The most widely gallivanted of all these archipelagic morsels is by far the island of Bali – a destination famous round the world for its sumptuous resorts and shameless Anglo indulgence, significantly less famous for its native penury, and the home of a thousand other stories not much different from this one right here.
When I knew Ketut Sutapa he was 37-years-old with a rotten front tooth that never gave him any pain or stopped him from smiling. He was the definition of a self-made man, but constantly denied it because no man made himself without the help of God, and because it made other men in his village who weren’t self-made a little sad and irritable.
Like a lot of Indonesians Ketut’s life began with the kind of cards that couldn’t easily beat a fold. At the age of 5 his widowed mother took him to the busiest road in Bali, gave him five packs of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaf, and deserted him. She stood on bended knee and told him without tears or memorable grief what she had to do and why: that the family was too poor and fatherless to care for so many children, that sooner or later someone would come along and give him a better life than she ever could, that this was a good road to be left on because white people with money used it all the time.
Two days later Ketut was picked up by the Salvation Army, fed, clothed, inoculated, sent to an orphanage and never adopted. The orphanage wasn’t in the business of finding parents for its children; it was in the business of raising its children like a parent, then releasing them back into the poverty from which they’d been rescued.
Once, when Ketut was little, a beautiful white Australian couple appeared at the orphanage and spent a week taking several of the children for something like a test drive. The couple took Ketut for a walk on the beach and bought him a kiwi milkshake, and when it was all said and done took his best friend to Melbourne. “His hair was combed and mine wasn’t,” Ketut would always joke. “Now it’s the first thing I do when I wake up.”
At 18 the orphanage evicted Ketut via a work placement program that placed him as an apprentice cook at a 3-star resort for two US dollars a day, seven 13-hour Indonesian workdays a week. Within a year Ketut had vaulted from apprentice to master, and within another year he had mastered the entire cuisine of his culture. He cooked for all the tourists, and by and by learned enough English to teach other orphans how to say hello to white people and smile like Christmas morning so that their best friends wouldn’t be taken to a better life instead of them, even if their hair wasn’t combed.
The years were hard and boring and passed without occasion until one day when a bloated Dutchman checked-in to the resort.
The Dutchman was so rich and important that he’d never learned how to drive. He’d also never handled his own travel arrangements and had booked a 3-star resort by accident.
The Dutchman was inconsolable when he arrived at the resort and saw his crummy $400 villa without all the slightly more exorbitant luxuries of the $800 villas he was accustomed to, and ordered a heap of Indonesian food as a way of sulking. “Things can’t get much worse,” he sighed. He had reached a status in life where disappointment came with room service.
The Dutchman ordered several traditional dishes, like seafood nasi goreng and soto ayam. The dishes were a captivating new enjoyment, like Russian ballet dancing down every part of his pallet, and afterward he was so smitten by the performance that he stormed into the kitchen and demanded to meet the cook and take him back to his restaurant in Holland.
Ketut could hardly believe it. He was very excited and a little afraid.
He went out the next day and bought the nicest bag he could afford and some clothes to put in it. He’d never needed new clothes to put in a bag before, but he was going to the West, and in the West people carried things in bags like new clothes and sometimes nice watches and soaps.
He bought two shirts and a pair of slacks and immigrated to Leeuwarden to work for the Dutchman. The Dutchman gave Ketut a bicycle and a nice apartment, plus a big kitchen in his restaurant where Ketut created all kinds of simple rice dishes that customers called exotic and happily overpaid for.
The Dutchman was so pleased at how much everybody was overpaying at his restaurant that he offered to send Ketut to university just to keep him around for another four years. The plan worked perfectly until it came to an end. Four years later Ketut had a degree in hospitality management and enough money to come home and have children and actually keep those children.
The Dutchman was inconsolable. He offered Ketut anything he wanted to change his mind. He even learned to drive just to drive Ketut to the airport. “I’ve never driven or driven anyone to the airport in my life!” the Dutchman begged. “What do you say?”
“Ik wens jou veel geluk en voorspoed,” Ketut said.
Along with English, he could now speak Dutch.
Ketut had departed Bali with one language and one bag of clothes. Now he was back with three of each plus some very nice soaps. He also had a nice watch.
The watch was German-made and kept the time in places like New York and Bogota. It looked very handsome but made other Balinese feel bad about themselves, so he didn’t wear it. How would he like it if somebody tried to impress him?
Ketut went back to work at the same resort where the Dutchman had found him. The resort had grown two new stars since Ketut had been away. It had grown marble floors, bigger rooms, and an elite and premium style that included a 50-meter pool with several tinier pools around it. But most of all it had grown plenty of white people. The white people were like western vegetation that grew around the edges of the pool and swayed back and forth from one end of the resort to the other. They were very pretty and delicate and all the native staff worked and smiled hard to ensure their easy rock-a-bye remained at the resort and was free of aggravation.
One day Ketut was talking to one of the guests and mentioned that he’d gone to school in Europe. That afternoon he was called to the General Manager’s office and told to take a seat.
The General Manager looked terribly serious, like maybe one of the guests had died from Ketut’s cooking.
