I believe independence is a huge part of growing up. You move apart from family, a place you call home, in search for new opportunities and perspectives from people whose cultures are unfamiliar.
Perhaps it’s what my parents felt when they left Medan to Jakarta, same country but different island, different ethnic groups, and different ways of thinking.
Perhaps same thing with international FOBs like me who felt different from everyone else the proximity in terms of looks, conversation topics, ways of growing up, etc. I’ve been there, and like most things, it doesn’t get easier. You just learn to assimilate.
After years of jumping between work and internships, It was finally time to break myself from the hustle and return home (for 4 months! Hardly recall the last time I had vacation that long). Itineraries and expectations of any kind are unnecessary. All I had to carry with me was an empty canvas ready to be painted with undiscovered memories.
This blog post was meant to be a gallery of paintings (a collection of short essays) that had shaped me during my trip. They’re in the more personal side of the spectrum that I hope would leave some comfort for those who’s able to identify themselves amongst the paintings.
New family member
My sister somehow convinced my parents to get a dog during the pandemic. A creature they perceived to be dirty and a burden for as long as I can remember. It’s relieving to see how my parents turned to embrace the new creature warmly (even perhaps too pampered). I mean how could you not? when she’s that cute of a dog…
It’s name was Kopi. A coffee colored poodle that can melt any stress away. My first encounter started pretty hostile (barks!) and awkward (trying to get her to sit on my lap) but not for long.
It’s not easy taking care of another creature (especially with a language barrier) - meal times, keeping them away from anything that could kill them, disposing their waste, and observing them if they’re not feeling well. Domestication of pets has gone a long way. But I found that there’s also beauty to being ignorant, seeking companionship, reminding me that maybe life isn’t as complicated as it needs to be. She’s always there for us wagging her tail away.
Catching up with old acquaintances
The only friend I have back home are friends from high school.. Or shall I say acquaintances? Some were close and others have drifted apart.
One day, in a conversation with a stranger, I somehow found the courage to reconnect with old friends, including those that has drifted quite far. I acknowledged that maybe I was a different person back then. But so are they. There’s nothing wrong (it’s more exciting in fact) getting to know the new person that they have become, and deliberately adding moments in time where we continued to cross paths.
I learned that there was so much friction of scheduling venue that worked for everyone, particularly trying to manage the location, time, priorities.. It was a 1-1 invitation from my side, so hopefully there wasn’t any pressure to participate. All of them responded well though.
Finally, that evening, we sat on a Sate Senayan restaurant muching away food and there’s really so much to talk about! Reunions are pretty fun I learned.
Conversations with parents
With all my privileges, my parents loves to pamper me. I was always the one who stops them from over-purchasing things I don’t need, often involving debates and persuasion. I don’t need much, I thought. I really don’t.
On the flip side, they never really let go fully. It takes gradual time for them to accept that I am now an adult and can take care of myself. Probably partly because they’ve mostly seen the me that was 6 years ago. And you really can’t get much conversations online. My weekly whatsapp call with my parents are very one-sided. Usually consisting of lectures that I answer with ‘ok’ or ‘ya’.
This time, seeing them in person reminded me how much of a human they are. We bonded through mistakes, family gossips, philosophy, disagreements, learning new things and ideas together.
My dad and I occasionally went for walks and I enjoyed the new grown-up-friend dynamic, unlike the usual father-son. Conversations open up, I began asking lots of questions, and learned some insane history. It’s nuts how different life was between our generation. For example, my dad, a high school graduate, was never the book-intelligent type of guy. But he was respectable in his own way - migrated alone away from his family, build all kinds of businesses, failed, deceived, helped, until he persisted and found his way out of luck. To survive, he chased after wealth and opportunity his whole life but still remain grounded to his ethics. Growing up, I was able to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but also his life lessons that I often disagreed with (e.g. Lack of trust in most things including the system and people, over-weighing faults and negatives rather than the positives, very likely to believe hoax spreading through Whatsapp, obsessively clean, etc). To a certain extent these things are true especially if you’re trying to survive in a rough society - which I acknowledge that I hadn’t experienced enough of.
I realied that I found more value in those abstract thoughts/conversations nowadays. Because as they say, knowledge without wisdom is useless. And you only get wisdom from teachers, society, stories, people who you interact with everyday.
