27 months in Indonesia teaching with the Peace Corps. This blog contains my personal thoughts and opinions and does not represent those of the Peace Corps or US government.
I’m tired of the story format that most of my blog posts adopt. Life is not so precise nor fitting of the traditional story line, with carefully – or arbitrarily – chosen beginnings and endings. These are my thoughts, as I’m having them:
March is a month of holidays. The March page of my calendar presents me with several new holidays/astrological events/ days of recognition every week. First there was Holi, now there’s the Wiccan holiday Ostara and the Persian holiday No Ruz. There was Purim and let us not forget Palm Sunday. Embedded betwixt these diverse celebratory days is Religious Freedom Day. It’s a good reminder and calendars are nothing if not reminders of just how busy the religious and politically-correct communities are in any given month.
It is a strange thing to own a western calendar in the east. You feel like you’re missing things that were never a big deal to you before, or, at least they were a complimentary background to your seasonal scenes.
We talked about the solar eclipse in my Thursday class (we’re sort of doing the school thing again, after a month’s hiatus). We jumped right back on the horse with a lesson about news articles. In groups the students had to take a group of simplified news articles in English and write new headlines for them. I’ve only just now stumbled across the website newsinlevels.com. It's absolutely brilliant, even if Level 1 (out of three levels, with Level 3 containing the most original vocabulary) is still a bit difficult for my students to comprehend.
For the article about the solar eclipse, the groups came up with headlines like, “A Dark Morning in London” (the article was actually about all of Europe) and “Ring of Moon in Europe Sky.” The solar eclipse will not be visible from Indonesia this year but maybe next year we'll see it if there isn’t too much cloud cover. While this phenomenon wasn’t present from our neck of the beach, it was present for me in the digital news sphere, as was a heightened appreciation for the official first day of spring.
Spring is a time for traveling, for growth and above all, it is a time to die to the past and be reborn to the future. Even if I am not able to witness all the symbols of life and rebirth that Nature usually displays here in these equatorial climes, I still follow the same cycles I’ve followed for 23 years past.
My music and literature choices of late follow the theme of travel and I've spent more afternoons outside this week than I have in the last two months (although that may also be because the rainy season has just now ended). It is not only a desire for motion which this ghostly demarcated season stirs within me but also momentum. Momentum as in the crest of some energy, not the ending and subsequent beginning of a new trajectory.
Beginnings are difficult to record and can’t be assigned to a particular date on a calendar. A beginning is a feeling that comes over you when you’re leaving some place or thing behind. It is that lightning moment of internalization, when experience and pre-conceived but as yet un-felt thoughts mold together. Beginnings are just paradigm shifts and endings, well, they’re only there so we don’t exhaust ourselves.
I find that beginnings usually happen in the middle of things, when you have some momentum. Even in the Cap Go Meh festival I spoke of in my last blog post, the 15 days of the new year are spent in transition, appreciating the blessings of the year past and praying for more blessings in the year to come. Their whole tatung festival was a sort of spring cleaning of residual energies in order to be spiritually recharged for the coming year. They celebrate the transition, recognizing where they've been and where they're going.
Although it’s a bit stagnant activity-wise at site and there are still drizzly afternoons spent watching the dull river dance with small pinpricks of light, I feel a change in the air. It is a predictable change, but one that never loses its novelty.
There we were at the airport, having inched our way through Jakarta traffic for the past three hours like an inchworm who has lost all motivation to go on. My host family departed and I went inside, discovered that two hours was ridiculously early to check in for a domestic flight, then went back outside and settled down at a restaurant table to people-watch. There was a crowd of older ibus wearing matching batiks and maroon hijabs which fell to their waists like capes. There was also the token bules looking unwashed and out of place (I always judge the other bules so harshly) in a tank top and see-through shirt. My friend Chad arrived and we were off to the mysterious island of Kalimantan for a festival about which I knew precious little.
