Posts tagged "indonesia"

Merantau Cino

Tretes, Indonesia (link to some photos I took

1. I have been struggling with my feelings on and about immigration.
2. Some time in mid 2023, a woman at a bus stop in San Francisco pointed a blow torch flame at me and threatened, I'm going to burn you, because you're Chinese!
3. Number 1 is possibly related to number 2.
4. A theme I keep coming back to: why does it feel like this?
5. The feelings: neither here nor there, a deep sense of longing for 'home', uncertain what 'home' really means, feeling like I'm in two or three places at once, feeling stuck, feeling like I don't know where I fit, feeling like I am two people at once.
6. That the 'home' I return to, I no longer fully fit into. I left five years ago, and in that time: obviously, it's moved on without me. I no longer know how to exist here in Singapore. I don't have any routines, I don't have places to go, things to do. I'm no different from a tourist. Just that I'm a tourist who knows a lot of details about this country, and who has an intimate knowledge about its food and its politics.
7. That the 'home' I now exist in: where I have work, family, contemporary friends, hobbies, a home, feels on some days like it's real and solid, and on other days that idea of solidity is completely unraveled, especially when things like number 2 happen.
8. I've spent the past week in Singapore and Indonesia. It's been splendid to be around friends, food, the weather, environment and culture that I know and love.
9. A big part of why I suffer from number 1 is that I feel completely estranged from the Southeast Asian bits of my life when I am in California. I can probably fix that by going to do things like, I don't know, play gamelan or learn Balinese dance in Berkeley (both activities that are very popular and established, led by East Bay Indonesians).
10. Living in the heart of the imperial superpower, I do not hear, see, learn about anything about the outside world outside the US at any time. TVs don't play world news, they play sports: sports that only Americans play. Online discussions tend to veer towards only domestic politics. I feel like I'm at the heart of the world, and totally cut off from it, at the same time.
11. I've fought it for a while, but I feel the semblance of a nascent Asian American identity forming. Ever since I learned about the Hyphenated Americans discussion, I've been far more open to the idea that without the hyphen, I can be both Asian and American (without necessarily needing citizenship).
12. As number 11 strengthens and solidifies, number 1 also waxes and wanes. Some days, I am convinced that coming to California was the best idea I ever had. On other days, I cry myself to bed missing tropical weather, my family back in Asia, immigration stability (not having immigration challenges at all), and maybe a romanticized idea of what Singapore means to me.
13. The past week in Indonesia was transformational. Not only did I get to wake up the part of my brain that had been dormant for a long time, the one that speaks, understands, and exists in Bahasa Indonesia as well as Bahasa Gaul, I also got to reconnect with my friend of 25 years.
14. Beyond the food, which was amazing (East Java has my favorite Indonesian cuisine and dishes), it also sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to Indonesian music and reading in Indonesian.
15. I was reading something today that referenced the idea of merantau cino.
16. I know about merantau: it's the Minang rite of passage where men leave their homes in Sumatra to pursue careers and experiences outside their village. There was even a martial arts movie made about this.
17. In merantau, the idea is that you leave and then you return to your home.
18. However, in merantau cino, you leave your home and you never return. Not permanently, anyway.
19. The term is based on the idea that the southern Chinese diaspora left China, many of them never returning.
20. Therefore, a person who does merantau cino is doing a rite of passage, embarking on a migration story, where it's unlikely that they will return to their original homes.
21. I'm not sure whether I am a perantau cino or a merantau cino yet (difference explained here; article in Indonesian), but I'll be damned if this hasn't been a more relevant and insightful observation about my personal immigration journey than anything I have read about in English, in an American context.
22. When I get 'home' to San Francisco next week, a couple of milestones will happen; things that will set us up for a different phase in our lives there.
23. I will probably always see myself as someone split down the middle.
24. Two lives: one here, one there.
25. But at least I know now that there's a name for it. And maybe it feels a little less lonely, since merantau cino was exactly what my grandfather did, as a teenager.

Roadtrip to Tretes

A memory I will always treasure: the opportunities I've had to visit Tretes. Going to Tretes always means going on a short road trip with my best friend of 25 years. I remember listening to her describe her home to me, when we met as teenagers in Singapore, and dreaming about going there with her one day.

Indeed, we stayed friends, and I've visited. Many times. While I live ten thousand miles away now, Indonesia, especially East Java, will always have a special place in my heart.

This past weekend, we managed to get up to Tretes again. The trip was remarkably the same as every other time. Consistently delightful food and company. I am going to miss this. And everyone.

Absolutely delightful rawon, pecel and empal. Possibly one of my favorite restaurants in the world.

Sunlight trickling into the restaurant we usually stop at.

I don't know anyone who eats as much krupuk as I do. And it's the best in this part of the world.

Nasi rawon is my favorite dish in Indonesian cuisine. I can eat it a few times a day, every day. That I don't get (good versions of) it, or at all, abroad, is why I feel the need to really focus on my rawon time when I am in East Java.

Check out the view. You can't hear it, but there was also beautiful traditional / classical Javanese music streaming out of a school or home in the valley below. Culturally, this part of the world just speaks to my soul.

(All photos taken on Nikon FE, Kodak Gold 200, developed and scanned by Whampoa Colour Centre, Singapore)

Doors of Surabaya

One of my oldest friends in the world lives in Surabaya. I love visiting her. Not only is the food one of my favorite cuisines (East Java food is my favorite Indonesian regional food, and it can be hard to get abroad), the city is also a place I enjoy photographing. Eat, shoot, eat, shoot. That's basically all I do there.

This was my first time there with a film camera. I brought my trusty tiny Nikon FE with a 28mm f.28 lens, as well as a 50mm pancake f1.8 lens. That's really all I need on a vacation.

I even got the film sent off and developed at a local lab in Surabaya, which I was happy with.

Green.

Old.

Noodles.

No parking.

Rainbow.

I'm getting into the swing of things, shooting and developing film locally. Although I miss developing film since I'm so used to it, it's nice to see what services are available.

(All photos taken on Nikon FE with either 28mm or 50mm lens. All photos are Kodak Gold 200, dev and scan by Impossible Lab Surabaya)

Road, Gravel, Mud

It’s been a while since I’ve written about work. Even longer since I’ve gotten on a bicycle.

In so many ways, running a startup is like a race. Some people like to do sprints. Some people like lycra.

More and more, I find myself preferring endurance sports and comfortable clothing — perhaps because that’s the closest sporting analogy I can find for the kind of work that I do.

In 2014, I moved to Indonesia to work on ‘financial inclusion for women’.

In 2015, I completed the ideabox accelerator, worked with no salary for a year and a bit, and worked on finding product / market fit.

In 2016, I finally raised my first tranche of funding. At that time, ‘Indonesia’ / ‘emerging markets’ and ‘social impact’ were three things that didn’t go together.

In 2017, I lost both of my cofounders for personal reasons, and struggled to not burn out myself. I did not succeed.

In 2018, I am still going at it. Wobe is growing everyday. We have great investors. I am supported by a team of hardworking people who are not only great at what they do, but they also believe that we can use tech to bring financial inclusion to emerging markets.

