East of Eden
First posted August 16, 2005.
"Well momma, I know I act a fool/But I'll be gone 'til November I got packs to move"
-K. West
It struck me yesterday as I watched Filipe’s brother carefully hammering away at the transistor of his old truck that I will never be a tradesman. My hands, from a tender age, have always been lithe against piano keys or picking a set of guitar strings but staggeringly play-doh-like when turned toward anything involving repair work or construction. It then struck me that this is pure bullshit. Take Filipe’s brother: he’s a small businessman, selling designs for school uniforms to make ends meet. He’s also very poor, a condition which affects almost every Timorese family I see. He’s repairing his car with his own hands because he has no choice, jus as I undoubtedly would be if I was from Timor, instead of Australia, a mere hour and a half plane’s journey away. And even that is only the case because my parents happened to be more industrious and fortunate than their peers.
I then thought about my utility in this world, as spoiled artsy college kids tend to do when surrounded by economically depressed, pragmatic men holding greased tools. I didn’t have to think back too far to imagine a more likely destiny. The previous two weeks have been spent with old family friends in Western and Northern Australia. Of one family I grew up close to, the three children have become dentists, pharmacists and future mechanical engineers respectively. Such careers have tangible rewards like blinging jeeps and decked out bachelor pads. I know this because I just came from one in Darwin, where a six figure salary straight out of Uni means a whole lot of fun for one. And continuing down this list of where-are-they-now peers, one sees telltale signs of the “Yellow Peril” that racist Australian immigration officers spotted many decades ago. The diseases have course names like “Computer Technology” and “Neurology,” their symptoms ranging from studious responsible character to over-achiever-itis.
Then I turned to myself (figuratively, mind you) and I wondered what golden rule in Guanyin’s Book of Prospering Asian Parent No-Nos my parents possibly broke to wind up with me as a first son. See, when other good Chinese kids read Fortune or Science magazine, I read John Pilger and Matthew Jardine. And where your typical travel-budding 21 year-old chooses Italy or Morocco (or maybe Cambodia if she feels like really “getting ethnic[1][i]”) as their summer destination, I chose East Timor, a country about as tourist-friendly as a wild boar trotting along side your car, of which there are many and by which I mean not very. And where paid internships, yearlong cooperatives or other colorful resume stuffers fill many near-graduates’ virtual post-it note walls, dilapidated matchbox homes and militia-razed rubble currently fill my visual landscape.
The financial incentives for a career in international development are…well, non-existent, and the physical consequences? Say, how do malaria and tuberculosis sound as your two options? So there has to be something satisfying to make up for such depraved deprivation, one might ask. At this point, some hippie save-the-world kick is supposed to come in. The “it-was-all-worth-it-for-that-one-person” fuzzy schmaltz you got bored with in Year Two Christian Ed.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble Beryl, but I don’t have one. If anything, it’s about finding my own peace, just as investment banking is about making your own million or truck driving is about driving trucks. For me, my motives in coming to countries like East Timor are as personal as any other self-interested college student. And that’s all I can tell you, Mum. Sorry if I wasted your hard-earned money and best of luck with your other son.
What I can say is that there’s something undoubtedly serene about the way Jesuinha holds her three-year-old in that brief evening respite from house work.
And I can try to describe how ironically tranquil a beach filled with howling teenage men playing soccer using rubble for goal posts is, as they retrieve their ball from the same warm shores that their countrymen were bring dumped in by Indonesian special forces a mere six years ago.
It’s kind of like the first time you try on a pair of two hundred dollar Bose noise eliminating headphones. Or that split second of aquatic white sound between your outstretched body cutting through the water and your first kick to the surface in your high school swim carnival. It’s the feeling I felt watching Ronaldinho tear off a piece of sate I had bought (30 sticks for $3) with his tough little molars then grinning, peanut sauce all astray. Which is actually a close relative to that contentment I felt holding his tiny body in my lap as we trundled across the pothole-strewn roads of Dili back home from the beach.
East Timor, I must admit, is a sad place. A stroll at sundown through the suburb I am in brings hundreds of photo-ops for World Vision pamphlets. The dirty girl in torn clothes who peers through her shambolic front gate was on my left. The disease-ridden dog rummaging through filthy rubbish could be the neighbors. After 24 years of drip-drip genocide and the murder of between 200 and 300 thousand of its pre-‘75 one million people, recovery comes slowly to this island nation. Dili, the capital and only major town it possesses, reminds me of the worst poverty I saw in the mountains of Bali when I was 13. Except that night I slept in a tourists’ hotel overlooking a volcano. Tonight I sleep in the room that Salvador’s children normally occupy. Yesterday, I gave them my Lem-Sip and Advil medication from my travel-kit, because the proposition of children coughing without cure bothered me a whole lot more than my occasional flu.