“Is there a problem?” Ketut asked. He wondered if the guest had an allergic reaction.
“Did you tell one of our guests that you went to school in Europe?” asked the General Manager.
“Yes,” said Ketut. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you tell them in English?” said the GM.
“I did,” said Ketut. “I’m sorry.”
“Is it true?” said the GM.
“It is,” said Ketut. “I’m sorry.”
“Congratulations,” said the GM.
“Thank you,” said Ketut. “For what?”
“You’re my new assistant.”
Ketut thought it was a joke. He could hardly believe it when he came to work the following morning and found a furnished office just for him. The office had a leather chair on wheels, and flowering plants, and an old Indonesian woman who wouldn’t leave him alone until she made him coffee and watered the plants. Ketut liked everything except for the woman. The woman was like his German watch and made him feel bad whenever he saw her on the wrist of some menial duty he could’ve done himself.
At any rate, Ketut took on all the duties of Assistant Manager, and after a few weeks all the duties of General Manager, too. The General Manager had a problem. The problem had to do with prostitutes, but mostly it had to do with paying prostitutes with resort funds and sleeping with prostitutes in the presidential villa.
One day the General Manager didn’t show up to work, and that afternoon Ketut was summoned to the owner’s estate and told to take a seat beside the pool.
The owner looked terribly serious, as if someone had been paying for sex with his money.
“Did you know our General Manager was paying for prostitutes?” asked the owner.
“Yes,” said Ketut. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you know he was paying for them with resort funds?” said owner.
“No,” said Ketut. “I’m sorry.”
> “Do you sleep with prostitutes?” said the owner.
“I don’t,” said Ketut. “I’m Christian.”
“Congratulations,” said the owner.
“Oh Lord,” sighed Ketut. “For what?”
“You’re the new GM.”
Ketut had absolutely no desire for such a promotion because he was absolutely sure he’d screw it up. He pleaded with the owner to consider all the incompetence he’d bring to the position, but the owner was convinced that not paying prostitutes with his money was the direction his resort needed to go.
The next day Ketut became the interim General Manager of a 5-star Bali resort in Seminyak, and the next week the “interim” part withered off the title like a dead leaf that had never been on the right plant to begin with.
The resort flourished under Ketut’s management. It didn’t matter that he’d never quarterbacked a front office or controlled an F&B department, for he had mastered the most important knowledge a person in Bali could master: what white people liked.
He was seemingly so educated on the matter that banks and local businesses hired him for seminars to teach the great art of Anglo satisfaction. Ketut went to the seminars and got dozens of different questions all asking the same thing: How do you make white people happy?
Ketut had no idea how to make white people happy. It wasn’t anything he’d ever worried about. But it was true that there was a lot of money to be made in doing so, and he felt obliged to offer the best answer he could. The answer usually went something like this:
“Good afternoon. My name is Ketut Sutapa and I am here today to talk about making westerners happy. I do not know what makes them happy all of the time, but I will tell you what happened with me and maybe that will mean something to you.
“When I was very little I had much less than any white person. I had almost nothing. I was left on a road and a group of white people took me from the road and gave me a home and some food. They did not ask me for money or work. They gave me these things even though I was little and dirty and could not give them anything in return. And that made them happy.
“But when I was older my teeth went bad and my hair wasn’t nice, and that didn’t make them happy. I was still dirty and poor, but they didn’t like that anymore. I didn’t see them for a long time. Then I grew up and learned their language and they were happy again. I learned how to cook the food of my people and they loved the food and gave me an education for it. They traded their education for my cooking. But when I got my education I took my cooking away and that made them unhappy again.
“So when I came home to Bali I went back to the kitchen to make them happy, but that made them the most unhappy of all. They didn’t want their education cooking for them. They made me leave the kitchen and put me in charge of making them happy. I didn’t do anything special. I talked to them nicely and smiled when they asked for things. And when they asked about my life I told them the truth, and they were happy. Almost grateful.
“In conclusion then: I speak to them in their language, I have less than almost any of them, and I smile when they ask for things. And that makes them happy. Thank you.”
The audience almost always left Ketut’s seminars looking for a refund. It didn’t seem like he knew anything about white people. He might’ve known less than them.
Ketut didn’t mind. He didn’t know what white people wanted. He didn’t care what they wanted. There was only one thing Ketut wanted, and that was to find his family, start a family, and keep a family happy and together.
He went back to the road where his mother had deserted him 30 years before. He wanted to find his original village and then locate his mother. He wanted to show her his diploma, which he kept folded neatly in his wallet, show her the fine paper it was printed on and the elegant European language that was printed upon it. He wanted to hold her hand and tell her things like:
“Now this family has money and can take care of itself. It does not have to leave its children by the road for rich foreigners to take them to better lives. It can give them those lives itself. And we will be proud and have nice soaps and raise our children under God, because I can make people with money happy, and it will take us from nothing to anything.”
Ketut searched all afternoon. Finally he found an old farmer who remembered his family, and even a little about him.
“You look different,” the old man said.
“I’m not poor anymore,” said Ketut.