Grit and resilience don’t come naturally to me. I understand them as concepts and I live, to the fullest extent that is possible, with as much as I can muster. I’m also painfully autistic; I simply don’t see risk. Risk is not a discrete concept, nor is it something I can grasp. Therefore, it does not exist.

Early stage startups are hard.

You risk: running out of money, running out of steam, running out of time, running out of energy. Everything needs to be in perfect alignment and timing. You have to fashion a product and a company into existence, and do both really well, in a remarkably short period of time.

All of your flaws are amplified.

Everything needed to be done — yesterday.

Everything is broken. Everything is great.

Like so many startup folks, I decided to work it off. Triathlons are especially popular with us. I suppose if you do what we do for work, weekend competitions that are physically and mentally demanding are just yet another challenge. Another hill to climb. Another bendy road. Another slope to descend.

I did a bit of that, and I’m pretty good at it. But I realised my taste in sports is the same as my taste for business. I need gravel and mud. I need to fly face first into wet muddy terrain. I need to find a hill I’ve never climbed, with the equipment I have, and just pedal furiously.

I feel like I do that everyday at work, and everyday at play.

I’m at home in places where conditions are rough.

I like unpaved roads.

Maybe that’s why I’ve chosen to build a business in a space I care very much about (increasing access to financial services for the unbanked), in a country I love with all of the opportunities and challenges (Indonesia).

The road ahead is bumpy, wet and rocky. That’s when I know it’s time to hit the gravel.

Thank you, friends, family, investors, Wobe team members and our customers, for coming along on this ride. You push me to do better, be better, learn everyday, and do my best. Burn out is not fun. You lose so much time and focus. Growing is so much more fun! I want to share more stories from the trenches, growth, warts and all.

Munduk

Munduk.

Two people, suspended between heartbreak and fury, met on Hong Kong Street after almost 2 years without each other.

Their hearts, recently broken by others, found each other agreeable — even safe.

They made a plan. The universe attempted to foil it. To no avail.

Through long public holidays, expensive flights, an expiring passport and the logistics of homes, broken and renewed, no unfortunate event stood in the way.

I stood behind the multitudes to wait for you: the many sweaty, smelly men waving flags awaiting their Chinese tourists. Me, in my shorts with holes, a top that's much too big and my hair that's floppy and flat after an hour on a motorbike to come to see you.

Even on arrival, the universe was determined to place one last obstacle before us: the long amble, actually scramble, along the railing, past the sweaty tour guides, into some tourists, around the ATMs, and then you, there in the flesh.

As with the start of new things, my pulse sped up mostly in not knowing how close I could be. It had just been a few days since I had been with you, and here I was furiously making plans to cancel all of my plans.

There's a curse on this island for couples who come here together, they say.

What they didn't say: come as a not-couple, leave as a couple, uncursed?

I hoped.

In the most improbable places, we found fireplaces and each other.

Before long, you would say, coming to Munduk to see me was one of the biggest gambles you had ever taken. Next to Bosnia.

In the first week we travelled many towns, lakes, forests and hills; sat in many cars and planes together, discovered how a plane aisle was much too jauh, so soon.

The odds were long, but our odds are good. And I don't even like Bali, not one bit. I love us in it.

Shaken Not Stirred

When you work at Wobe, you’re bound to have conversations like these at some point:

“Can you check on this transaction for me in dumplings?”

“Let’s make some changes to kaya.”

“This PR removes the confirmation code from diplomatico request”

This is a feature, not a bug.

We’re a company founded by foodies, but our engineering team is the foodiest of all.

Deep within our repos you can find things like:

Coconut makes the world, and our infra, go round. Dark, golden and distilled beauty. Just like our microservices.

Since we’re a multi-cultural team, with 2 engineers from Venezuela, we were also happy to christen one of our most important packages after Venezuela’s most famous product, Diplomatico.

One of our internal web apps we call, lovingly, Dumplings. That’s because all of us love dumplings of all kinds. Chinese dumplings, momos, gyozas, manti, mantou, har gow, ravioli, tortellini, xiao long bao, samosa, wantons. If you don’t love dumplings, you can’t work for us. (JK!!)

As our infrastructure and services expand, we’re going to need many more food and drink names for them.

We crowdsourced some ideas within the team:

• sushi
• rendang
• cokelat
• pempek palembang
• siomay
• jeruk panas
• gulai kambing
• dendeng balado
• martabak manis
• dosa (the South Indian breakfast, I like this especially also because it means ‘sin’ in Indonesian, which it is.. with all the ghee)
• cumi
• negroni
• ramos gin fizz
• arepa
• pav

My personal vote, however, would go to Ramos gin fizz. With just a few simple ingredients, vigorous shaking either renders a masterpiece — or a flop. Like bad code, and bad engineering practices, a bad Ramos gin fizz doesn’t even resemble the real thing.

Randomization

As the cofounder and CEO of a tech startup working to improve financial inclusion in one of the world’s largest countries that is also one of the largest cash economies, I have amassed a wealth of odd knowledge on how cash works. How it works, specifically, at the intersection of people and connectivity. It always excites me so that there is a world of difference in how different places have different assumptions about payments.

My first world assumptions already went out of the window when I spent a year in Myanmar before SIM cards went down in price from $2000 to $1. There, bags of cash were king. Bags of cash under a desk, even better.

Here in Indonesia, we faced the same challenges as most other companies: how do we accept payment from the average person? For our customers to start selling pulsa (airtime), internet packages and other products with Wobe app, we need them to first pay us for their prepaid account. (Here, you can also buy a cigarette by the stick when you want to smoke it, instead of buying an entire pack. The same is true of phones.)

Happily, this is why we do what we do. Before you can improve on something, you first need to know it well.

Not reinventing the wheel

It helps to examine the prevalent norm.

In Indonesia, you commonly see what can be described as “hacks for the cash economy”. These are necessary ‘hacks’ through a set of circumstances entirely unique to Indonesia; with more than 17 000 islands and a sparse population outside of Java, cash is still king here, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Distribution and reach (of ATMs, banks, etc) is only one part of it.

Other than cash-on-delivery, it is quite common to pay for things online in any of the following ways:

• Asking a friend with a bank account to transfer the payment for you
• Standing in line at a bank, where you do not have an account, to make a manual transfer
• Going to a convenience store to tell them you want to pay for say, a flight ticket; waiting 40 min for their payment system to boot up, then finally making a cash payment

As you can see, large companies have armies of people just staring at internet banking screens to verify each and other transaction in real time.

What has emerged as the de facto way of taking manual cash payments is so unique and elegant, and so characteristically Indonesian: randomized unique codes that almost function as convenience fees, cheaper than credit or debit card percentages.

In many ways, Tokopedia has been at the forefront of Indonesian ecommerce. As one of the pioneers of the 3 digit unique code method, we were impressed at how simple yet effective it was — for both the consumer and the company.

Assuming I want to buy a USB-powered electric fan, or kipas, which costs IDR 52 050 (USD 3.91).

