Between Batam and the world

Looking over a Batam street food center at night

For four days I wake to the sun in a hotel in Batam, Indonesia, and put on music. Burial and Sofia Kourtesis soundtrack the sunrise as I stretch, shower, and head downstairs for coffee.

I am back in the world, visiting factories in towns I’d never otherwise have known about. I’m back to getting flown places to learn, to teach, to do. And I am comfortable.

The days are spent in a windowless room. Twenty odd people gather each morning, some familar with this building, some on their first time in this country. We work on a project that will not be finished in this visit, that will take a year. We work as part of a larger vision, one node in a network spanning the globe, spanning my time in Pune last month and San Francisco in June. We work.

In the evenings, after dinner and a team debrief, we have beer on plastic chairs in the open air, surrounded by people doing likewise. We are in the world, in a place. Food stalls surround the tables, sellers push alcohol and spicy snacks, push bread rice noodles. The clientele is local, is at home in Batam but not only from Batam. Chinese, Malay, Muslim, Singaporean, Indian, the occasional westerner. This is the world, and we are in it, diverse noisy welcoming and, for me, comfortable. I am at home, and after a beer I leave the table, walking the surrounding streets, stopping in to check on street stalls and small malls, convenience stores and restaurants. On these walks, intended mostly to provide motion to a body that has sat for far too many hours, I think about this comfort.

Twice I bring colleagues, only to have to stop and wait for them on the far side of a street crossing. Without realizing it I’ve left them on the curb, stepping out into the traffic with no pause. Just walk across without thinking,” I say. Just step off the curb and keep going.”

I think back to wandering Saitama suburbs at 22, biking around Shanghai at 24, standing on the side of a highway trying to flag down a long distance bus in Changzhou at midnight at 26, crashing a scooter in Shanghai at 27, crashing a motorcycle in Laos at 36, and the comfort, the difference, is no longer as surprising. In some way this traffic, these Indonesian food stalls and dusty roads that I have never seen before are home. In some way, in my mid forties, I am comfortable in many places, if not most. I am happy, out in the world with no ambition save my work goals, no need save my flight home.

We get McFlurries, on our last night, from a McDonalds in a mall basement. My colleague is disappointed that the experience isn’t more local, despite the crowd of people around us eating the same thing. We are the only westerners getting ice cream at 10 pm at McDonalds in the basement of this Batam shopping center. Stepping back out into the heat with the cup half full, I am happy in a way that feels hard to share. My colleague surprises me.

I like it here,” he says. I feel alive.”

And like that, there the words are. After all day on a computer, after all week in a windowless room, after giving up all of the things I would have done with my own time for these shared days and evenings, we are alive here, wandering in the dark of a place we never meant to go.

May it ever be so.

Barely attached

Raja Ampat

Sitting on a deck in Raja Ampat, the water fading to black in front and beneath me, I perform a strange ritual. Like the four other people on this deck or at the tables behind me, I am waving my arm slowly overhead, searching for a signal.

In this corner of the world we are barely connected. The idea of a global network is alive, just out of reach. Once or twice a day TELSEL E springs to life and delivers the occasional email. More frequently it delivers only subject lines, leaving us curious as to the writer’s intent. Instagram displays pictures from several days ago with enthusiasm.

On some evenings between 6 and 11 pm, when the generator is running, there is satellite wifi. It is a finicky thing, ephemeral and varied. Weather affects it, I hear, or the breeze. In my own observations it works hesitantly or not at all. Waiting for these brief slivers networking is a tedious and laughable exercise that brings mosquito bites as often as data. Luckily all present are taking malaria pills.

The Internet, when found this way, in slivers of roaming or satellite data, feels far more fragile than the conduit of knowledge we’ve grown used to in the US. This is life not on the edge” but on the remote coasts of the world. Overhead here Orion is upside down and the moon sets early, a tiny sliver. Out in the bay between islands the occasional skiff motors, drawing a straight line between points, unconcerned about traffic.

The next morning we circumnavigate our private island with ease in a kayak, enjoying these flat seas. Here at the equator the world is beautiful and time goes slowly, just like the networks. We hear of the owner’s plans for a second resort, for more solar panels to supplement the generator’s few hours. He bemoans the lack of infrastructure, how machine parts have to come from Jakarta. The capital city is a five hour flight, a two hour ferry, and a thirty minute speed boat ride away. Nothing arrives next day. This is no great distress when fish can be caught and eggs gathered on island, but would concern everyone if water ran low.

