A Place Called Home

The train reached Baltimore, Maryland, and in about 30 minutes we would arrive at Washington DC’s Union Station. In less than an hour, I would finally be reunited with my best friend, Maya.

I reached for my bag to reapply my lipstick – I don’t know why but meeting an old friend always puts a knot in my belly, even if it has only been a few years since we last met.

We knocked on her apartment door, and there was her voice asking who it was, although I could feel her looking through the peephole. It has always been our thing to be silly to each other. I said: You know who it is.

I heard the door being unlocked and there she was in a brown “Bali” nightshirt, blushing.

It seemed ages since I last saw her, but actually it was in 2004 in Palu, Central Sulawesi. She was visiting her family, who was living there at the time; I made a point to stop there while traveling around the eastern part of Indonesia, writing stories on the general election.

At the time, she was married to her U.S. military husband and living in Arlington, Virginia. I was a few months shy of my own wedding.

We met 19 years ago aboard a plane to the U.S., both part of a student exchange program. She was 15 and sat across the aisle from me. I made a comment about how I hated my bangs because they were too short, and she agreed.

Little did we know that we had just ignited what would be a lifelong friendship – a friendship that would cost both of us huge amounts in long-distance phone bills over time, but one that helped us navigate through the thick and turbulent time of growing up alone in an adoptive country.

We never lived in the same town but would drive to see each other whenever we had time. We shared each other’s darkest secrets – crushes and heartbreaks, dreams and disappointments.

In a strange way, our lives seemed to parallel each other in their erratic turnabouts, until of course it reached a point where we had to decide what we wanted to make of our lives.

In 1996 I went back home, having had trouble deciding whether to stay and pursue my writing ambitions while toiling away on graveyard shifts at convenience stores; go to grad school; or – like every other grownup – find a real job in the real world.

Having spent some of my formative years abroad by myself without any adult supervision, I had grown to love my freedom and become attached to my adoptive country.

I spoke with an American accent, I had picked up American mannerisms and for a time, I could not imagine having to adjust to life back home, a life that I knew very little about since I left as a teenager.

But I went home anyway to start my first journalism job, knowing in my heart that it was probably the most reasonable decision as my writing career was going nowhere and, most importantly, I had overstayed my visa.

My friend Maya took a different route. She got married, followed her husband from one military base to another, got her MBA and worked at different companies, before they eventually separated.

She is now single and working as an investment analyst; I look on her accomplishments with pride.

We have come a long way to be where we are.

She is a permanent resident of the U.S. and although she would meet the criteria, she has not changed her nationality. So I asked her if she ever wanted to live in Indonesia again. There was a brief pause before a reluctant “no”.

“My life is here,” she said.

That could not be more true.

Aside from her immediate family – and possibly me – she really had no connection to Indonesia anymore other than her addiction to sambal and the motion sickness pill, Antimo, both of which can be easily obtained at Asian groceries in the U.S.

I notice the same pattern with our other friends who have made America their home.

My close friend Eva became a Canadian citizen years back when she was still married to a Canadian and living in Toronto. Now in Maryland with an American husband and a child, she is contemplating taking out U.S. citizenship as well.

“I don’t know if I can live in Indonesia again,” she told us over a lunch of nasi uduk at Café Asia in Washington DC.

“Everything seems so much more complicated and unpredictable, and in Jakarta, life seems to lack quality.”

Later in San Francisco, we met up with my husband’s childhood friend Wisnu. He works as a software engineer for the Internet company Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California.

With his wife and three-year-old daughter he drove us through Silicon Valley and told us stories of fellow Asian immigrants, who make up the bulk of employees in the hi-tech industry.

He was one of them. Leaving for America 12 years ago with nothing but determination to make it, he took some mindless jobs, including working on house renovations, before paying his way through graduate school and landing his dream job.

In his four-bedroom house in the suburb of San Jose, he told us how his wife, who is ethnic Chinese like him, left Indonesia just before the May 1998 riots, and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen as did one of her brothers and sister.

He does not hold a U.S. passport yet, but he is looking forward to the day when he can vote in a U.S. election.

“This life we have here, I might never have had if I had stayed in Indonesia,” he said.

“So I guess that makes this our home.”

On our flight back to Jakarta, I contemplated these friends, part of the Indonesian diaspora who make another country their new home.

Their homeland is a distant memory, a memory mostly tinged with nostalgic culinary longing.

Twelve years ago I made a difficult decision to leave a country I had considered a second home. Now I could hardly think of living anywhere else but my own homeland.

Home, I decided, is really where you make it.

 
+ Devi Asmarani

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