If I were to select the cash / manual bank transfer method, I would see this screen:

My total, with the unique code (+032) added to the final bill.

All Tokopedia would have to do would be to verify that they had indeed received a transfer of IDR 52 082 on that day.

It would not matter from whom, the payment came from, or whether it was successful or pending (manual payments can be seen as pending after a certain time in the afternoon, depending on the bank and only available the next business day—which makes Fridays and weekends particularly difficult). The existence of that exact amount would suffice.

How that inspired us

It would be easy to wish that every market was exactly the same as where you are familiar: but that mentality would not take you far. Anywhere, but specifically in Indonesia.

As a company that has betted its entire future on the 4th most populous country, it has always been in our DNA to operate within the frame of what works here, and to never once claim to know it better.

We believe that the future will be a mix of unique ‘hacks’ like these, along with a substantial push towards the digitization of payments (more on that in a bit).

I’m proud to announce that the next feature we will have in the Wobe app, will be our very own version of the randomized unique code. We are currently testing it but it appears to be a huge improvement to our top-up mechanism. All of our product and business decisions are driven by the simple question: how does this improve the lives of the people we claim to work for? In this case, we will be able to easily take payments from individuals who may live as far as one to five hours away from a bank, an ATM or a convenience store.

What is the way forward?

How does one reconcile the two Indonesias, then: with one foot so violently in the future, with its obsessive love of mobile phones and social networks, and the other so virulently enamoured by the ease of cash?

Short of pushing the country towards bank accounts and debit and credit cards, what looks likely is this: there will be a peaceful coexistence of cash and digital payments. In some ways, Indonesia will lead the way in Next Billion tech, ecommerce and payments. If India’s PayTM and China’s Alipay are any indicators of how a hinterland with a large population and a unique set of infrastructural and geographical challenges are anything to go by, I believe that in 3 years Indonesia will find its own beat. Which is why we do what we do at Wobe: we believe that if we build a product that helps the average person participate in the digital economy, we will be able to find innovative ways to make a difference.

What we do best is to empower women to be the missing link between their communities and the world of online opportunity. Be it in small features, like randomized topups, or in the big ones—like creating financial independence sessions for the women we work with—we are driven by our mission to do well and to do good.

Perhaps one day there will be a new school of thought on product design and enterprise: how to create and design with empathy, as if our lives depended on it.

Our next build will feature the randomized topup feature.

The Last Mile

How to create products for emerging markets

Nearly everyone wants to cash in on emerging markets. Facebook wants to fly drones to deliver internet connectivity over rural areas. They may or may not collide, in scale, ambition and delivery, with Google’s balloons (link). Whoever you are, emerging markets are hard.

Every time you see a Singaporean or Malaysian startup raising a fund, you see them want to expand to Indonesia, like it was a mere thought_._ How do you make apps, websites or any kind of media for a market so different from anywhere else in the world?

In our case, coming to Indonesia to create a product aimed at the last mile in a country of 17, 508 islands has been some of the most challenging work we have ever done.

As a cofounder and first product owner, here is what we did.

1. Listen. It is not possible to parachute into a place so fundamentally different, so unique, with a suitcase full of tips and tricks that have worked elsewhere. We listened extensively. Who you listen to can be just as important as how you listen. We went right to the source: we literally had listening parties where our target customers, who are Indonesian housewives and students, had fried food and sweetened tea with us as we studiously thought about how our product could work for them. Before writing a single line of code.
2. Iterate. Anyone who has put an app or a website together knows that constant iteration, improvement, is key. From our paper prototypes to our app version 3.7.5, our iterations have come a long way. There comes a point where iteration has to be backed up by metrics, though when you are just starting out, flexibility and rapid adaptability is more important.
3. Speak their language. Literally and figuratively. We found, for example, that in some locations it is not wise to send out young men into conservative neighbourhoods. From the early days of visiting homes and communities as a merry band of random people with clip boards (and fried bananas), we now have community leaders who are respected and respectful. It is sometimes still funny to trot out my Singaporeanized Indonesian as a joke, but when work has to be done we always get so much more accomplished by reducing cultural, linguistic and other kinds of friction.
4. Consider all assumptions. Thinking on the intersection of product and business is hard enough. Thinking about it without assumptions can be very difficult. Somehow, it seems even harder for some to do this without being condescending. If your starting point in building a product is, “Indonesians like X”, you are on the wrong track.
5. Conduct ethnographic research. This may be extreme, but I consider it very important to live in the same environment as the people who are likely to use Wobe. Paying for my (prepaid) electricity just like everyone else in my kos-kosan, standing in line to pay for my online purchases including air tickets with cash, all of those things were essential for our product. Very soon we will be able to pay for all that with Wobe. Extreme ethnographic research helped us begin our journey from idea to product, from the same starting point as our customers: in cash, in line, in wait.
6. Consider your stack and architecture. Where we are it is still PHP-land. Services are massive, not micro. Hosting is local, rarely in the cloud. Bandwidth can be narrow and coverage can be spotty. We knew we had to avoid building a traditionally synchronous app to have any chance of Wobe working well outside of the cities. More than ideology, our micro-services architecture is supplemented by the concurrency of Go, the ease of native mobile development with React Native, and a team-wide obsession with improving performance and cost savings for our customers (every byte counts..).

There was scarce literature for us when we started out on this journey, so we hope in the months to come we can share what worked for us. If you’ve built something for an emerging market, what worked for you!

How to Build Something

Wobe’s founder on the basics for technical success

“Jakarta Panorama” by Gunawan Kartapranata [CC BY-SA 3.0]

If you’re a founder too, technical or not, you’ll know all about the struggle.

The struggle: late nights, being poor, having everything go well and then not, the very same minute.

For me as a non-technical founder, and I’m sure for many others, the struggle is also: how do you build things? and other assorted questions.

If you build it, will they come? (Customers)

How will you build it? (Teams, product, culture)

What, indeed, do you build?

I’m always perplexed by founders who want to only move fast and break things without knowing themselves what they’re moving or breaking. If you ran a furniture company, had aspirations for it to be the best in the world, wouldn’t you want to at least know how to wield a hammer?

This post documents the who, what, why, how of our year-long journey building technology in the emergi-est of emerging markets: Indonesia.

Wobe works to improve access to payments and utilities at the last mile: our unique application and its surrounding ecosystems of microservices and tools let us offer regular people the opportunity of running their own business. They can sell recharge (of phone airtime, data, electricity, water and other vouchers); their communities benefit from cheaper and more efficient ways of topping up, without having to travel. We work with grassroots organisations to bring about greater benefits for low income women who come into our networks.

Who we build for

More than how you build or what you build, is the question: who do you build. This is tied to the mission of the company, and resonates through the company. It also has to do with what the founding team, not just founders, cares deeply about.

I had the amazing opportunity to spend a year in Myanmar, right about the time it was ‘opening up’.

Despite the $1500 SIM cards and the bureaucracy, Myanmar helped me fall in love not just with a country or a region, but with the idea of very hard problems. How will Southeast Asia go from our cash-only economies to online, digital payments? Will women and minorities be left behind? Wobe seeks to answer these questions through the tech we build, via the business relationships we build, and within our team.