To my right the next evening, on a raised wooden walkway connecting the eating deck and the shore, the resort owner sits, arms around his knees and hands on his phone. Like us he is searching for the signal, happily alive on this island but barely connected to the wider world.

Repetition and growth

Beijing Apartments.JPG

In the summer of two thousand seven lives a boy I will remember forever.

In the echoes of experience lie good stories.

In my memory this boy boards the train to Beijing on a Friday evening. It is summer, closing in on his birthday, and the sleeper cars are mercifully air conditioned. This train was new when he first moved to China, the car interiors a spotless white. The first time he rode it, in summer of two thousand four, the twelve hour ride to Beijing was incredible, so fast. Three years later everything feels well-used, a patina of hand prints on each door handle and section of wall surrounding. This overnight train from Shanghai was an improvement on the fourteen plus hours and hard sleeper trains of prior years, the late nineties and early aughts. In the present day the speed is not impressive; the current high speed line runs Shanghai to Beijing in only six hours. In two thousand four twelve hours seemed fast, but by two thousand seven it had become routine, and whole new ways of life had been built around the overnight sleeper’s reliability. Families in Beijing could have one parent take a job in Shanghai, commute down Sunday night, head to work Monday morning, and run the reverse on Friday. They’d stay with friends or family on week nights and be home when the kids got up on Saturday.

We never know what kind of lives the future will support.

In two thousand seven the boy who boards this train to Beijing is preoccupied. He throws his backpack in his berth. When the older Chinese couple in his compartment asks if they can have the bottom bunk he acquiesces without thought. Foreigners prefer top bunks, they say, and he agrees. Foreigners do. They’re happiest when able to sleep. Chinese families prefer the bottom bunks in this small four bed compartment. More social, better for eating and chatting. The boy moves his bag up high and steps back into the hallway. There are small tables and seats at intervals that fold up against the wall when not in use. He squats at one, charging his phone off the outlet beneath.

We never know what kind of lives the future will support, he thinks, scrolling through email on his Blackberry. This is a new technology, his third smartphone” but the first one that supports work email, that is paid for by a company. He has had it since May, purchased in Los Angeles, and it is his favorite device ever. On this train though it will be a weight around his weekend adventure. He is heading north to see a friend from Hawaii who is in China taking classes for the summer. Despite the weight they will have an excellent weekend.

The train leaves promptly at seven oh five pm, and the phone starts ringing shortly after. It is a woman from Indonesia, someone he has never met. She wants him to guarantee a shipment of fabric from a Chinese factory that is sitting in port in Jakarta. The shipment is valued at fifty thousand dollars. And so they debate, on the phone, as the train moves out of Shanghai headed north. Through Jiangsu they debate who is to bear the responsibility if the fabric has an issue, and why the Chinese factory that made it can or can not be trusted. Fifty thousand dollars. The fabric is to be made into dresses, for delivery to his company in the United States. There is a deadline, a ship window, and he urges her to have faith, to make the order, to pay the Chinese supplier. Again and again she asks him to personally back the shipment. They have never met. In a year he will leave this job and return to the United States. They will never meet.

The phone call drops, it is two thousand seven and he is on a high speed train. Standing in the vibrating space between cars where he’s moved to have some privacy the boy stares out the window at the Chinese countryside. Already then he knows he will never forget this evening. A boy from upstate New York, not yet twenty eight, taking the overnight train from Shanghai to Beijing, spending the whole ride arguing with a woman in Jakarta over fifty thousand dollars. How did this become his life?

The phone rings.

In two thousand sixteen I stand outside a bar beneath a highway in San Francisco. It is eleven pm on a Wednesday. The phone number on the screen is long, international. I answer it.

On the other end is a man in India I will never meet. He wants me to guarantee some charges on a shipment. The container is sitting in the port in Mumbai. We debate dollars. Excuses are made. Clear the cargo, I ask. Send me receipts.

I start walking. Somewhere in the next two blocks we are cut off. For the length of one red light I stand on the corner of 14th and South Van Ness staring at the phone. I am thinking of that woman in Indonesia, fifty thousand dollars, and the train ride to Beijing in two thousand seven when the phone rings again.

Hello,” I say.

In some moments the future feels like the past, imperfectly recreated.