Carlos, my driver and travel partner, is unemployed, like approximately 60 percent of East Timor. He sounded almost apologetic when I asked how he supports his family.
“Salvador, my brother,” he replied.
This is the Salvador whose wide grin I spot in Carlos’ son “Ro,” – named after a Brazilian soccer player –the same Salvador whose compelling storied of home I listened to in near disbelief in the common room at the International Student House last year. It was these storied that rekindled my interest in East Timor, five years after I cheered on the Australia-led UN Peacekeeping Force in ’99 which drove rampaging militias across the western border with Indonesia. Salvador’s English training in seminary school made him employable as an interpreter for the UN and then USAID in 2000, and ultimately a marine biology student on scholarship in London.
To me, he reflects the indomitable resilience of the Timorese people, as described by a Peace Corps volunteer from Delaware I met earlier today. His three-year-old, Clara, is a bundle of knee-high energy. She repeatedly runs from the eating area into the living room at a brisk rate, often pulling the green door drapes along by her face. She also cried for two hours today after I left, because her still formative mind had turned me from a “malae[ii]” into “apa.[iii]” But as sad as this made me feel, and as wrenching as it was when Carlos took me to visit their sister’s grave at Santa Cruz Cemetery, I am still able to sleep with a degree of peace tonight. A sort of peace that College Park keg parties and Perth nights on the town won’t ever bring.
Because when Salvador returns home in two years, he’ll bring the sort of capacity and skilled labor that Timor needs so badly in order to lure Western investment to its shores. Folks like Salvador, be they Timorese, Global Southern or anywhere across this small globe, inspire me to dream of a thousand Claras in local universities becoming the sort of dentists and pharmacists that parents like mine yearn for. The financially secure sort that only lasting peace and successful post conflict reconstruction can bring, and almost enough hope for me to think that perhaps studying development really isn’t that misguided at all.
Boy, I might even risk getting my hands dirty on this one. And that, more than anything else, could be enough to offer my parents a slice of peace tonight.
[i] My term, not ‘hers’
[ii] Tourist/Foreigner
[iii] Father
"Well momma, I know I act a fool/But I'll be gone 'til November I got packs to move"
-K. West
It struck me yesterday as I watched Filipe’s brother carefully hammering away at the transistor of his old truck that I will never be a tradesman. My hands, from a tender age, have always been lithe against piano keys or picking a set of guitar strings but staggeringly play-doh-like when turned toward anything involving repair work or construction. It then struck me that this is pure bullshit. Take Filipe’s brother: he’s a small businessman, selling designs for school uniforms to make ends meet. He’s also very poor, a condition which affects almost every Timorese family I see. He’s repairing his car with his own hands because he has no choice, jus as I undoubtedly would be if I was from Timor, instead of Australia, a mere hour and a half plane’s journey away. And even that is only the case because my parents happened to be more industrious and fortunate than their peers.
I then thought about my utility in this world, as spoiled artsy college kids tend to do when surrounded by economically depressed, pragmatic men holding greased tools. I didn’t have to think back too far to imagine a more likely destiny. The previous two weeks have been spent with old family friends in Western and Northern Australia. Of one family I grew up close to, the three children have become dentists, pharmacists and future mechanical engineers respectively. Such careers have tangible rewards like blinging jeeps and decked out bachelor pads. I know this because I just came from one in Darwin, where a six figure salary straight out of Uni means a whole lot of fun for one. And continuing down this list of where-are-they-now peers, one sees telltale signs of the “Yellow Peril” that racist Australian immigration officers spotted many decades ago. The diseases have course names like “Computer Technology” and “Neurology,” their symptoms ranging from studious responsible character to over-achiever-itis.
Then I turned to myself (figuratively, mind you) and I wondered what golden rule in Guanyin’s Book of Prospering Asian Parent No-Nos my parents possibly broke to wind up with me as a first son. See, when other good Chinese kids read Fortune or Science magazine, I read John Pilger and Matthew Jardine. And where your typical travel-budding 21 year-old chooses Italy or Morocco (or maybe Cambodia if she feels like really “getting ethnic[1][i]”) as their summer destination, I chose East Timor, a country about as tourist-friendly as a wild boar trotting along side your car, of which there are many and by which I mean not very. And where paid internships, yearlong cooperatives or other colorful resume stuffers fill many near-graduates’ virtual post-it note walls, dilapidated matchbox homes and militia-razed rubble currently fill my visual landscape.
