I

’ve lived in Indonesia so long that I sometimes forget I am still a foreigner in a foreign land.

In all, it’s been 22 years, broken down into a one-year stint as a high school exchange student in West Sumatra, a six-month university experience in Malang, East Java, and a fellowship that panned out into more than 20 years living in Jakarta.

I like to believe that I am Indonesian at heart, because it is the place I choose to call home.

I am proud if people call me pak (even better if they call me mas, an increasing rarity, but please no om) or compliment me on my Indonesian.   

But I also realize that Indonesia does not have a tradition and custom of absorbing European migrants as Indonesian; I may have lived here longer than Indonesian-born Anggun C. Sasmi has lived in France, but I doubt I will be hailed as one of this country’s almost native-born sons like the sultry songstress in her adopted homeland.

A rude reminder of my alien presence came on a recent rainy Sunday morning. We play tennis every weekend at a club, and asked if we could play indoors due to the weather.

A court was free, a ballboy said, because a group had overstayed their allotted time.

But one of the players was none too pleased at this white man cometh. “We were colonized for 350 years, and whitey is still pushing us around,” he muttered.

After a few minutes, the manager came rushing onto the court.

“The gentleman is very upset and he insists nobody use the court. He wants to report the ballboy to the police. Please stop playing, Pak.”

And so we did, sitting in silence across from the man, now shirtless but appeased, like poker-faced soldiers occasionally glancing uneasily at each other across the demilitarized zone. Except in this case it was a tennis court, and the ball was in nobody’s court.

“It’s not personal, this is about principle,” he harrumphed.

“Well, if that is the case, why did you start out with the comment about ethnicity?” I harrumphed back.

Of course, as Indonesian colleagues and friends point out, it’s hard to escape the issue of ethnicity in Indonesia, whether it is for a Caucasian expat such as myself — considered to bear an all-access card wherever I go — or for the ethnic groups that make up this country.

There is a historical precedent to it, one colleague noted, in using the “us and them” mentality to divide and conquer and uphold the status quo, whether during colonial times or the authoritarian New Order regime.

In 2008, I visited a region that became a killing field when the majority population turned against migrants in the early 2000s. A tourism official, trying to sell the attractions of the area, touched on the carnage. It had been their fault, he said of the migrants, because they were too aggressive and uppity. They had what was coming to them.

And it still continues in 2013, whether it is the anti-Chinese statements allegedly from lawyer-cum-politician Farhat Abbas in discussing Jakarta Vice Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, or ethnic rioting targeting Balinese migrants in Sumbawa Besar.

Just last week, in discussing the Jakarta floods, a friend put the blame squarely on ethnic Chinese businesspeople for allegedly bribing New Order officials to build high-rises during the 1980s.

It was one of those uneasy moments when you mull whether to counter the argument — what about all the rich tycoons from other ethnicities who took advantage of the system, sir? — or simply leave him in his blissful ignorance.

For drawing on ethnic stereotypes allows us to keep others at a safe distance and also in their place, according to our rules, values and objectives.

 Maybe it is changing: the social media outrage against Farhat’s alleged comments is heartening. Perhaps Indonesians are learning to truly respect others in all their diversity and as equals; that disgruntled man on the tennis court may really see the day when all Indonesians, regardless of ethnicity, will receive first-class service (including the ballboy he treated like a second-class citizen).

That was not on my mind as I got into a taxi after work last week in Palmerah, a low-income Central Jakarta neighborhood. Eventually one stopped, but I noticed the driver shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“I didn’t expect to see a white person in this area. I was afraid you were a hantu Belanda,” he confessed, referring to legendary Dutch ghosts who troll the streets duping unsuspecting taxi drivers.

Yet another reminder that I am still quite the specter to some.

— Bruce Emond