocent, untouched, unstained, unblemished.

 Back in Massachusetts during the spring term, he bridged the emotional divide with perennial phone calls and intimate letters.  Over the Easter break, he flew across the Atlantic, a suitcase full of freshly cut tulips.  Out of his meticulously packed suitcase tumbled chocolate rabbits, cocoa eggs, and farm cheeses straight from the Dutch polders.

 "I found a purple tulip, the first one this season, the one I wanted to give to you only," he was almost crying as he gingerly unfolded the tissue paper that enveloped the delicate pink bulbs.  The solitary purple stood proudly in the center, like an empress supreme.  I clutched the fragile flowers, amazed and speechless.  I was in disbelief at this lavish display of generosity.

 We drove to Maine for the Easter weekend.  It was springtime.  Everywhere was aromatic.   There was little thought about Calvary and the Garden of Gethsemane between steamed clams and succulent lobsters.  When the morning bells of Easter Sunday rang, he declared his vigorous love.  

 And then it was time for Henk to depart.  At Boston's Logan airport, ticket in hand, bound for the Sudan to work for the UNHCR, Henk offered me a summer in the desert to spend with him, and a firm proposal that would bind me to him for life.  His journey across three continents won my heart, as did vibrant discussions on gender equality, cultural tolerance, and committed scholarship.  Like me, he was a liberal anthropologist.  Or so I thought.

 He hugged me so tight I thought my breath would snap.  "We have time to talk about the past. I want to know everything," he said.  "I'll see you in Khartoum."

 Huhhhhh? Did I hear that right?  I left the airport.  My misgivings crept in as the taxi rolled across the Lincoln Tunnel, traffic building up with the onset of rush hour.  

Holy crap!  Why does he want to know about my past?  What the f—- is this?  A morality accounting?  Some kind of virginity test?  How much do I tell him? The litany of men?  Women?  The failed marriage?  The cross-continental experimentation at snorting, shooting, smoking, sexualizing? 

Back in my dorm room, I felt a mild dose of solitary panic.  By the window, the afternoon sun shone on the petals of the purple tulip that wilted and fell. Painfully crumpled and dead.