Living the Expat Life

The Jakarta Post   |  Fri, 03/28/2008 2:44 PM  |  Center Piece

The glib expat stereotypes and assumptions do not fit anymore. Globalization has made the expatriate community a very diverse bunch, inclusive of young Asians earning their career stripes and an increasing number of young, single women. Here they tell their stories.

Japanese journalist Nozomi Matsukawa is 25 and has been coming to Indonesia since 2003. She first fell in love with Surabaya, where she studied Bahasa Indonesia, around working as a volunteer with street children. A gritty determination to come and live in the archipelago saw her do everything in her power to find her niche and today she reports for The Daily Jakarta Shimbun.

My story is different. I saw a picture of Bali when I was little and I thought I would like to go there. I didn’t know it was Indonesia – but I wanted to come.

I studied international relations at university and while I was studying, 9/11 happened. I was really shocked because the world’s journalists were so critical about Muslims and I wanted to know why.

I wanted to learn more about the culture here and I wanted to learn more about women and children. In 2003, I came to Semarang to help clean a river for one month – I stayed in a very small village, but even though I could not communicate properly, I used body language, and I mimed, and in this way I made friends.

In 2004, I went to Sumatra to work as a volunteer again. This time I could already speak some Bahasa. I also tried to go to Malaysia and Mongolia – but I never felt the same about those countries. So that’s why I decided on Indonesia. I fit in here. I even look Indonesian, some people say.

Then I found The Jakarta Shimbun and I was very lucky to get a job.

I’m afraid at first I didn’t like Jakarta. This is a big city – it’s complicated and messed up.  Every day I have to write two or three articles – I don’t have enough time to find my own focus. I want to write about street children.

I will stay until 2009 – then after the elections I will go back to Japan. I have learned to love it here though. It is a very great experience.

Japanese people don’t want to come to Indonesia now. They are afraid. They are afraid of the bombs, of the tsunami, of bird flu. Many have gone back to Japan and now they don’t want to come back.

But I recommend to come to Jakarta – it is such a big city, there are so many stories.
Of course I will miss it when I go back in 2009. But I will come back to Indonesia.

Yousuf Rangoonwalla, 25, hails from Calcutta, India. After studying mass communications at university and in between bids to work in Cairo and almost Russia, an opportunity through a youth organization saw him head to Jakarta in 2006 for just eight months. Two years later he’s in his second advertising job, climbing the ladder, and absolutely loving it.

I was about to become senior brand manager at home when I decided to take this opportunity and come to Jakarta. I was working on blue chip-brands and I was on a decent salary for Calcutta standards. But I just decided I’m going to do this, because if I don’t now, it will never happen.

I was offered two opportunities – one in Singapore and one in Jakarta. In Singapore, I would have had the opportunity to work for DHL, or in Indonesia there was the opportunity to work for one small advertising company.

But the job in Singapore was boring and the guy in Indonesia was interesting. He didn’t have a lot of money – but he wanted to hire a foreigner because he knew the people here needed a push.

I’d never heard very much about Indonesia. A friend had told me it was a beautiful country. He used to live in Bandung. He told me not to expect too much in terms of modernity – but he said I wouldn’t be dissatisfied with the experience.

I didn’t leave Calcutta to become part of an expat community. I wanted to come here to learn about the country, to learn the language, to become part of the social fabric.

That’s also a very big reason I didn’t want to go to Singapore or Malaysia, where every fourth person resembles an Indian, or is Indian.

My friends ask me, why Jakarta. They say it’s a bad city – it’s poor economically, it’s not doing well, and India is moving.

If you tell anyone at home you’re going to Indonesia, their first question is why, there’s no economic reason to go there.

And I tell them you cannot judge something based on popular opinion.

Every country has its problems, but every problem has a solution.

Jakarta’s expat community is cosmopolitan, it is diverse and it’s a working community.  There is a beautiful diversity here.

And Indonesia is back, hotels are competing, Jakarta is back.

There is a huge sense of optimism. Jakarta is Indonesia’s best-kept secret and that’s what has kept me here.

Carol Walker is almost a professional expatriate. With roots in New England in the United Sates, she has a master’s in public policy from Harvard and has worked in Indonesia, Micronesia, Egypt and Mozambique. But today she’s back in her much-loved Jakarta, with her husband and son, and she says she couldn’t be happier.

I’ve had three different incarnations in Indonesia. My first time here was to run the American Chamber of Commerce – I came out here first while my husband was finishing his PhD. It was late 1993 and we were here for three-and-a-half years. It was boom times in Indonesia.

The membership of the chamber grew enormously while I was there – the investment climate was improving daily and the economic outlook was very bright.