A line from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Recuerdo” had been going through my head all morning, “We were very tired, we were very merry – we had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.” Although she and I were at different moments in our journeys, she caught in the middle of hers, me caught in the net of waiting for mine to begin, she accurately described my dueling emotions for this brief trip to West Kalimantan which I had been looking forward to for the past month. I was weary of the weeks of hardly any school in Karawang and happy to be doing something definable - with a beginning, end and goal.
About a month ago, in early February, I began to see the red lettering and pink cherry blossoms bloom on billboards around town advertising Cap Go Meh. In the east, Valentine’s Day was gone and Cap Go Meh sat on its rosy-hued throne. I asked another teacher where I should go to see the best Cap Go Meh festival and she said without hesitation, “Singkawang. You must go to Singkawang in Kalimantan.”
Cap Go Meh is a festival held on the 15th day after the Chinese New Year (Imlek). Throughout February, Indonesia’s Chinese population devote time to giving thanks and prayers for the year past and the year to come. Cap Go Meh is the raucous grand finale of Imlek activities. Its purpose is to cleanse the city of evil spirits for the coming year. Different cities have different festivals. Karawang’s festival was on the Sunday after I returned from Kalimantan. I later learned that people come from Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore to see Singkawang’s famous Cap Go Meh celebrations.
The plane ride was only an hour and a half. My friend aptly observed that it took us about two and a half times longer to get to Jakarta from our near-by cities than to fly to another island hundreds of miles away (455 to be exact). Once in Pontianak, the capital of West Borneo, we met our taxi driver with surprisingly few miscommunications. During the next five hours on the straight-shot road to Singkawang I stared out my window at the wild landscape of coastal palm forests and swamplands. Mountains stood like sentinels in every direction except due west, which leveled out to flat-as-glass blue-green sea.
Angkot in Pontianak.
An hour away from Singkawang we stopped for dinner. We ate on a wooden deck perched above the calm waves and looked out at the black specks of fishing boats drifting in a path of moonlight. I piled my plate with spicy bar-b-q chicken, corn fritters and boiled vegetables with shrimp and sat down to eat with our taxi driver. He said casually, after finishing his dinner of white rice and one lone piece of chicken as a garnish, that he made this ten hour trip five days a week.
In the sprawling spaces between towns we passed many barren houses whose porches proffered a single red lantern. Occasionally we passed through a town and idled in traffic while a parade similar to the one we would see later in Singkawang passed by. Boys hung over the tops of dump trucks whooping, shouting and waving tree branches at the people lining the street below. Cars towed floats with pretty girls sitting stoically atop ornate furniture and bright green turf grass. Driving down the dark road away from the lights and souls, hundreds of red lanterns and strings of lights lit our path. It was like Christmas was dyed red and exploded into rainbow shards which caught the light of the moon erratically.
At last we reached Singkawang. The name means town between the mountains and the sea, which was an accurate description of most of the country we’d seen so far. We originally arranged to stay with an air bnb host named Dhanny. He was very communicative in the month leading up to our arrival and even went as far as to tell us that his house was far away from the city center and maybe we would like to stay at another house, which he could help us arrange. We accepted and I’m glad we did as Singkawang has no angkots or other public transportation. Also we found after our second evening, when Dhanny invited us to dinner with his family, that he wasn't joking about how inconveniently-located his house was for two foot-bound travelers.
After meeting our actual host, Dona, a Catholic lady, Dhanny picked us up to see the lantern festival. We thought this was exceptionally gracious of him seeing as he was no longer our host, but, then again, Indonesians would put even Southern hospitality to shame.
After a brief respite between road and more road during which we had only time to put down our bags and lock our room, we went once more unto the breach. As much as he talked with us via text Dhanny was very quiet in person. He sat and drank coffee as we wandered up and down one of the main streets before the parade began. Then he showed us several other spots where we could get a better view of the lantern parade. Ultimately we learned that he worked as a cop. This worried me slightly because I knew from experience that police liked to ask you for your identification and then somehow hover around you even after you had presented said identification.