The farmer led Ketut to his babyhood home, but it wasn’t his home anymore. There were other poor babies and another poor mother there now. The mother had a grove of children and three jobs that had nothing to do with taking care of the children. She didn’t know where Ketut’s family was. She didn’t know where the father of her children was. Two of her children had diarrhea. None of them had shoes. “Take this,” Ketut said, and gave her a card with his name and number. Two days later her eldest son had a job at the hotel and was talking to white people.
That was as far as Ketut’s story had come at the time that I knew him. He never went back to that road again, not even to drive on it. He made his money and ran his resort, and on nights when the kitchen was short-staffed he got behind the burners and worked his old magic with fervor and joy. He married a girl he’d met long ago at the orphanage and had three children, and he loved going to work because he loved providing for and coming home to children. His face had the life and youth of his children, and looking into it you could not detect any of the poverty or strain of obsequiousness that warps the spirits of so many others who are born into identical circumstance. Everything that could’ve been gained from the content of white people, he’d gained.
They’d made him happy.
CRUSH
RICHARD CALAYEG CORNELIO
I
Right until the Year of the Flood, we lived in a hundred-year-old house in the city center, a dusky affair with high, vaulted ceilings and walls made of real pine wood; eight drafty rooms upstairs that dripped history as it dropped slates; a grand staircase flanked by wooden balustrades and with dry, worn steps that still managed to hold out for years only because we had the fiddly science of shifting our weights down pat; and, my favorite part of the house, a spacious rooftop that looked out to the whole neighborhood, where I sneaked off to most afternoons dreaming of marrying our nextdoor neighbor, Mr. Isaac, till I wept in a fury of tears and defeat and everything turned carnation, mauve, pearl amethyst with the inexorable dusk.
The turn of the millennium was almost here, and doggedly I took stock of the years before I turned eighteen and worried day and night that the world would end before my love even realized he was madly, foolishly, rabidly, infinitely in love with me. I was sixteen and saw love as one would a hidden treasure buried deep in the seafloor, but I made no efforts at all at dredging up the treasure and fancied myself a princess to whom troves and bullions and king’s ransoms came simply of their own accord.
Mr. Isaac was a tall, hollowly thin man who looked like he’d whittled away pounds in the name of scholarship, which was probably true, for he taught at the state university, was revered and liked by many, except perhaps when he wore his favorite green parka with a green beret, green pants, green pullover, and thankfully brown shoes – and, really, it was all you could do not to think of puke and not to torch to shreds all the sickeningly green stuff in his wardrobe. He’d only recently moved in from the States and I could distinctly recall the day he first stepped into the neighborhood, partly because it was a foggy night then and from out of the wafting whiteness he emerged, like an angel sent from heaven, and waved hello to me when he caught me peering down at him from the rooftop. But of course, I remembered it, for in those days we were made to believe that ghosts roamed the streets at night to steal strong-willed little girls away, and I hadn’t known until then that ghosts had outrageously awful fashion sense.
My brother Jaypee liked to joke about and make a meal of my calf love every chance he got. Five years my junior, he was ju
st being quite the airhead, nudging or poking me so violently in the side I almost fell off the curb when we passed by Mr. Isaac’s, a turn-of-the century monstrosity, a door up the street from us, on the way home from school in the afternoons. If it was my lucky day, Mr. Isaac would be there in a wicker armchair on his screened porch, on his lap a heavy hardbound book, horn-rimmed glasses slipping a fraction down his nose. He squinted terribly, and Jaypee was forever and a day wagering our babies would for sure come out so squint-eyed, just like the father, that they couldn’t tell a ‘two’ from a ‘one’, and sooner or later I’d need a pair of glasses too. The clown would double over with laughter, his eyes lighting up and crinkling till they looked like slits in his face, and my heart would crawl pounding out of my throat as Mr. Isaac looked up in wonder, saw us kids walking by and wished us a good afternoon. My gut turned so watery I thought I’d swoon.
A couple of times Jaypee wrestled off his clown shoes and, in some old fit of sobriety, asked me however I fell in love with a man probably half as old as Father. And so I told my brother about that one time I was on my nighttime walk, having stolen out of the house while Mother and Father plodded through the hills and valleys of slumber, the row of streetlights throwing down my shadow on the asphalt, turning everything the color of foil. Why I felt lonely then, I didn’t now know, and the tears I remembered but didn’t know what for.
I walked, then trotted, then ran across five blocks as the wind whipped against my face and wafted dry the tears spilling down my cheeks like runnels. I ran and, before I knew it, Brownie, the neighborhood dachshund, was drooling close on my heels, so I ran, ran for dear life, and who should I run slap into but Mr. Isaac of the horn-rimmed glasses, in a green dashiki upon whose misplaced patch pocket I cried, cried, wouldn’t stop for all the world.
He walked me home under a cluster of stars peeking through a cloud-curtained, velvet sky. We heard the distant toll of church bells striking the witching hour of ghosts and night wanderers, of lovers and dreamers. Dead leaves littered the sidewalk. We walked in silence and gazed into the few houses still lit, paper lanterns flickering in the dead of the night.
TRASH Page 5