The financial incentives for a career in international development are…well, non-existent, and the physical consequences? Say, how do malaria and tuberculosis sound as your two options? So there has to be something satisfying to make up for such depraved deprivation, one might ask. At this point, some hippie save-the-world kick is supposed to come in. The “it-was-all-worth-it-for-that-one-person” fuzzy schmaltz you got bored with in Year Two Christian Ed.
Well, sorry to burst your bubble Beryl, but I don’t have one. If anything, it’s about finding my own peace, just as investment banking is about making your own million or truck driving is about driving trucks. For me, my motives in coming to countries like East Timor are as personal as any other self-interested college student. And that’s all I can tell you, Mum. Sorry if I wasted your hard-earned money and best of luck with your other son.
What I can say is that there’s something undoubtedly serene about the way Jesuinha holds her three-year-old in that brief evening respite from house work.
And I can try to describe how ironically tranquil a beach filled with howling teenage men playing soccer using rubble for goal posts is, as they retrieve their ball from the same warm shores that their countrymen were bring dumped in by Indonesian special forces a mere six years ago.
It’s kind of like the first time you try on a pair of two hundred dollar Bose noise eliminating headphones. Or that split second of aquatic white sound between your outstretched body cutting through the water and your first kick to the surface in your high school swim carnival. It’s the feeling I felt watching Ronaldinho tear off a piece of sate I had bought (30 sticks for $3) with his tough little molars then grinning, peanut sauce all astray. Which is actually a close relative to that contentment I felt holding his tiny body in my lap as we trundled across the pothole-strewn roads of Dili back home from the beach.
East Timor, I must admit, is a sad place. A stroll at sundown through the suburb I am in brings hundreds of photo-ops for World Vision pamphlets. The dirty girl in torn clothes who peers through her shambolic front gate was on my left. The disease-ridden dog rummaging through filthy rubbish could be the neighbors. After 24 years of drip-drip genocide and the murder of between 200 and 300 thousand of its pre-‘75 one million people, recovery comes slowly to this island nation. Dili, the capital and only major town it possesses, reminds me of the worst poverty I saw in the mountains of Bali when I was 13. Except that night I slept in a tourists’ hotel overlooking a volcano. Tonight I sleep in the room that Salvador’s children normally occupy. Yesterday, I gave them my Lem-Sip and Advil medication from my travel-kit, because the proposition of children coughing without cure bothered me a whole lot more than my occasional flu.
Carlos, my driver and travel partner, is unemployed, like approximately 60 percent of East Timor. He sounded almost apologetic when I asked how he supports his family.
“Salvador, my brother,” he replied.
This is the Salvador whose wide grin I spot in Carlos’ son “Ro,” – named after a Brazilian soccer player –the same Salvador whose compelling storied of home I listened to in near disbelief in the common room at the International Student House last year. It was these storied that rekindled my interest in East Timor, five years after I cheered on the Australia-led UN Peacekeeping Force in ’99 which drove rampaging militias across the western border with Indonesia. Salvador’s English training in seminary school made him employable as an interpreter for the UN and then USAID in 2000, and ultimately a marine biology student on scholarship in London.
To me, he reflects the indomitable resilience of the Timorese people, as described by a Peace Corps volunteer from Delaware I met earlier today. His three-year-old, Clara, is a bundle of knee-high energy. She repeatedly runs from the eating area into the living room at a brisk rate, often pulling the green door drapes along by her face. She also cried for two hours today after I left, because her still formative mind had turned me from a “malae[ii]” into “apa.[iii]” But as sad as this made me feel, and as wrenching as it was when Carlos took me to visit their sister’s grave at Santa Cruz Cemetery, I am still able to sleep with a degree of peace tonight. A sort of peace that College Park keg parties and Perth nights on the town won’t ever bring.
Because when Salvador returns home in two years, he’ll bring the sort of capacity and skilled labor that Timor needs so badly in order to lure Western investment to its shores. Folks like Salvador, be they Timorese, Global Southern or anywhere across this small globe, inspire me to dream of a thousand Claras in local universities becoming the sort of dentists and pharmacists that parents like mine yearn for. The financially secure sort that only lasting peace and successful post conflict reconstruction can bring, and almost enough hope for me to think that perhaps studying development really isn’t that misguided at all.
Boy, I might even risk getting my hands dirty on this one. And that, more than anything else, could be enough to offer my parents a slice of peace tonight.
[i] My term, not ‘hers’
[ii] Tourist/Foreigner
[iii] Father
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