Embracing culture
Religion is big back home. For a lot of us, we were born with it - so religion to me is more of culture rather than belief. But it can get real superstitious, and there’s really no point of debating whether things are right or wrong. In much of modern world, people believe things that are ‘scientifically proven’ (leaving aside fact that science are also largely evidence based, not exactly a proof). But when you live amongst a religious culture, you learned that maybe there’s so much things in life that mankind has yet to discover/explain, and that maybe there’s some truths hidden in those rituals.
As a Buddhist for example (actually Taoism but still classified as Buddhist since the Indonesian government don’t recognize those streams), we practice things like Buak-bui and Kau Chim (a practice to get the dieties’ answers to all your tough questions. Sort of like fortune telling. My dad often does this to make hard decisions). Also Feng Shui, the taoist gods we pray to, burning jost papers, etc. Furthermore, Indonesia have so much superstitious things that’s outside the realm of any religion. Like dukun (shaman), people who’s born able to sense ghosts (natives and appears to be inherited (?)), pawang hujan (professionals hired to call/get rid of rain).
You might call it placebo or pseudoscience, but if these rituals and belief has been passed down for however centuries long, and since much of human history is unknown to mankind, I’d like to stay open with the possibility that these things might be up to something.
Anyways… here are some pictures from Chinese New year (after not celebrating it for 6 years)!
On the flight back to Canada, I watched a movie ‘The Farewell’, which I found to be heck relatable. About chinese cultures, immigrating away from family, death (which we’ll talk in a bit), and cultural differences from the western world.
Reading and rabbit holes
In the midst of boredom, I found a gem on the internet - a curation service called Rabbit Holes by Patricia Mou. She curated and summarized interesting articles across different fields. Each monthly issue is filled with quality / thought-provoking content, and honestly must’ve been so much work to curate.
I’ve traded my Medium subscription for this, perhaps because algorithm based recommendations don’t give me as much diversity and enjoyment as handpicked ones. I found that I really enjoyed the open minded community of the Internet. Ones that search and forms sources of knowledge and digs the hole, instead of letting walled gardens of web 2.0 dictate our online presence and filter bubble.
I want to fill myself more with these. Not necessarily subscribing to newsletters, but to leave a block of time in the day where I just dig and let myself fall into the rabbit hole.
Also a couple of books that had filled my time: - Team of teams - Antifragile - When breath becomes air - currently in the middle of reading ‘The Dawn of Everything’ and ‘Designing Data-Intensive Applications’
I’ve been thinking of joining an online bookclub to help motivate my reading. For example, there was one Indonesian one I saw in IG called ‘Nonfiction Session’. But haven’t had the time/courage to do so. Maybe in the near future.
Social systems, environments sort of landscape
I found that living in Waterloo as a student could be a blessing or a curse. Unlike a developing country where social, political, environmental and economical issues are very visible and chaotic everywhere you go, nothing really happens in Waterloo.
Firstly, environment. Indonesia is well-known to be very resourceful - we probably have most natural resource you can think of. But is that really something to be proud of and taken for granted of,.. or a heavy responsibility to carry? Topped with being right at the equator, the heat is real. The pollution is real. The clouds most times are nowhere to be seen. People spend most of their time in traffic and under air conditioning. There’s an air quality tracking app called Nafas that almost always never shows green and the 'not safe to ventilate’ message shows up frequently on my phone. It’s concerning the fact that it’s gradual. I feel like the awareness is there, but isn’t prioritized especially when most people are still struggling to find basic needs.
Humanity has been challenged again with the Russian-Ukraine conflict. In Indonesia particularly, there’s an oil crisis. Expensive oil means expensive logistics, and everything gets more expensive. There’s news of people lining up and waiting for their share of subsidized cooking oil, lining up for gas, illegal stocking and exports of oil, etc. I have quite some empathy for the government because much of this is in their hands, but still.. a lot have to be done.
We’re used to unclear policies, politicians not doing their job, the powerful playing behind the scenes, riots that always end up in unnecessary violence. A place where humanity is always tested. At least that’s the picture you get when you are exposed to the news every day. But I do believe that for every bad news, there are countless other good news that’s aren’t celebrated. In the midst of complexity, emergence can be seen to occur. Amongst the crowd, there’s a generation of people who cares and I’d love to stay positive in shaping the future, and be surrounded by these people.
