Border Story
by
Alexandra Crosby

Kami orang, Kami orang berduka
(We are people, We are sorrowful people)
Kami bekerja di tanah jauh
(We work in a land far away)
Di tanah jauh dari ibu bapak
(In a land far away from mother and father)
Kami berduka di dalam hati
(We are sad in our hearts)
-19th Century Malay folk song

Air travel lost its romance years ago. Security is tight, service is minimal, and everything is wrapped in plastic. But as we board the short flight from Kuala Lumpur to Surabaya, there is excitement in the stale air of the main cabin. The animated chatter is in East Javanese, the local language of our destination–most people on this plane are going home. It takes a long time for everyone to settle down, as colourful woven baskets are stuffed under seats and impossible parcels forced into overhead compartments.

As we take off the old woman next to me grabs my arm. I feel panic in her tight grip, but her voice is resolute, quietly reciting the prayers of travel from the Koran. ‘O Allah You are The Companion on the journey and The Successor over the family, O Allah I take refuge with You from the difficulties of travel.’ As the plane levels out and the seat belt sign chimes off, her fingers uncurl from my sleeve, her eyes open, and she smiles warmly. 

Ani, who looks about my age, is sitting in the next row. ‘Permisi, where you come from?’ she asks, leaning over the back of her seat. She starts chatting cheerfully, her huge smile revealing perfect white teeth. This is her first time in an airplane. ‘It is so amazing. It took me two weeks to get to Malaysia. I rode a ferry for two days to Sumatra where I waited a week and a half for a visa. Now I get home in two and a half hours!’

Ani has been working as a nanny for a large, wealthy family in Kuala Lumpur, where salaries are much higher than Indonesia. Her two-year contract finally over, she is returning to her own neighbourhood, a small village on the Eastern tip of Java, to her fiancé, with whom she has spoken only twice over their two year separation (but exchanged thousands of text messages), and to her mother’s cooking, which she assures me has no rival across the Indonesian archipelago, let alone Malaysia. She tells me she hasn’t slept in days, anxious that perhaps things won’t be the same. At her twenty-six years, she feels she is getting too old to marry and have children of her own. She doesn’t want to look after bratty rich kids for the rest of her days.

Hassan, sitting to my right, is a Malaysian man who works in Kuala Lumpur as an electrician. ‘You know, these people are strange,’ he confides. He is going to Surabaya to join his Javanese wife, who has returned home in her final term of pregnancy. ‘There’s no money there, the health care is worse, but she insists that this baby is Javanese and must be born there.’ His visa is for sixty days and his wife is due in exactly 58 days. ‘Hopefully the baby comes on time,’ he chuckles, ‘but then again, that wouldn’t be very ‘Javanese’ of it.’

As the cabin crew busy themselves serving tea and coffee, I notice an old man in front of me slip the metal cutlery from his food tray into the basket under his seat. I look around to see if anyone else has noticed and discover that several knives, forks, and spoons throughout the cabin are disappearing from view. Seeing I have noticed, Ani leans over and whispers ‘we are not a poor country, but a country of poor people. In my village all the knives and forks are from an old shipwreck half a kilometer from our beach. You can still find good stuff there, if you can swim–and hold your breath for a long time.’

‘Are you taking yours?’ asks the old woman, pointing at my tray. I shake my head and her wrinkled hands close around the cutlery. ‘The best souvenirs,’ she smiles, ‘are the useful ones.’

When I arrive in Santan, Bu Pur makes coffee and calmly sets it on a yellow and green straw mat. I am relieved to have finally arrived here, this little village in East Java that has so often been my brief home. It is explained to me that Bu Pur’s eldest son, Mas Pur is leaving for Malaysia tomorrow, ‘God-willing,’ on a two-year work contract. There will be a dinner later that evening to send him off safely. Dewi, the new neighbour comes in to keep me company, and Bu Pur excuses herself to continue cooking. 

Dewi is from Kalimantan. It was there that she met her Santan husband while he was working for a forestry company. Within a year, they were married and had a child. The new little family was brought to Java where she is now trying to fit in and learn Javanese. People here think her cooking is too spicy and she misses the hot lamb porridge her mother makes. ‘It doesn’t matter though,’ she tells me unconvincingly, ‘everything will become usual.’ Dewi’s husband left again seven months ago, on a contract with another company, this time in Sumatra. He is moving sand and soil that will be neatly added to the island of Singapore. She wants to work as well, so they can build a proper house together and have their own well. She looks over at her son who is playing marbles on the smooth concrete floor beside the mat. ‘As soon as he is bigger, I will find a job.’ 

‘Where would you like to work?’ I ask, and I think of what I mean when I ask this to friends in Australia. ‘London,’ they answer, ‘or New York maybe.’