We build for them:

(Above, Wobe growth activities in Sumbawa, eastern Indonesia.)

Nothing is constant in emerging markets, except for how things change all the time.

Our community anchors us:

• Empathise: we carry out internal and external research activity to help us make product and business decisions and know our customers
• Understand: we do not assume everyone has a fast internet connection. We know from our research that our customers are price-sensitive, and cautious about data consumption. For this reason, our product (a) has a tiny footprint (b) performs better than most other apps in lower connectivity
• Prioritise: it would be far simpler to use established payment gateways and accept credit cards in-app. Our customers do not have credit cards. It would not make sense to make product decisions that work for only a small percentage of our total addressable market.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the building blocks at Wobe:

• Golang for nearly everything
• React Native for our Android app
• Microservices-heavy architecture
• RabbitMQ for Messaging
• Sentry for exception logging
• Drone for CI
• Terraform for infrastructure
• Multiple AWS products, of course
• Nexmo for verification and reliable SMS within Indonesia
• Firebase as our PaaS

Building the Team

For every founder, the quality of technical team and your technical decisions has a ripple effect. I can’t emphasise this enough. Even when you’re a one-person team, what you decide on this front will have long-lasting impact.

Your main options, pre-funding, are to either find a technical co-founder (a unicorn; stop searching, but more on this later), outsource, or to do it yourself.

Unless you’ve already built products at great scale, and / or run a team to do that, doing it yourself may not be the best use of your time.

For many, the likely choice will be to outsource. All types of dev shops and individuals will be happy to build you an MVP for anything from US$500 to US$100 000. Your mileage will vary greatly. Whatever decision you make on this, do not establish mediocrity as a standard. The quality of your future incoming team, if there is one, will be pegged to the ones who came before. Nobody wants to work with a Z team. Nobody wants to clean up Z-team level excretion.

Wobe’s technical journey was a long one. In the next few posts, I will be happy to share what that was like, how we built a product with very little money, how we thought about technical hiring, how non-technical founders can improve their technical hiring pipeline.

It has a lot to do with first acknowledging you don’t know all the answers. Even if you are a technical cofounder yourself, you don’t know all the answers. Then assemble the best* people who care deeply about your mission.

Our mission is to build tech that works for the people who need to rely on us. We succeed when they are able to increase their family’s income level by a dollar, or a few hundred, because of what we do.

Given the many questions we’ve had to ask, and impossible mountains we’ve had to scale, I want to set a clear path for us as a company. Wobe will be an open company, right down to our core: our code.

In the coming months, my team and I will share how we write Go, how we hire; how we work cross-culturally from Mexico to India and Indonesia; how open source will be a pillar in our company. What is culture?

Culture is not free beer and beer pong. I doubt that anybody really knows what it is.

Let’s find out here together, shall we?

My article on Indonesia in Brink, last month

I've started writing articles for Brink, a new media publication by the same people behind the Atlantic. My first piece is on Tech’s Role in Reaching Indonesia’s Rising Middle Class.

In Small Rooms with Betawi Women

Not for the first time, I found myself in a tiny room on a hot day, the youngest among old women. Each with a different thing to say to me, also the only person not from around these parts.

You're so old now! And unmarried!

Your hair is too white! Eat more soy beans!

One woman rubbed my tattoos, making a screechy sound with her teeth, before announcing to all the other old women around her: these are real.

No judgement, no scorn – I was local enough to be in a place like that, but not local enough to be judged.

Can you bring me some white chocolate next time you come, girl? I had them once and only in your country (Singapore). I've never had them since. She rubbed my back some more.

At places like these old women collectively talk, soothe each other's tired or injured muscles, and together not give a damn about anything outside of those doors. At least for an hour.

I went often to places like these, my severe back pains often needing urgent attention from anything that would give them rest. In Jakarta, I am a frequent visitor to Haji Naim – a group of famed healers in the Betawi community. I figured that if it didn't work there was at least delicious soto Betawi to be had next door. Now that I come here so often, a massage almost always precedes a lovely bowl of soup and beef.

I've always been glad to have the ability and opportunity to bond with old women anywhere in the world – their wisdom and unlikely sorority is what I look forward to, whether in Yemen or India or Singapore. Here, the Betawi women took turns rubbing my tattoos, shrieking when they discovered (repeatedly) that they were real.

Most of my time in this city has been about discovering, for the first time, scenes that played such a large part in my youth. Hot afternoons with old Indonesian women. Dusk on the street with teenagers singing with their guitars. Children begging. Families living under bridges. The Indonesian movies that used to play so often in my tiny, hot Singaporean shoebox apartment, now alive in parts of the city.

And yet the other parts of it are real, too. Large gleaming buildings. New shiny things. Cocktails as expensive as Singapore's. Malls full of only imported things. My feet in both worlds: one in the village and one in Pacific Place. One in meetings with fancy people, another under the firm thumbing of extremely old women.

It's a difficult balance to keep up, but I enjoy each moment. White chocolate in Betawi houses; going home to my $5 room after a day out in $5 coffee houses. Improbable things and inevitable places. As I chug along at work and in life, I'm relieved to have the opportunity to make things work again.

When I Was Young

I'm seated now by the side of an old vending machine in Jakarta airport, with power sockets so dirty and old I had to think twice about plugging my cables in. Yet in all of Terminal 1, one of the oldest airport terminals in a country not known for modern aviation facilities, there was only this one socket free. Confined to my fate of temporarily sharing power with a giant Teh Botol (not Coke!) machine with no seat within range of my Macbook charger, I am, obviously, on the floor yet again.

Sitting on floors: a practice cultivated in many countries across the world. Sometimes involuntary, most of the time because my inner hippie wants me to. The difference between now and then — I am now at the kind of age where you would, if you did not know me, expect some kind of manners from me. Wear proper clothes, wear proper shoes. Sit on proper surfaces. I imagined I would too! That one day, I would finally learn how to be proper. How wrong I was on that, and many other fronts! I am happy to still-sitting-on-dirty-floors. No — I am overjoyed. Overjoyed to be still a chapalang, anyhow and anyhowly chapalang person.

So much has happened since the last real post of any substance here. Mid, early 2014 perhaps. I started a company. It still lives. I have teams, collaborators, all across my different endeavours. The foundation I started in 2012 is still alive, too. I am relieved and grateful for all of the opportunities thrown my way, all of the paths revealed and then some.

Why did I not write? I did not write, because life overwhelmed me and kept me away and sometimes light-headed. I did not write, because I forgot how to. It isn't like riding a bicycle — it's more of riding a unicycle where you know eventually you'll find your balance but only after falling flat on your face anyway, no matter how many times you've ridden one. In my pursuit of achievements, exceptional or otherwise, prizes, awards, Silicon Valley-style work yourself to the bone for some big undefined payoff (emotional or otherwise); I lost myself in the race. I lost myself, too, in the unclear idea of what it meant to be an adult.

