Strings

March 2017 

The 4th of November 2016 in Jakarta, Indonesia, was sunny and warm, and the streets were filled with people. You hear those words and you probably think, oh, how nice, a festival! But there aren’t many children, and there isn’t enough laughter. You can’t see any floats or stalls selling food, and as you walk, police block your way with a barricade of bodies. If you close your eyes, though, gunshots can sound like fireworks.

It was another protest. It wasn’t as big as the first, less than a month before, but the office where I was interning was closed and my little brother stayed home from school. I woke up like it was any other day, but when I walked into the living room I found my parents frowning at the television, silent as the cameras panned over the waves of people. The news channels were reporting live. The protesters were all dressed in white, as if they could lay claim to righteousness, to purity, and they chanted the prayers of my religion even as they fought for something so unjust.

On the surface, the protests were about religion and race. Islam against Christianity, native Indonesian against ethnic Chinese. One of the candidates for governor of Jakarta was a Christian of Chinese descent, and had said something supposedly offensive about the Qur’an. The validity of that allegation was, at that point, inconsequential. Prejudice and racism ran deep under the skin of the city, so catchy slogans and exaggerated claims rallied people with ease. Recently, though, reports had come to the surface suggesting that it was all more than it seemed, that it was part of some convoluted plan to overthrow our current President. That the protesters were backed by corrupted money and the Daesh.

When I heard those words, I saw the little things that had raised flags over the last few years; the rise in nationalism, the increasing intolerance of race, religion, and sexuality, the government cracking down on international schools. Was all that connected to the Daesh, too? I felt caught between being ashamed of my country and defensive of it. Indonesia was supposed to be better than this. As I stood there, behind my parents, I couldn’t help but remember the bombing that the Daesh had claimed earlier that year. I remembered the chaos it had caused – driving fast through the city to get home, pushing my brother away from the windows in our car – and I felt fear bleed into my anger and frustration.

Was that what my city was doomed to become?

Let’s skip forward a few days. It was a hot Thursday morning in Jakarta, but in the U.S., it was Wednesday the 8th of November. Election day. As I drove to my office I noticed that the streets were quieter than usual. The protests had left their marks. I walked into my office and a part of me was shocked that it remained the same; still empty, still grey, with that one bright green accent wall that reminded me sharply of my high school classrooms. I hauled the pile of newspapers I had to look through onto my desk and opened my laptop to show the polls as the results came in. Then I started reading, and waited.

People walked in one by one and I watched as they sat at their desks, sighed, and unfurled. Everyone was still early-morning slow, and their smiles and small talk helped loosen the tightness in my chest. When Tom came in, though, it was different. He had a purpose in his step and focus in his eyes. After he dropped his things down at his desk he marched over to the projector, plugged in a spare laptop, and opened the live election poll. A map of the United States appeared, colours and numbers overlaying that ugly green wall, faint in the brightness yet somehow glaring. Satisfied, he walked back to his desk and sat down. He caught my gaze across the room, a reassuring smirk on his face.

“Don’t worry,” he said airily. “He won’t win.”

I smiled and nodded.

Grace made some joke that I only half listened to, and Aji pat my shoulder as he walked by. I plastered a grin on my face and pretended I wasn’t as affected as I was, but by the way Tom raised his eyebrow, it didn’t seem to work. My office had always been very political. It was filled with internationally-minded people, and they were all very aware of the weight of this election. I remembered watching the presidential debates, 4 or 5 of us huddled over one laptop in the corner of the office. Our own frowns were mirrored on each other’s faces, but we reassured ourselves that he wouldn’t win. The words placated us, and we chose to believe them.

At this point the results were slightly in Trump’s favour, but a lot of the major states hadn’t been counted yet. With each minute that passed, each vote that got counted, the tension rose in the room. It was probably the most unproductive day I’d had in that office. Fred, the politically indifferent intern that sat across from me, leaned over to my desk and cracked a joke. Before that moment, I didn’t think it was physically possible for one of my smiles to be so fake.

More votes came in and it looked like Clinton might be putting up a fight, but then Trump once again took the lead, and it only widened from there. Tom’s giggles and loud proclamations of confidence became less frequent and eventually stopped entirely. The office grew quiet. Soon it was past noon, and as I looked at the green-tinged results on the wall, at the disparity between Trump’s and Clinton’s vote counts, I forced myself to speak. “I think… he won, didn’t he?”

It was like the room deflated, like whatever had been holding people up had finally collapsed under their weight. Someone mumbled an agreement. Grace rested her face in her hand; Aji sighed and walked out of the room for a smoke. Tom, who had friends and family in the US, closed his eyes and tilted his head up to the ceiling.

Fred smirked and rolled his eyes.

I felt angry, and frustrated, and deeply sad. Donald Trump and his vice stood for a concept, a belief, that was so against everything I was, and there were people who would now feel entitled to practice those beliefs. No, I wasn’t American, nor did I live in the U.S., but seeing someone like Trump accepted, legitimized, felt like a stab in the chest. As a bisexual girl who grew up in a Muslim household, it felt like every dimension of my existence was being challenged. But I wasn’t just sad for me, I was sad for the people in the U.S. – women, people of colour, Muslims, immigrants, queer people – who probably felt as I did, but about their own home country. I was sad for the people around the world who saw this and received that same message of inequality and rejection. It was a deep, deep hurt.

More than being hurt, though, I was angry. My frustration and rage and disbelief spun together and I’d never felt more helpless in my entire life. How could this have happened? How could people have looked past all those awful things and voted for him? Was being a woman with a few emails truly more condemning than being a sexist, racist, homophobic amalgamation of all the things I stood against?

So, when Fred, the blond-haired blue-eyed Norwegian that could’ve been the face of the Hitler youth-

Fred, the twenty-seven-year-old free spirit who bought himself a vintage briefcase with his dad’s money-

Fred, the coconut water-drinking, polo-shirt wearing sleaze ball who couldn’t be straighter if you strapped him to a pole-

When Fred, the other intern, said that it ‘wasn’t a big deal’ and Trump ‘wasn’t so bad’, I had to physically restrain myself from screaming and crying and punching him in the nose. Instead, I smiled at him, sweet like decomposing fruit, “Look, Fred, I really don’t think your opinion is required here.” The corner of Tom’s lip tugged upwards.

When I got home later than night I felt like the life had been sucked out of me. My brother, who watched as I stared off into the distance, couldn’t understand why I cared so much. “We don’t live there,” he’d said. “It doesn’t really affect us.” We were sitting across from each other at the dining room table, dinner eaten and parents away. He stared at me, eyebrows quirked and questioning, as I tried to take the strands of ideas, of arguments, and tie them into a tangible thing to hand to him.

I wanted to talk about how it made me feel, how it invalidated people – people like me, however selfish that seemed. How it felt like a leap backwards. I wanted to talk about the protests here in Jakarta, the nationalist movement, religious intolerance, corruption. How it took us back to ’98, to the riots that drove so many of the ethnic Chinese out of the country and into hiding. About the Daesh and how they might be more active here than I’d previously thought, about the look in his eyes as I told him to get away from the windows. About how these things didn’t exist in isolation and events piled up on each other and rolled and gained speed. How there was a global rise of the right all over the world, a rise in hate crimes and racism and anger and fear, and how honestly, it all scared the hell out of me.

But I couldn’t. My words tangled together in my head and as I stared as his critical face all I could say was, “Well, he’s just evil, isn’t he?”