I was a DINK -- double income no kids -- at that time, and it was tremendously rewarding.

And it was exciting for me to be at the place that I had studied at university.

I took a history course and one of the periods we studied was Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. It was fascinating and thus became a love affair that still goes on.
I’m sure you can make the case for any country. Mozambique was radically different. And I knew people in Egypt who just adored the Middle East and wouldn’t think of leaving – they lived there for 20 years and wanted to stay there for as long as they could.

It’s about wherever you feel you can fit in.

There are all kinds of expats. There are the colonialists who are in it just for the money and for the pampered lifestyle.

Then there’s another layer that’s in it of the adventure. They are in it for learning more about the country they’re in – they’re not so concerned with the high income – and sometimes these people overlap.

They can come here on a good package but they like to go out and adventure – and I like to think I’m one of them.

In 1999, I came back in a totally different incarnation. I came back as a mother. And there’s no better place to be with a child – because Indonesians love children.

And of course you do have all the perks of being an expatriate. We missed the riots – but we were here for September 11. And that was being here for history.

It was a very strange time.

Since then I’ve had a dual aspect to Indonesia.

I think it’s a wonderful place but of course there will always be friends and family who tell me it’s such a dangerous place. But frankly, I feel safer here than I do in Washington DC, where I would be worried about a terrorist attack on the subway.

Here, for me, this time, I’m seeing everything through a different lens, but it seems everybody I meet is fairly comfortable with the expatriate lifestyle.

They’ve been in Indo for years – or they’ve been to several countries and they can tell you funny stories about their shipment getting lost in Brazil when they moved, or the time they went fishing and got lost in Bulgaria.

Right now the people that are here are the people who are really devoted to the country.
Jakarta can be hard. Really hard. But once you get to know more about the place, you can appreciate all the layers.

I think that’s what’s part of the fun for Indonesia for me.

When you see a little old woman hobbling down the street in her batik sarong, when you see the guy wheeling his cart down the street – and you know that weird looking fruit in there is jambu and you know what it tastes like and you marvel at the fact that anyone would eat it because it’s so dry.

When you know what a kaki lima is and why it’s called that. Once you know all this it’s like a beautiful movie going by on the street.

Michael Dass is relatively new to Jakarta, but not to being an expatriate in Asia. He’s the new resident manager for one of Somerset’s properties and has lived and worked in Burma and Vietnam. He studied mass communications in Singapore, his home, and while he’s visited Indonesia plenty of times before, he says Jakarta is throwing a completely different experience in his direction. He’s re-managing his staff, focusing on tourism and agrees change is in the air.

I think people here are ready for a change, there’s a lot of foreign investment here and Indonesian people want more than they have right now.

They’ve gone through the routine of the last 10 years, if you can call it that, and now they want to do something for their country.

There’s nothing to be afraid of here for expatriates. The element of fear in Burma was overwhelming. Jakarta is so different. People move around.

I had five years in Burma and I managed a large property there too, but I would still meet new expats who had been there for years – they were hiding. There are core groups there and they only attend organized events.

Here I’ve met so many different people, from all over the world. And they are moving around this city, going out, at different functions. It’s not so closed.

There are more malls here than anywhere I’ve been to in the world. It’s a very functioning city. In Burma the banking system had completely collapsed and there were no credit card facilities. It was so different.

Jakarta is a better option for expatriates compared to Indochina, which is too remote, and there’s more fear of political instability.

Coming here is a better choice. People know what to expect and Singapore offers a level of proximity that’s safe – this gives people a level of comfort.”

Louise Williams is a former foreign correspondent who was thrown into the world of expatriate living at the age of 24 when she was sent to Manila with The Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper. She also worked out of Bangkok before being sent to Indonesia in 1996.

Unlike many women at that time in Indonesia though, Louise’s husband accompanied her to Jakarta, along with two small girls. She covered the May 1998 riots here and lost a friend as she covered East Timor. She cannot talk about her family being evacuated without her in 1998 without weeping uncontrollably, but in January this year she returned to Jakarta for six weeks with a group of 25 Australian students, to show them the ropes and to encourage the next wave of young journalists coming to this country.

I was faced with such a booming expat community when we came in 1996.

We were worried if we would get places in schools and it was quite hard to get a house to rent. The deposit you had to pay to get into an international school was absolutely phenomenal, I can’t remember the exact amount – but it was something like A$10,000 and most of that was non-refundable.

It was a seller’s market. There was a perception that Indonesia was on this Asian economic projectory. There was a perception that the strongman was in charge, but that all started to unravel, really, pretty much as soon as we got here.