An adult, I was told, lived in a proper house with a proper bed with a proper pillow (for all of the neck pains you're bound to have). I have neck pains, indeed, but realise I can do without all of the rest. I haven't sat on dirty airport floors for years. I haven't gone somewhere with nothing in my bag other than the clothes currently on me, in years. I haven't gone somewhere without a plan, without a place to stay, without any idea of what i was going to do. I don't know how else to live, and forcing myself into being the opposite of those things brought me further and further away from who I really was.

Maybe this year, after learning to like myself again, I'll finally get my groove back again. I'm proud to be an anyhowly person. I'm proud to extreme and spontaneous. I will no longer knead the image of who I truly am into the uninspiring ideas of what some people had wanted me to become. I don't want to achieve things for the sake of doing that — I want to learn to be alive, again. Let's see how we go on this journey, I'm excited but also shit-scared about it.

But as I once believed (when I was much younger) — if it doesn't scare me like hell, it probably isn't worth doing.

Paths

12 years ago this time I was deciding where I should go, what I should study, at university. I was also four months away from deciding I would try to be happy in spite of my newfound queerness.

11 years ago this time I was in Kolkata, volunteering with an organization, not knowing I would go on to do that in the future. I was awful at painting walls, and not much better now.

10 to 8 years ago this time on the road learning Southeast Asia out of backpacks I still carried, before my back went bad.

7 years ago this time I got back to Dubai from Istanbul to find beetles had infested everything that I owned in the world. It was the first time I learned you could be truly alone in the world.

6 years ago on the Syria/Turkey border with no money and no clothes. Auto-rickshaws. My first businesses. An annoyingly debilitating illness. Recovery.

Three years ago I was back in Singapore feeling lost and forlorn when I left someone and a city that had spanned half a decade. Two years ago my life of endless pitching had just begun.

Today, 30 and in Indonesia on the cusp of everything. Bring it on!

The Cult of Busy

I do quite a few things. Run a startup. Run two non-profits. Mentor queer kids. Spend a lot of time with my family, partner and our dog. Play video games. Paint the house. Cook for friends. Take my dog on long walks. Even, gasp, sleep!

A lifetime ago on my first entrepreneurial rodeo, I did not know many of the things that I know now.

I know now, that:

• Sleep is the most important, ‘sleep for the weak, no sleep till I’m dead’ is just pointless and unhealthy bravado – because I got so close to the edge
• Health is important. Many of my peers have now had a few attempts at entrepreneurship, and many of us have worked ourselves to the bone and back
• Focus is everything, and time management is better. There’s no value to working insane long hours when you’re not focused. I have better awareness of my attention span and focus patterns now (short bursts, varied, always have to be doing something insanely fun or difficult, preferably both)
• Neglecting friends and family isn’t ideal, they’re worth a lot more than most business. You also get better at navigating friendships vs acquaintances
• Saying no is okay
• Saying yes to things that matter is also
• Getting something done imperfectly is better than waiting for perfection
• Being busy is a state of mind

Some people are perpetually busy. Maybe some people really are genuinely busy. I try to be un-busy, which is not the same as being unproductive. Even if I’m really busy, I want to never say I am. I will always have time to chat with a suicidal friend who calls me at 4am. I will always have time for anyone. I will always have time for my dad, mum, girlfriend, siblings, nieces. I want to always have the head space to be actively learning new things, instead of blocking anything being of a mistakenly diagnosed case of busy.

There’s a difference between being consciously un-busy and being frivolous. I suspect I might have some kind of attention deficiency disorder, so I need to be juggling three things at a time. I did not know that before – so felt unproductive, sad, and bored most of my life when shoved into the do-one-thing religion, which never fit. I also got very, very ill when I was busy, in a previous life.

Now I do lots of things, but I am not busy. I am occupied, but I’ll always have time for sleep, health, and happiness.

I am awful at calendaring, so I’ve hired a PA to help me do that. Calendaring makes me busy and sad, so I need to outsource that.

Today, there are a ton of things I’d like to do. There are always things to do. But I would rather focus on the meaningfulness of the things I have to do, rather than on the having to do in and of its own.

My to-do list might be massive, but I want to never close off my heart.

If I have to be insanely busy, which is a state I am getting to very rapidly, I want to be purposefully occupied, not and never too busy for anyone.

The Borneo Express

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be somewhere else. In all of my childhood day dreams, of which I had many, daily, and often, I imagined being an explorer out at sea. Being a pilot about to set off for yonder. Even the short stories I scribbled all had to do with stowing away, seeing new lands, discovering curious and wondrous foods.

Reading about Robinson Crusoe made me wonder what the natives ate, and why he never tried to just fit in (rescue seemed like a horrible ending, I hated it); Gulliver's Travels only made me wonder how the Lillputians lived with their neighbours before he came around. In my imagination, if I shipwrecked, stowed away, or was kidnapped to a foreign land, I would quite enjoy the adventure.

My parents travel in ways few other Asian parents do: cheaply and adventurously. The first time I ever left Singapore, we went to Sarawak. It wasn't a 'cool' story to tell your friends in primary school - no, you didn't go to Disneyland in Hong Kong, you didn't even live in a real hotel, you went to… Borneo.

Every day we walked for miles and miles. We never took taxis or cars, only buses, trains and boats. No matter how much you sweat, my parents don't care: they've got a backpack full of iced water so you have no reason to be sad! Just keep walking.

I don't remember much else about those times. Just that they were fun. That they made me. That when my parents wanted to take a bus four hours into the interiors, you learn to sleep anywhere. That when they want you to stop complaining about the hygiene of the food you're eating, even when insects of all kinds have landed on your food, you shut up and eat it and discover the best food in the world, or you go hungry.

There's a funny picture of me from this era, age 7. I had just showered. My mum had combed my hair in the way she always has: like a nerd. I'm sitting at the table of our 'hotel', looking straight at the camera like the little nerd that I was. I was writing. Writing about the blowpipe I just had the chance to blow! About the shaky tooth that fell out of my mouth on the four hour bus ride out from the interiors. About how my parents calmly put my tooth into their pocket, said nothing, alighted and fed me the most delicious noodles I'd ever had.

How much of my life is still exactly like that, and how lucky I am to be able to still have these adventures with the two people who taught me adventure and love.

I'm glad we never went to Disneyland!

My Life on a Bike

Every morning, I get on a bike to work. Except I don't ride it. I bargain with someone on the street, or use an app to book one at other times. Do you want masker? They ask. It's the Indonesian word for face mask. Gak mau masker, makasih pak. Sekarang pergi ke Jalan Hang Tuah bisa? A string of words that I sometimes don't know I know, come out of my mouth. Every morning, I am on the road at a time when the entire city has already decided to get moving. I am in traffic. A lot. You can't miss it, really. I am not a morning person, but I am always thankful for this. This is being on a bike going to work in one of the world's most exciting cities at the moment for what I am doing. This is not having to stand in an MRT every morning for 30 minutes, packt like sardines in a crushed tin box. This is having difficult problems to solve, every single day. Being able to solve most of them.