This did end up happening, but he was nice enough about it. We only ran into a small issue with not having all the pages of our passport copied (usually they only need – want - the front page and a copy of your visa) but he strangely let it go after talking with a security manager from Peace Corps and realizing that it would take a long time to receive a fax of the other pages and by that time we would have already left. Either that or our bright personalities won him over.
Everyone in Singkawang and then some had turned out to see the lantern parade. Having been in transit since 7:30 that morning I was ready to sleep in the middle of the road after an hour at the parade, but there was one more surprise in store for the night. When Dhanny dropped us off at Dona’s guest house, we met our housemates who had taken our original room. They were a young, good-looking film crew making a documentary on tatung (the art of calling on positive spirits to enter the body in order to dispel the bad spirits who affect people’s lives negatively) for the Jakarta-based Metro TV station. They said that their itinerary the next day was to visit the houses of two families, one Dayak (indigenous Borneans) and one Chinese. The family they would visit in the morning had four children who would prepare for the tatung parade. The objective of the Metro TV guys was to explore the perspective of the Dayak vs. non-Dayak tatung. They said to be ready by 5:30 if we wanted to join.
I set my alarm for 5 am the next morning and, seeing as no one was up yet, staked myself out on one of the yellow peeling couches in the living room to wait for some sign that I had understood which end of the day we were to join them. At 5:29 the producer emerged from his bedroom looking significantly less bedraggled than the rest of his crew, who followed moments later. In traditional Indonesian fashion, we were on the road 5 minutes later toting cameras and equipment as we drove in the cool pre-dawn air.
The wind gave all the crew members even worse bed-head than before but none of them seemed conscious of much at that hour. At the tatung leader’s house we waited while the film crew set up a few shots and got their B-roll.
Looming over the wide walled-in courtyard stood a temple where red candles as tall as an adolescent who had met their first growth spurt were burning around an alter of fresh fruit, a cauldron of incense and images of gods and goddesses. The bright pink temple was open to the fresh air and still the smell of incense pervaded the space. Soon after we arrived people set off fireworks. Little bits of debris rained down on my feet and the loud bangs echoed behind us in the direction of the mist-shrouded mountains.
The producer, named Jastis, hung around and gave me a quick run-down on the tatung artists. He explained that while being a tatung is quite common in Singkawang, it is an honored position, like that of a doctor. We saw the leader wandering around in a wife-beater and blue slacks and grey make-up under his eyes.
I believe he's the one on the left.
His children (three daughters, one son) were being prepared for the festival on Thursday, known as “hari untuk membersihkan kampung”, or, a day to clean the city of evil spirits. His own position as a tatung was passed down through his family. Jastis said that one can only be a tatung through blood.
Suddenly a young woman came out of the house wearing shorts and a grey tank top. Jastis motioned to me and said, “she is the beautiful tatung”. He told me that she is one of the daughters of the leader but lives in Hong Kong with her family. Every year she must return to Singkawang during Cap Go Meh to perform the ritual. If she didn’t she would become very ill because the spirits would be angry with her. Her presence was rare, that of someone who is self-possessed and doesn’t take notice of who is watching her or what they are doing. All eyes were on her and the camera crew were immediately in her face but she went on with her business like a pro. She walked over to two kids who could have been her siblings and checked on the chairs decorated with nails and knives sticking out all over. I thought to myself that I could learn a lesson in peaceful ambivalence in the face of unwanted attention from her.
Eventually I realized that we were waiting for the four tatung to go into their trances. It happened one by one and took them over very suddenly. One of them would first begin to show signs of being elsewhere; they rolled their eyes and their movements became stiff and mechanical. People seemed to be assigned to each of them to help - the next day we saw two people per tatung who threw water at them from a special plant and who carried a censer around the tatung and their chairs. The helpers would tie a scarf around their head or hand them their clothes, which they had to stamp before doning them. They also were there to listen to the mumbled words that the rest of us couldn't hear.