‘Anywhere,’ says Dewi, ‘Surabaya I guess. There’s lots of work there.’ I follow her gaze out the window of Bu Pur’s house, along the patchwork of rice fields to the forest of jati trees and the distant mountains. ‘I’ll do anything,’ she says.

I know there is a lot of work in Surabaya. There are thousands of factories that pollute the rivers and make the air black with soot. There are foreign bosses that will complain in her language while convincing each other that they are doing her a favour in their own. And there is a child at every traffic light, singing happy songs with a sad voice, shaking bottle tops with one hand and tapping on car windows with the other. There are streets lined with prostitutes, stiff vinyl strapped to their feet. I look at Dewi’s scuffed bare feet; strong, flat, brown, her toes splayed on the dirt floor.

Mas Pur comes in carrying a small dusty bag–once black–in one arm and a pile of clothes in the other.

‘You already long time not visit us here,’ he accuses me with a smile. He empties his arms onto the mat beside me and he takes my hand. ‘I miss practicing English with you.’ Mas Pur is self-educated and speaks more English than anyone in Santan. He has been planning a trip to Australia for ten years. Although he has tried many times, has never succeeded in getting a visa. ‘Indonesia is no good.’ He has told me this so many times it has become a ritual between us. There is no blame in his voice, but I feel heavy with my own opportunities. ‘We work hard for no money. My daughter has enough to eat but how will she go to school when she is more big?’

He dusts off the bag with a cloth to reveal a line of green cursive letters. ‘On the move,’ it reads followed by an arrow, and we laugh. I watch as he packs his things one by one into the bag: one change of clothes, two packets of toothpaste, a toothbrush, a photograph of his daughter Tikka, a comb, and a bottle of lotion. ‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘For my bald spot,’ he explains in Indonesian, pointing to his thinning hair. ‘My wife gave it to me.’ 

‘The cream or the bald spot?’ asks Dewi. We laugh again and I think of his wife in Surabaya, working in the plastic factory and dreaming of her husband coming home with a full head of hair and enough money to buy a house.

Today I am flying from Surabaya to Singapore. I sit next to a large Dutchman with a round red face. His name is Rinze. He works for O’Neil, traveling around Asia checking production at shoe factories. He has also just been to Vietnam, China, and Laos. ‘You must know a lot of languages,’ I say, ‘for that kind of work.’

‘Just German and Dutch . . . oh and English, of course. But Indonesian has a lot of Dutch words,’ he tells me. ‘Like ‘gratis’ which means ‘free.’ 

I know this already but I ask. ‘Free? As in ‘not costing money,’ or as in ‘without chains?’ 

Indonesia was Rinze’s last stop, and now he is flying back to his wife and three-year-old daughter in Holland. In Surabaya, he was checking a factory where production has steadily slowed over the past few months. There are many empty factories in Java, he tells me, mostly in the big cities. ‘Workers are so lazy there. They’ll strike about anything. It’s much better in China . . . and factory workers in Vietnam are the absolute best.’  

I think of Pur’s wife, Mbak Rin, with whom I stay in Surabaya. She is beautiful, softly spoken and has a strong, sweet singing voice. She is also from Santan, but has been working at the same Korean-owned plastics factory in Surabaya for fourteen years. I once tried to visit her at the factory, as a surprise. I brought rambutan and iced tea, but I couldn’t get past the security at the front gate. I have asked her about her work often enough, and the answer is always the same. ‘There’s nothing to tell. Its boring, the same every day. Lets talk about something else.’ 

Mbak Rin and Mas Pur have a three-year old called Tikka. During the day she is taken care of by her nanny, Mbak Sur. Often, if I’m in Surabaya, I look after Tikka. I take her shopping or swimming or to visit neighbours. If we go outside her suburb, people assume she is mine. ‘Her Dad must be from Java,’ they say approvingly, and I smile. The last time I was there, Sur had a puffy eye. It looked like conjunctivitis to me. She wanted to go home to her village to recover. ‘Once,’ she told me, pointing at her eye, ‘one of my cousins–a good-looking man of a marriageable age–had a sore eye like this. They took it out and replaced it with a dog’s eye!’  Mbak Rin says that when I’m visiting, Sur always seems to get sick with something and needs to go home, as she knows I can look after Tikka. She has four children of her own at home who are brought up by their grandmother.  

Rinze orders a beer and continues talking. ‘It’s very bad for their economies when they get political.’  He tells me he comes from a family of shoemakers. For four generations, they held metal tools in their hands, making and fixing shoes. ‘I suppose what I do now is just the modern version of the same profession,’ he laughs. 

I look at his pudgy smooth fingers and am astonished at the simplicity of everything. ‘Aren’t the factory workers the shoemakers?’ I ask.