I've never been one for job descriptions, but the only one that would truly work for me would be: "Adrianna Tan, Street Fighter". I find peace and equilibrium on the streets of noisy Asian cities. I know exactly where to find the things I need. I know where they are. If they are in buildings, I am not interested in looking for them anymore. If they are not wrapped up in an impossible puzzle, I don't know how to solve them. Somehow the best place to do any of this is precisely where I am, every morning: on the back of a motorbike, travelling over rubbish, driving by someone's wet laundry, turning out of a tiny alley before merging into the big city again.

I like this life. I like this bike. I like this city. The rest of it, we'll figure out.

Split Language Disorders

It is a well-documented fact: multi-lingual people have multiple personalities. I am no different, though I was only recently cognizant of that. Of how my languages affect the way I perceive myself, present myself to the world. How I trade, make contracts; how I fall in love.

For as long as I can remember, 'foreign languages' were never foreign to me. They just seemed like perfectly formed words in very different chords. When I started travelling, my language brain and place brain also got inextricably tied up with each other.

For example,

When I am home in Singapore, I code-switch. Every ten minutes. English-English. American-English. International-English. Singlish-English. Then I go from that largely English existence to, broken-English-if-I-have-to. Then to Mandarin. China-Mandarin. Taiwanese Mandarin. Singaporean-broken-ass-Mandarin. Then to what I actually consider my mother tongue, which is early 1900s Chaoshan area Teochew language.

In my 'international English', learned from a decade in a privileged upper-middle class English speaking school setting, I fit in anywhere. My politics are liberal. My passport takes me to any country in the world. I am both privileged and not, in this language. I can become American, Australian, Singaporean. Or I can become this weird hybrid, which is closer to the truth: that I speak in a certain way because I have been everywhere and nowhere.

But the me that speaks in an affected Singlish accent, that is also all me. It does not come naturally to me, but I have learned its inflections and quirkiness. I have learned how to express anger, despair, annoyance and joy-using the same words-but I have learned to separate my emotions with the ascent or descent of a single tone. With the addition or subtraction of a single suffix. Lah. Lor. Leh.

Why you so like that leh, means resignation and acceptance that your friend is an asshole.

Why you you so like that one, means you are still surprised your friend is an asshole, because he isn't often one.

Why you so like that lor, means you have been an asshole for a while and I know that, but I am still annoyed that you are.

Why you so like that lah, means I am in equilibrium with your general assholery.

It's that Singlish that gets stuff done. I pick up the phone and yell at someone in it. No matter the colour of their skin, the understanding is universal. "Eh why you like that can you help me or not bro"

My Mandarin brain is complicated.

I literally cannot go to China without having an existential crisis about it. When I was 4, my Chinese teacher in kindergarten yelled at me, saying "why don't you understand Mandarin? What kind of stupid Chinese person are you?" At that point, I decided: not a very good one. I don't want to be a Chinese person, then.

Eventually, I made peace with it. I learned that my grandparents spoke more Tamil and Malay than they did Mandarin. I learned that the Mandarin that had been plugged into my brain, with all of its accompanying cultural baggage-oh, you should learn Mandarin because you are the daughter of the Yellow Emperor (correct answer: who the fuck is he and why am I his daughter. And why does he speak Mandarin?)-is always going to be a part of my unstable, cultural identity. At this point, the language I keep as my second one is functional. It is sufficient. But that is what it is.

I can order food in it, and have political conversations. But I do not care about that language-in fact, I hate it. Absolutely detest it.

Because Mandarin takes a part of me away from who I think I really am, which is, a Teochew in Southeast Asia. The idea that I find no comfort or joy, instead I find downright disgust, at the language I was forced to speak for a decade or more. When the language I dream in, wake up blabbering in, feel happy and loved in, is not even a designated language at all. It is considered a dialect, not a language. Teochew is the dialect of my heart and soul. I live it, love it, breathe it, revel in it. I sound like a fairy with helium in my mouth when I speak in it.

My English and Mandarin selves are whole identities. My Teochew self is a private, semi-religious self. It is the language I use to tell my grandmother that I love her. It is the language that I use to love, and to be loved in. English feels clumsy in comparison: love in Teochew, is by far a superior experience. Partly because everyone who I have ever loved in this obscure language of mine, has loved me unconditionally.

It is then difficult to take the language of love in one plane and to try to translate it to another. Especially if it is a language you barely speak. My Indonesian brain is about 3 years old at this point. Half-formed; the other deformed. My Thai brain is a little bit better, but not by much. One time, I tried to date a Thai woman, and I spoke as good Thai as she had good English, which was not at all. It showed me that love, sex and attraction is all about language for me.

I do not think I could ever love someone who spoke Mandarin to me. Even if I understood it perfectly. It just does not work. It is not my love language; it is my functional language. English, yes. Hindi, somewhat. Indonesian, maybe.

And as I go off into the big world at large, carrying a pocket full of several languages with different lives, I am also reminded that there is no other language in the world that makes me feel the most love; only the one I speak the least. When I have dreams, more and more it is in that obscure southern Chinese dialect: my dialectical love and life, carried with me in a different passport, in a different time, in multiple other lives and languages.

Don't Work With Assholes

There's a wealth of literature out there about this, but it can never be said enough. Too many people work with assholes.

You see them everywhere.

The cafe owner that takes a shortcut by hiring an asshole barista? The barista plays shit music at your cafe and nobody wants to go there.

The startup founder who values talent over attitude? The asshole co-founder or top exec, no matter how good they are at their jobs, is going to screw you over.

Eventually you realize that you're losing money and that nobody wants to talk to you at industry events anymore. Or perhaps investors or future team members take you aside to say they want to be a part of your dream team, but… that guy is an asshole.

Assholes don't inspire trust.

Assholes can sometimes be nice, too.

People often make the mistake of assuming that the opposite of an asshole is a push-over. It is not. The opposite of an asshole is a decent business-person or partner who brings net positives to the table. An asshole, no matter how occasionally nice, perhaps to certain people, or to most people, has certain characteristics which breed mistrust and disdain.

At my first startup, I worked with a guy who was a really nice person, and very good at his job-to me.

I was new to the scene. I had no idea.

He had ideas, he got things done, he was a good person-to me.

But he was not a good person to people who could not give him something.

There will always be people like that.

I'm talking to a handful of investors at the moment and what I do for each one is to see who has worked with said people before. I call them, no matter how tenuous the link, and say: "What do you think of ____?"

You don't really have to get more specific than that.

You can, of course, to clarify some of the assumptions that people might have made, or to get more details on deals gone sour, etc, so that you can make up your own mind.

But I've found most often that if I am going to be met with silence or awkwardness or worse, with hemming and hawing which can seem unjustified, it's a red flag for me.

This applies to people I hire and to people I date, too.

You need to be sure that this person doesn't kick old ladies or torture pets when you're not looking. A good way is to see how they treat waiters and how they respond to the homeless or the poor.

I don't need you to be a bleeding heart old lady hugger (please don't), but life's too short for anything that isn't "fuck yes, yes and yes".

No amount of money is ever worth it. That's not idealistic-it's the most practical advice I was ever given.

Stress Balls.

