Far from Home

Erick Setiawan gave up the security of a techie career to write. The US-based Chinese-Indonesian’s debut novel reflects a desire to better understand his homeland and himself.

By Yenni Kwok

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl who lived in a haunted house. She saw ghostly apparitions, menacing cold mists and parents who were spiteful to each other. She married young and left this hellish home, only to find herself living in another. Her husband’s house is bewitched, swarming with angry bees, and the family has its own terrible secrets and feuds. There also is the manipulative mother-in-law she has to deal with.

But Erick Setiawan’s Of Bees and Mist is not a worn-out narrative that exploits the perennial trope of the wicked mother-in-law. It is a fantastical page-turner that captivates and bewitches its readers. Set in no specific time and place, it reads like a modern fairy tale with gripping accounts of love, loss and forgiveness.

Yet there is another reason for the absence of any specific geographical reference.

“I wanted to create a race-free, label-free world in the book, and I wanted it to contain all three of my cultural influences – Chinese, Indonesian, American,” says Erick, a Chinese-Indonesian writer who has been living in the United States for almost two decades.

“For this reason, I knew I couldn’t set the book in a particular time or country where Chinese and Indonesian and American cultures blend seamlessly without conflict. It was liberating to be able to tell a story within this race-blind, ‘everything goes’ framework.”

This fictional place betrays the writer’s diverse cultural affiliations and a sense of not belonging anywhere. It is a feeling shared by many Chinese-Indonesians, other overseas Chinese and descendants of ethnic migrants, be they Indian or Turkish.

“I’ve been an outsider all my life, the minority of the minority,” says the San Francisco-based writer, “and to this day, it’s still an ongoing process for me to figure out what I am and where I belong.

“I do think this feeling of displacement is shared by many overseas Chinese, especially those from Indonesia. Like me, a lot of them can’t speak Chinese, they have a fractured and incomplete understanding of Chinese culture, and most likely they were made to feel ashamed of their Chinese heritage when they were growing up. Since we don't know where our roots are, we are often unmoored.”

He remembers that he felt like an outsider growing up in Soeharto’s Indonesia, where ethnic Chinese were discriminated against and often treated as scapegoats.

“Because of how people saw me and treated me, I always felt like a foreigner – an alien, an intruder – even though I was born in Indonesia and I’d never lived in another country.”

Heading Out

Erick left home at the age of 16, driven by a strong sense of desperation – not unlike Meridia, the protagonist of his book. Up till then, he was attending an all-boys Catholic school in Jakarta, where the teachers disciplined the pupils with beatings and humiliation.

“I found the whole practice reprehensible,” the author says. “At the same time, I realized this was how the whole country was operating at the time. The powerful ruled over the majority, and they could do whatever they wanted with impunity. This both saddened and angered me, so I decided to leave and try my luck elsewhere.”

When Erick went to finish high school in the United States in 1991, the sense of displacement began all over again. Not only he could barely speak English, but also he couldn’t comprehend American culture. He had wanted to study English literature but, too conscious of his English, he went on to study computer science at Stanford University. He later worked as a software engineer in San Francisco, but after a year he realized how unhappy he was.

“I was going through life like a zombie,” he recalls. “I hated my job, I had never had much love for software, and I was only doing it for the paychecks.”

He began penning stories, writing during his spare time mostly to escape the tedium of work and to comfort himself. It took several years – and two rejected novels – before he could turn his pastime into a life-altering experience. Erick began working on Of Bees and Mist in 2004; three years later, he quit his job to complete the book.

“I didn’t have a book deal then, and I didn’t know anyone in publishing, so giving up a full-time job was terribly reckless of me,” he says. “My friends and family thought I was crazy.”

Erick gives the book’s characters and places Western and Biblical names (Monarch Street, Eva, Gabriel and Daniel), bestowing poetic names on the female protagonists: Meridia, Ravenna, Permony and Malin. The story idea, however, came from the family and the country he had left behind.

Family Ties

Born in 1975, Erick is the second oldest of four children. He was raised as part of a large Chinese family with its own set of dramatic entanglements.

“We didn’t always get along, and we had our share of jealousy and grudges and dysfunctions,” the writer says. “My mother, for one, had a long-standing feud with her mother-in-law, and I grew up watching these two women constantly outsmarting and outwitting each other.”

The dynamics between his mother and paternal grandmother inspired the relationship between the main heroine, Meridia, and her scheming mother-in-law, Eva. Indeed, some parts of the novel mirrored the young life of the author’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated.   

Spanning three generations, Erick’s novel has reminded some readers and critics of Latin America’s magic realism writings, especially The House of the Spirits, a fantastical family saga by Isabel Allende. (He himself acknowledges that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of his favorite writers, and magical realism has left “a deep impression” on him.) But it is Indonesia’s prevalent belief in magic and spirits that has given the strongest influence to the narrative.

“I grew up listening to Indonesian folk stories and they were always full of ghosts and demons,” Erick says. “I loved those stories not only because they were riveting, but also because they fused strange, otherworldly happenings with good, practical life lessons, which I thought was very creative.”

The novelist is working on his next book, and will only disclose that, “It will also be about families and the dark, dark secrets they keep. I might even set it in Indonesia.”

Looking Homeward

Indonesia may figure predominantly in his creative thought. But like many exiled writers, Erick has a complicated relationship with his home country. After the anti-Chinese riots in 1998, he avoided returning home for many years.

“There was a period when I couldn’t even talk about Indonesia without getting worked up,” he says.

A few months ago, he went to Bali for a quick visit, which he describes as “wonderful” – but he admits he is not yet ready to go back to the city of his birth.

“My growing up in Jakarta was not a terribly pleasant time. I felt oppressed not just in school but by the whole social and political climate of the country. I was sick of constantly feeling frightened and anxious every time I left the house, I was sick of feeling like an outcast and it was unthinkable that I would have to live the rest of my life that way,” he says.

“I remember locking myself in my room day after day after school, feeling hopeless and helpless, and just thinking: ‘Is there a point to all this?’ So to go back to Jakarta means digging up that past and somehow making peace with it. And I am not ready. Someday, I’ll go back.”

When he does, it will mean that he is ready to confront his demons.

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