After the tatungs went onto their painful-looking chairs, the procession of chair-bearers ran out of the courtyard like bats out of hell. Again, our trip to the temple with the tatungs was a story of hurry up and wait and then charge through the actual event that you have been waiting for. The litter-bearers practically ran past the Chinese graves embedded in the scenic hillside, followed by the film crew running with all their equipment, followed by us with our little cameras. I was exhilarated by the frantic overture which preluded this play. At the temple, the tempest of movement calmed for a few moments and we saw some other tatungs paying homage to their gods and goddesses in their wild or else totally zoned-out ways.
By 10 o’clock, the bright sun was in our eyes and on our backs and we joined our cinematic friends for breakfast. Day one was over for the tatung - the morning's activities had just been in preparation for Thursday. After that we went back to our guest house where the film crew promptly assumed positions of exhaustion and we promptly got ready to be picked up for the beach. Dhanny had swooped in again to rescue us from a fate of boredom. He stopped by the police station to pick up two other police officers – in full uniform – and thus we had a full police escort to the beach. I smiled to myself at the thought of us, simple English teacher tourists, being treated like foreign diplomats. The beach, Pasir Panjang, was a little slice of paradise - and deserted too! Presumably everyone was in the city preparing for the parade.
We went to dinner with Dhanny’s family that night, then wandered over to a stadium around the corner to gaze in bemused wonder at the booths set up as replicas of various business chains. The funniest we saw was the Indomaret tent complete with racks for crackers and Pocari Sweat and even had a little check-out counter standing on a spindly plastic stand. Some henna, potato spirals with every condiment you could imagine on them and cool little dragon souvenirs later, we called it a day.
Delicious dumplings for breakfast - don't know what they're called.
The next morning we slept in til the glorious hour of six and promptly made our way to the stadium from the night before to follow any thread of the tatung parade we could find. This didn’t end up being too difficult as boys in black shirts announced each tatung by banging on their wheeled drums. We followed the sound of the drums and odd animal noises and found our parade. Jastis said that the government put a cap on the number of tatung who could participate in the parade, that number being 500, but several articles reported between 750 and 800 tatung this year.
You'd want a Guinness too, were you in his shoes. The tatung are on empty stomachs while they pierce themselves full of holes, due to a 24-hour fast beforehand.
Yellow paper thrown during parades such as this one or funerals. I tried to pick one up and Jovia (pictured below) said to buy some instead.
Similar to the riveting experience of watching impatient drivers in Jakarta traffic speed up only to stomp on the brakes moments later, litter-bearers kept bumping into each other as their catch thrashed about on their pointy thrones. I suppose I should be just as concerned for the people in the cars (namely me and my friends) as the people involved in this procession, but the tatung appeared to be in more immediate danger of impaling themselves on the spears attached to the corners of their chairs than reckless Jakarta drivers were of crashing.
We met with a girl named Jovia and her boyfriend who had introduced herself to me the first night and she became our tour guide. She explained all the particulars of the tatung performances to me. After several hours we ended up near a large Chinese temple which had tables of slaughtered pigs on them with most parts intact except their innards. My friend explained that the poor of Singkawang were to receive the meat, so I found that it’s not all about dispelling evil spirits but also sharing the abundance of good fortune.
As the tatung artists persisted into the heat of the almost-noon day sun we lost our friends and found that we had walked quite far from our guest house and knew not how to get back. Fortunately, the first person we asked set us straight and we were back at our guest house by one in the afternoon. Overly-exhausted from being in the sun all morning and absorbing the relentless energy of the crowds and the tatung who never let up their trances once the entire time, we allowed ourselves a break. With barely a nod to the film crew who had already assumed their lounging positions across the yellow living room couches, I headed to our room to take a nap. After an hour, which felt like ten minutes, our stomachs motivated us onward, back out into the elements and the mad world. We had bak mie the day before and stumbled across the most delicious cap cai I’ve ever had this afternoon. I had forgotten that there were peppers that didn’t burn your taste buds but gently massaged them with exquisite care and perfection. Truly our pallets rejoiced in the explosion of texture and flavor that is Chinese food.