Some time ago, some people (read: entrepreneurs) I follow on Twitter posed a seemingly innocuous question. What drives us, as so-called entrepreneurs, to do what we do? Is it hubris? Ego? Is it an out-sized and unrealistic view of one's abilities? For most of us, choosing this life also means the opportunity cost we left behind, often reluctantly: decently-paid jobs with career growth at startups, VC firms, tech companies, banks, even… bars. There has been no better time to be a tech exec. My friends, and I am sometimes envious of them, clearly smash through the income and lifestyle brackets in the top 1% of the cities they live in, even the world-what we do is such a upwardly mobile trajectory. The lifestyle, with the stock options in soon-to-IPO companies, global travel as part of international "launch teams" in the most successful tech startups, fuelled by the globalizing of venture capital and focus of said capital in my part of the world, is certainly tantalizing. No longer do you need to work in finance, it seems to say, with each job offer and recruitment mail, in order to eke out a nice life for yourself and your family. The stock options certainly don't hurt.

So what can it possibly be that some of us choose to do this? Even though it's easier than ever before to raise money and do your thing, the fact is no matter where in the world you do this, building a business is just terrible. It's fun, otherwise we wouldn't be drawn to it. It can also be rewarding, otherwise we wouldn't try. But. It's hard.

I'm torn:

Between the deluge of entrepreneur porn articles and this shit is hard articles (like this, but 10x more pity): I'm torn.

On the one hand, having the ability and the opportunity to start and run your own business, even to try, is a damn privilege. It really is.

On the other, there are so many moving parts. Skill sets you need to suddenly and abruptly become a ninja at. As a founder, from HR (super important) to project development to technical skills to payroll to accounting to taxes to… whatever challenges it throws at you, really.

The last couple of weeks have super hard.

Stressful.

Energizing.

Insane.

Gut-wrenching.

Incredibly amazing.

Many startup founders come across founder depression at some point, and I think it's a real risk you expose yourself to when you put so much of yourself on the line. No matter how well-adjusted you think you are, you need all the help you can get.

This is my second company. My first, right out of school, was a dev house that specialized in creating innovative marketing projects for advertising and FCMG companies through the then-new mobile and social platforms.

Pushing 30 this year, doing this at 30 is a world apart from how it was like to do this at 22. I'm sure there are many young startup founders who learn and grow on the job, or perhaps possess a certain self-awareness and ability which I did not have. But. I find myself, this week, making dozens of decisions daily-on the sorts of things which would have caused me a lot of grief, time, money or existential angst, back in the day.

I have the opportunity, the right teams, and the business partnerships to push through with the sort of tech business I have always want to do: tech, finance and social good.

Now?

Now, we ship. And learn. And ship again. And learn again.

I love it. I hate it. I love it.

Do You Know About Galau?

I was just telling someone tonight: I force myself to meet a different stranger in Jakarta every single day that I'm here.

Even if I'm exhausted after work (which I usually am), I try to meet a new person, or eat a new food. Go to a new area.

The first time I lived outside of Singapore was when I moved to Dubai in 2007 right out of university. Then, without the metro or a usable public transport system, I was lost, angry and disoriented (I don't drive). I hear it's different now, but I'll never know.

Jakarta, despite the terrible traffic (and I don't think I'll ever stop saying that; I certainly haven't heard any locals stop complaining), works for me.

Between the ojek (motorbike taxi) and plentiful and good taxis, I'm pretty much covered.

I try to practise my Indonesian with total strangers, too.

Tonight's conversation went a little bit like this.

Cabbie: Why did you not get into the cab earlier! Is it because I am black?

Me: No!

Cabbie: Okay!

Me: How long have you lived in Jakarta!

Cabbie: 20 years! I'm from Timor! I play in a band! Check it out on YouTube! T-I-B-E-T B-A-N-D G-O-M-B-A-L

Me: Tay- ee- bay- aa- tay… fuck, what's this G in Indonesian?

Cabbie: Watch my videos! I'm singing! Let me put on some of my other music for you!

Me: (recognizes words like… cintamu, denganmu… JIWANG ALERT GOES UP)

Cabbie: Do you know about the galau?

Moments like these.

Rockstar cabbie in ridiculous YouTube video.

Nus Bany, is his name. He's the one in the insane costume. He also arranged and composed most of the music.

Nus Bany is now my regular taxi driver contact.

I intend to unleash him on all of my unsuspecting business visitors.

Yes, I know about the galau.

And it might be a sign that I'm moving further away from my Peninsular Southeast Asian roots when I now say galau over jiwang.

I love galau music. What's your fave?

Some Updates

1. I've moved to Jakarta to take part in Ideabox with my startup, WoBe

2. I'm writing more on Medium these days. The blog format is unsatisfactory to me at the moment

3. Over there, I've started two collections which may be interesting to some of you. In The Java Diaries, I obsessively track my time in Jakarta in the name of learning. In Myanmar's Second Wind, I write about my year in Yangon and the people I've met there, from the tech entrepreneur's point of view

4. Know someone fun or interesting in Jakarta? I would love to meet them

5. What does one do with a blog these days?

Peanut Butter, This What?

postcard from Banten

I never learn.

If there are two items you must not forget when travelling, they are your universal travel adapter and your watch.

I keep forgetting either one but that is seldom a problem. Forgetting just a travel adapter means you can tell time with the other essential item, the watch; forgetting the watch but having the adapter means you can tell the time with your mobile phone, iPod, or computer.

I had neither this time.

And so it was that I woke up on Thursday morning with a jolt. I had a flight and it was one I could not miss: I had a dinner appointment in another country. Not having a travel adapter meant my phone was dead for days and I therefore couldn’t inform my dinner date of any changes in the plan; the only alternative then was to make it for dinner. Not knowing what time it was I leaped out of a sofa in downtown Jakarta and sped into the bathroom, having stripped fully and redressed entirely in the 5 steps it took to get there, swept all my toiletries off the bathroom counter, administering the contents of these toiletries on my face and mouth before they got into the bag, relieved myself concurrently, and was out of the house (also having checked three times that I didn’t leave any thing behind, which would be disastrous: I don’t have the key into this apartment) exactly four minutes since I woke up with a jolt.

Downstairs at the foyer I cut the line and jumped into a taxi still worried I might miss my flight. It was 11 am.

On checking my flight ticket I realized I was, for the first time, grossly early for a 2.55 pm flight. At least that gave me enough time to get through the predictably unpredictable Jakarta traffic.

By 11.45 am I was at Soekarno-Hatta airport. If you’ve ever been there you know how that airport does not in any way resemble the airport of the capital city of the fourth most populous country in the world. The way it’s built it looks like someone took a bunch of the dullest looking Lego bricks and lined it up in a row. At each break between a set of bricks someone else started labelling them: International, terminal A, B. Domestic, terminal C, D. You can only enter the airport if you have a boarding pass and a passport, everyone else had to clamber up some steps to the Waving Gallery. The only thing you can do at the terminal is check in. The international terminal is too crowded; it makes you sprint from place to place looking for where you’re supposed to be, before going through another hurdle (to pay fiskal, 1 million rupiah for Indonesians, 100 000 rupiah for everyone else), then getting into the grotesquely long passport control lines. The domestic terminal is far more sedate and cuts to the chase. You enter the terminal; look at the screen; the check in rows are 5 feet in front of you. You check in your bags, then walk 100m to pay fiskal (30 000 rupiah, domestic). Then you get on the plane. I have seen airports in small tribal town India that work and look better. Guwahati airport in Assam, for example, is light years more advanced.