That year was the beginning of the rise of Megawati so there were small pockets of opposition. They were shocking at the time, some incidents – but of course nowhere near what was to occur.
A few things happened which were extraordinary – it was like living history. So when the economic crisis hit, there was obvious mass hysteria in the shops.

People were panic-buying and buying for economic advantage – it was like watching an economy literally melting down. It was really incredibly sad.

I remember the sky clearing up over Jakarta because so many factories closed and we got some blue sky.

I remember being in line in Hero with people with carts piled up to the roof.  

There was an underlying simmering of unrest – and people, particularly the Chinese, because they had been the butt of much violence over the years anyway, people had a sense that there was something seriously amiss.

And the banks had a negative spread. They were paying customers more interest to take their money than they were charging for loans that had already gone out.

That was really the beginning of a lot expats going home. That was before ‘98. Partly because there was a lot of Korean money here – that was the second country after Thailand to go through the economic crises – so Korean companies withdrew, they pulled back.

And a lot of Asian investors fled. So people started to have a sense that things were very precarious here. It felt quite different.

And then of course that led into the beginning of all the student demonstrations and this relentless, exhausting round of demonstrations and sporadic offshoots of violence and crises in Kalimantan and Ambon. There were spot fires everywhere.

But despite all that, this was a great posting for people with young children. And it was great to be a workingwoman – because it was easy to get help at home.

I could work at home and I could have a babysitter and a cook and I could have a garden.
I had my job and I was with my children 24/7, unless I had to travel.

There were a lot of families here. It was considered quite a good post because you could afford a house and various domestic staff. I think that’s a little different in Hong Kong and Singapore – a lot of the expats live in high-rise apartments and that’s not as attractive.

But there were also plenty of young professionals. There were quite a few in public relations, in mining and accounting.

I think in most expat communities, it’s mainly the guy who has the job and the wife and kids follow.

There were a lot of women who weren’t working here but who were professionals at home. And I think that’s one of the problems with expat communities – if you can’t get a work visa for your partner. And many marriages break down.

In my case, I got the job and my husband had to get a job to come here. He was an industrial chemist for Coca-Cola.

I wasn’t a typical expat. I was a foreign correspondent. I wouldn’t have dreamed of living in a compound. My kids spoke Indonesian. Everybody in the house spoke Indonesian.

It was such an incredibly busy and important time. I was so, so busy. I loved it.

Laurene Desclaux is a 23-year-old field engineer with a manufacturing company based in Cikarang, Bekasi. She completed her engineering undergraduate in Paris, her master’s thesis in Brazil and is the only female field engineer with PT Welltekindo Nusantara. She spends weeks at a time hidden away in Kalimantan, working on and testing new innovations for the oil and gas industry. She comes to Jakarta whenever she can because she says it’s the only way she can feel normal again.

When I first arrived here in February 2006, I felt I didn’t belong anywhere.

This city is such a big mess and as I watched things go by from the car, I didn’t want to close my eyes. There is so much to see.

The French community here is very closed. And because we don’t always have such good English at home, language is a barrier.

I do not have much interest in being with the French here, I prefer to meet other people and because of this my English is getting much better.

Jakarta is very international and that’s one of the things I love. I’ve learned that there is not just a community made up of Western and Asian people. There’s so much more to it.

I’m learning more about socializing with others and I’m learning about cultural differences. My friends at home are different to me now. I’ve learned a lot more than I would have at home.

It was much easier in Brazil, I learned Portuguese quickly and it’s a very Western culture there, not like here.

As expats, we do tend to hang out together I suppose, and money does bind us together, but sometimes this city is hard to cope with, all the attention we get on the street is hard, having people constantly stare at you, and sometimes the only way to feel normal again is to be with other expatriates.

This is a great chance to open up your mind though, and my job is so much more fun than if I had stayed at home.

It’s been intense, but once you get through that … it’s always the most difficult situations that are the most rewarding.

Wikipedia’s definition of an expatriate
An expatriate (abbreviated form is expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of their upbringing or legal residence. The word comes from the Latin ex (out of) and patria (country, fatherland), and is sometimes misspelled as ex-patriot because of its pronunciation.

The difference Jakarta offers
Singapore and Hong Kong tend to be more like career path stepping-stones. No one goes to Hong Kong or Singapore to immerse themselves in the culture and no expats see themselves retiring there. Most motive and satisfaction for them is financial in origin.

By its nature Jakarta is more renegade and attracts accordingly. I think the chaos and desperation of the place provide a sort of frenzied sanctuary to a lot of expats – it’s like putting on a big pair of headphones and turning Metallica up loud enough to make the rest of the world disappear for a while.         (David Griffin, K2, Singapore)

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