A few of hidden gems which I love following: - Emergence of many sustainable waste management start-ups (ie. Duitin) - Emergence of many edutech and non-profits empowering underprivileged with needed skills (ie. Markoding) - Gita Wirjawan’s endgame series (always sparks deep conversations) - Project multatuli (journalist initiative for the ignored minority and issues) - Whatisupindonesia (WIUI) (a English Gen-Z way of explaining sociopolitical issues in Indonesia) - 1000startupdigital (a movement for emerging startups) - Ceritera_id (meaningful story-telling)
Privilege and nepotism
Entrepreunership, particularly family businesses is widely common back home. My dad worked his way to building one, gaining new money in which I was able to reap the benefits growing up. There’s always a question lurking in the corner of whether I’d like to carry on the business when my dad retire. For me it’s less about the money, but more to the amount of responsibility to carry, switching career from software development which I absolutely love, and the type of work culture, people, and missions I surround myself with. This time off allows me to wear my dad’s hat a bit, and understand some history and type of problems they face. I’d understand that keeping a business running is by no means a simple task.
Death
Lastly, a recurring theme of my trip was death, which I’m sure nobody will ever be comfortable about. My grandmother had been bedridden for over 6 years now, diagnosed with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer. With euthanasia illegal, the goal is to simply hang on to life, and as family we try to keep that as painful of a process as possible. If there’s one lesson we learned, I think is that retirement funds and insurance is super important. My grandparents didn’t have them, so the family bare most of the cost (leading to much of family drama, stress, distrust and miscommunications between my mom’s 7 siblings). I think these struggles must be pretty common - ‘sandwich generation’, a term referring to those who’s responsible of taking care of aging parents while bringing up their child/career. Then I thought - is this room for innovation in elderly care space? Perhaps there’s room to make life easier like hiring caretakers, consult experts, emergency links, financing, nutrition, etc; there’s so much complexity in dealing with one’s life.
One day, came the striking news.
My uncle passed away weeks after CNY (partly glad that I’m home to see him for the last time) from lung complications. He was obese, known to have bad lifestyles, financially struggling, and probably depression. But nobody saw this coming… On one part he never opened up about his problems and very stubborn (despite all our concerns he acted like he was fine). But of all things he was overall a caring and humorous person, and I wish to remember him as just that.
Within a week after I came back to Canada, I received news that my grandfather had passed away as well from heart complications. Huff… But if it was me, I think I’d prefer that kind of sudden death rather than barely holding on to life just waiting for your time to arrive. But again, none of us really have the luxury to choose how to end a natural death. It’s hard not only in bringing a person to life, but also finding a way out of it.
On that same topic, I just finished reading a book during my flight called “When breath becomes air”. A very sad but beautifully written book by an excellent neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi during his last moments of life when he was diagnosed with cancer. It talks about confronting death as a physician and a patient, as well as discussions on other things: - doctor’s empathy. To ease suffering rather than treating patients as a subject matter or neat medical diagrams - wisdom he learned from making judgement calls on what kind of life is worth living for his patients (brain fatally effects everything else) - his role as death’s ambassador rather than making enemy of it - Acknowledge/grieve for the loss of past identity and focus on securing the present. Embracing whatever future you can forge ahead of you - being optimistic but realistic - holding on to metaphysics and existential meaning because fullness of human experience can never be contained by what scientific theory can tell.
I definitely grew to become more aware of my mortality, and of my speck-like existence in the mysterious universe. A reminder to be present and live for the moment, to be vulnerable, kind, and grateful.
On a lighter note, I’ve read Tatsuki Fujimoto’s recent one-shot manga series called “Goodbye, Eri”. Like all his other works, this was a phenomenal piece of literary art that is widely open for interpretation. My personal takeaway was that you are free to choose how to remember the dead (the good or the bad), and that we’re all fighting to make special experiences and meaning of how we spend our life.
What’s next
Now I’m back in Canada and it feels lonely again, no different from freshman days. No one I call family aside from a couple of university friends that remains in the proximity, or maybe coworkers. One of my goals is probably to join some clubs (I can get an alumni card) in school now that it’s back open.
Being alone has it’s benefits as well - one of them being freedom and independence. It’s funny how I long for warmth when I’m here, and long for the cold when I was home (in the literal and figurative sense). The thermostat is never exactly at the homeostatic point, and I’m learning to embrace that either way.
One way of doing that is maybe to recapture the moments. Look into pictures, memories, or remembering the feeling I had at different moments in time (ie. How thrilled I was before my flight home 4 months ago, or how socially/emotionally prepared and ambitious I am right now being back in Canada and starting a full time job).
Overall this trip was a very refreshing cooldown period. A way to literally step away from work and take a moment to see things from all other things happening in the world (e.g. home). I will miss a lot of things, like the late night conversations with my sister, parents and friends, drives around the city, the comfort of home, the softness of Kopi’s fur, and food especially.