Bak mie. Yes, that is pork. Never thought I'd miss its flavor.
A potato-y type layer at the bottom with spiced meat on top.
The serendipitous meeting of the afternoon came in the form of Felix, one of Dhanny’s acquaintances, who saw us eating in the shade of our warung and did a U-ey on his motorbike to come say hi. Felix said he hadn’t seen the parade earlier (the locals are quite bored with all the blood and crazy eyes by this point) but somehow the light in his eyes seemed to contain all of the mad energy we had just been exhausted by in the past five hours. Not picking up on our wilted expressions, he extended our lunch by at least two hours and we passed the afternoon listening to stories of his time as a soldier in the Aceh war. He is newly retired from the army after spending the past ten years as a soldier and now has a lot of soldier friends in Singkawang. Energy poured off of him in waves like the heat which seemed to hover around me like a cocoon, as he explained that he quit because he was too lazy for army life. He told me he had one friend die during service, but it was because he contracted malaria and then committed suicide.
In the golden hours of the afternoon I said we had to buy gifts for our families. Felix jumped at the opportunity to help and offered to go with us to pick them out, so off we went. After our shopping we were right next to the elaborate Chinese temple from the morning and Felix suggested we go in and look around (I tell everyone here I'm buddhist because you are expected to follow sone religion). This is the second time I’ve been without a camera in an amazing temple. I suppose I should know better by now that one does not simply walk out for a quick lunch and not expect to meet someone along the way who will want to while away the rest of the day with you.
Vihara Budi Dharma, a beautiful Buddhist temple. They are equal opportunity when it comes to colors.
Photos courtesy of panormaio.com (top) and gettyimages.com (bottom).
We went out with the film crew that night for dinner at a series of food stalls named Pasar Hong Kong and there met a ten-year old tatung artist and a woman film-maker who was making a documentary about her specifically.
The ten-year old is the one front and center.
The ten-year old mostly hung out with her friends and at one point stormed off angrily. Jastis told me that she hadn’t wanted to do the piercings but that the spirit had forced her to earlier. I found myself looking at her mouth after that but could only find one tiny, barely noticeable hole on the left side. Tatung artists are not supposed to be hurt by any of the piercings or drinking animal blood or cutting that they do while they are possessed. Jastis told me that women are not allowed to do piercings but they and children as young as four are allowed to drink animal blood and do all the fancy work with the blades. I think I might have misunderstood him on this point, however, because we saw men and women alike with piercings. Although all my pictures are of men tatung, we did see several women like the one we met riding on unsheathed litters. After dinner Felix called us for one last hurrah then we dropped into bed like the spirits of the chickens had dropped from their bodies.
On Friday morning I did not have any poetic thoughts about leaving. The past few days had been a blur and we piled into a taxi with the film crew as bleary-eyed as the rest. We saw the sunrise as we crested a hill on the outskirts of Singkawang. The camera man and editor promptly went to sleep in the backseat as the cheerful driver whose eyes somehow looked like they were always caught in the shadow of a smile plugged in his USB as we barreled down the highway linking Pontianak to all other major cities in West Kalimantan.
Ellie Goulding and Indonesian pop sensation Agnes Monica wailed as we cut through the wilderness of feathery palms and brown inlets in which sat blue wooden fishing boats. Dona sat beside me singing along with Agnes Monica and humming all the English songs. She was joining us to Pontianak for social reasons which Jastis suggested were of a romantic nature by his giggling.
Me with film crew and Dona, our sweet guest host.
Breakfast on our way to the airport - pineapple, cap cai (stir fry vegetables), stewed vegetables and egg.
Even if you went to Singkawang at a different time of year, there would still be plenty to do: beaches, trying all the delicious food, going around with friendly locals...etc. And if you ever have an opportunity to see a Cap Go Meh festival I would highly recommend it. It was strange and felt a bit like black magic to me at first, but by far, it's one of the most interesting things I've ever taken part of. Although we were not up there with the tatung artists, there was an energy in the city that was really different.