But never mind all that because Soekarno-Hatta airport has a Krispy Kreme outlet — outside, as all the shops are.

While attempting to check in early I notice my flight had been delayed to 4.15 pm. I take to delays with a certain degree of nonchalance that only experience with budget airlines and Indian trains can afford. I sit at a restaurant eating overpriced soto babat, and only because A&W Indonesia doesn’t have curly fries, and talk to strangers. One man sitting next to me with an Eee PC tells me he is Vietnamese American and is travelling the world; he’d quit his job, but as a world class backgammon player… plays backgammon online and makes more money from that than some investment bankers I know. We both have not showered in many hours and as solo travellers, need each other: to watch our things when we go to the toilet to wash our faces.

When it was time to check in for my flight at the new timing, I roll my trolley all the way back to the domestic terminal. The screen has been saying “retimed: 4.15 pm” all this while. Announcements are impossible to hear in this airport, if they exist at all. While trying to check in I find out my flight… berangkat! Departed. At the old time. It wasn’t delayed after all. Although the screen still said my flight is leaving at 4.15 pm.

So I’d missed it and was put on the next flight to my destination… at 6.40 am the next morning. I was running out of Indonesian currency, and money changers don’t really exist in this airport (or they do, but in the most inconvenient place possible — at a location which necessitated me taking a shuttle bus there); I was getting cranky. I decided to stay in the village nearest to the airport rather than brave traffic back into Jakarta, preferring village life to hanging out at Soekarno-Hatta even though I knew my new friend the backgammon champion was going to be playing backgammon online at the airport until 10 am the next day. Every minute there was depressing.

Someone booked me a decent hotel in that village, and they also came to pick me up. When I arrived in Banten I felt nothing. No panic, no horror, just one question: what am I going to do until 4.30 am tomorrow? (Remember, not having travel adapter = no laptop and mobile phone.)

The hotel was decent enough. I’m used to hotels of all stripes. My accommodation preferences sway two ways: either extreme luxury of the private retreat sort, or bottom of the barrel. I mostly dislike everything in-between and would rather stay at a place scraping the bottom of a barrel than yet another soulless hotel. The bottom of the Banten barrel, this Sri Permata place, wasn’t too bad. I mean, I have stayed in leprosy mission guesthouses in Bangladesh, longhouses hours away from cellular coverage in Borneo, and box-sized rooms in Calcutta. And enjoyed them all.

It’s the sort of place where everything on TV is in a language you don’t understand.

In my case, everything on TV was in a language I understood in fits and starts. My grasp of Malay/Indonesian is shaky, not having done it in school, and with the sentence structures of a two year old and the vocabulary of a three year old, it’s frustrating to understand bits and nothing else. Though my dedicated efforts in reading signboards in Malaysia mean my abilities in this language are slowly improving (Me: “What’s_faedah_?!”, on an insurance signboard. Her: “Say it again! Hahaha!” Me: “Frown!”) it still counts for nothing. If anything at all I feel like an idiot. Watching TV affirmed this. I understood one in ten words.

So an Indonesian comedy program, which I’m sure was very funny to the native audience, sounded to me like this:

“Where!”

“Here!”

“There!”

“Who!”

“Mosquito”

(Audience: “Hahahaha!”)

Me: “There are many mosquitoes in this room alright.” (in my head, and in English /switches off TV) Though to my credit, I did understand that they’d written in a product placement for Hak Hak Bento prawn tempura: they’d erected an entire shopfront on the set and were discussing how delicious prawn tempura was. Not entirely useful linguistic skills, then.

By which time it was 5.50pm and every channel on TV was a call to prayer for buka puasa(break fast). I wandered out into the village in search of food.

Since I had 11 hours to kill in this place I picked a warung at the brightest spot in town — Cafe Rindu, right outside Indomaret, Indonesia’s answer to 7-Eleven. In a town like this, 24h convenience stores did not exist. They closed at 10pm. I had 4 hours to go in the bright lights of this warung.

Reading Indonesian menus are never too harrowing. Being from where I am I understand 98% of menus in Indonesia and have probably eaten most of it. It seemed like a day for_roti panggang_ (toast), but so many options! Coklat! Keju! Strawberry! Selai kacang! It didn’t seem like a night for chocolate, cheese or strawberry. But just what was the last option?

I puff up my chest slightly and furrow my brow.

“Kak. Errrr… selai kacang. Ini apa?”

If anyone ever asked me that in English I would react the same way 18 year old Yati did. Stumble, laugh, giggle, and not know what to say.

“Peanut butter. This what?” What is the world? Why is the sky blue? Why does my Indonesian suck? Why am I so hungry? What is life? Why are we here? How does one answer that?

Yati pondered the deepest existential question posed to anyone since The Answer is 42. What is peanut butter, indeed?

She made me some, and I understood. I understood the secrets of the world, and why we are here. To eat peanut butter toast at a warung in a random, faceless small town in Java. To do all that while attempting to talk to people in a language I don’t entirely understand or speak.

When it was all over she asked me to be her friend. In Indonesian, of course. (“What? Huh? What did you say? Speak slowly? I is from Singapur. me speak Bahasa Indonesia a little bit a little bit.”)

I wanted to ask her to leave me her address so I could send her a postcard.

“Please give me your maklumat.”

Blank stare.

(Maklumat = information)

“Sorry, please give me your alumat.”

Another blank stare and a giggle. I vow to stop trying to speak Indonesian if I get it wrong again.

(Alumat = doesn’t mean anything)

“PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR ALAMAT.”

Yati clapped her hands, giggled, actually shrieked and did a little jiggle. And wrote excitedly on my writing pad. In English. Name = Yati. Age = 18. Address = xxxxx, Banten, Indonesia.

I’m not used to girls behaving like that towards me at all, certainly not used to tudung-wearing girls in Java (or anywhere else) being so excited about me.

I wish I could tell her peanut butter is the world, but knowing my shit Indonesian it would probably come out as “in the world, peanut butter is”. Or “peanut butter, in the world”.

It was time to leave. And I had her alamat, and all the maklumat I needed. Now to tidur, and balik ke Singapur. Langsung!

A few Malay/Indonesian language elves died in the process of writing this entry.

(Incidentally, for years my mother thought I was dating a Javanese girl named Yati. And chose to call her Yeti. How that’s anywhere close to Z’s real name is a mystery to all of us. My mother was also fond of boasting to her friends that Yeti was the colour of _kopi susu_and like hitam manis — milk coffee, and black and sweet, which I guess ties into the whole abominable snowman idea — so I guess irrelevant Indonesian skills are something I inherited.)