The first thing I heard when I stepped into the area of what I would call home for the next three years was the echoing boom of fireworks in the distance. I was born on the 29th of December 2005 and my mom had just gotten home from the hospital on New Year’s Eve with a newborn baby. A welcoming ceremony being the blares of fireworks in the sky was the most memorable thing that night.
I have heard many stories about me as a baby. One that stuck with me would probably be that I learned to read in English first, despite my first language being Indonesian. I loved to read as a kid to the point that if I were to have a tantrum as a kid, my mom would give me a book to pipe down. The shocking thing is that it worked every single time without a doubt.
Fast forward to when I was three years old, I had moved to The United States of America because my mom wanted to pursue her master’s degree in The States. I was lucky to have traveled and lived in another country at such a young age and even still consider it the golden age of my whole life till this day because of how I was back then.
A small three-year-old foreign kid with perfect English and a myriad of questions, waiting to be asked. I was a small little detective, scientist, paleontologist, and artist all in one. I buried myself in books and would frequent the city library with my mom and dad to read books and do my school homework. Not to mention that in school, I was labeled as an exceptional student in our class. I went to a private predominantly Muslim school in the States and found myself indulging in Middle Eastern culture a lot because of my friends and my surrounding environments. I loved going to school and would dread the day that we had no school as I liked it that much.
I was your typical American kid who loves to run around in parks, play with chalk on the sidewalks, and dress up for Halloween every year to participate in trick-or-treats, the kid who would call break time “recess” and would play at the big playground at McDonald’s. Slowly but surely, at the end of those three years, every inch of Indonesia in me vanished into thin air.
I remember the anticipation as the plane landed in Jakarta for the first time in three years.
I had no single recollection of what Indonesia was like, a total amnesia of all the memories before I had arrived in The States. My six-year-old self ran her eyes around the place in observation. The smell of the airport was new to me, and I had to sink into the fact that I was in another place far away from the place I could call my second home. “Was this really where I came from?”, I had said to myself. Though I shook away the thought quickly.
On the first day of second grade, however, I had a question burning in the back of my mind as I entered the school gates. My father had driven me to school in a car that day, so I had the opportunity to ask him about what was happening in front of my eyes. Motorcycles and cars were stacked behind each other just like a chaotic domino game with their messy honking and machine rumbles. “Dad, why is the street like this?”, I ask my father. He looked at me, clearly puzzled about what to answer with.
He could only reply with a sigh.
“This is Indonesia.”
Those were always the words I heard for what felt like an eternity. I had been asking so many questions that were not simple at all for a child to hear. The answers had always been between culture and history together, but it wasn’t something I shouldn’t be concerned with now. I had started school in Indonesia, but where to start asking was my problem.
The anticipation and wanting to learn and explore my potential were only met by disappointing reactions and that same phrase all over again. “Dimana bumi dipijak, disitu langit dijunjung” would be the catchphrase that I had heard repeatedly to the point I was physically tired of. Not that I rejected that notion, but I tried so hard to conform to what everyone expected a “normal” Indonesian would be to the point I didn’t even feel like myself.
I buried that six-year-old American kid inside me, putting her away to rot. I found myself not being a genuine child and would make up a lot of stories for my classmates to accept me. To my unexpected self, however, it didn’t work, and I ended up not having many friends in primary School.
I never liked school either, which was quite a shock to my parents when they found out I had slept in class during the second week of second grade. They had always seen how eager I was to go to school and usually came back home beaming with delight, frequently proceeding to talk nonstop about the stuff I had learned in school that day. In the following years, I had adjusted myself to be able to keep up with my studies though it didn’t mean I liked school anymore.
Middle school came in a flash, and I had moved to a national-plus school. I had told my mom about how I struggled to learn in Indonesian and asked if I could move to a school that has a semi-international curriculum. With her agreement, I could look forward to learning in class and exploring the world again.
That feeling didn’t last long.
I was overwhelmed with how much I had missed in the syllabus and had to take extra steps to catch up. Tasks and assignments that were assigned by my middle school were unfamiliar to me and made me realize how big the margins were in a national curriculum and an international curriculum. Discipline wasn’t my strong suit either and I was scolded a whole bunch of times in class and out of class. With everything going on, I had to work three times harder than any of my peers in that school.
Somehow, with sheer determination, I caught up in my second year of middle school and made the most amazing friends there who are still with me to this day. It was the silver lining to all the struggles I had in middle school, and I wouldn’t change anything at all. I finally felt heard and seen as an Indonesian who was still proud of my heritage but wasn’t acknowledged as one. All of us could relate in some way, either it was speaking Indonesian with an accent, being of Chinese-Indonesian descent in a small city like Bandar Lampung, or in my case, not having the same experiences as a “normal” Indonesian would have as a kid. We would confide in each other and regard our friend group as a safe place to talk about our experiences and even our vision for the future to make the world a better place.
Unfortunately, those years were cut short due to COVID-19 and we had to spend our last semester of middle school online.
For my high school, I enrolled in a public school near my house. My mom had told me to go there because she wanted me to understand what a “normal” Indonesian would go through in the so-called peak years of high school. She felt that I had become a responsible teenager and that was what made her confident to send me there.
I agreed to go. It would be a learning experience for me, and I could understand my environment better if I had another perspective to compare it to. I also felt very secure in myself to not be fazed when a person would judge how I acted. It was a matter of time for me to understand my peers.
To my agony, however, was the fact that I somehow managed to find myself in the same predicament I was in back in elementary school.
I had managed to be in the student council, and remember vividly what my friends were talking about in our council room. The snacks they loved as a kid, the events they did in middle school, what their day-to-day life in middle school was… I couldn’t relate to a single thing. “How do you not know that? You’re like… from another planet!” A friend exclaimed to me as I finished asking a question that was correlated to said conversation.
A foreign specimen to the place that I call home.
It bugged me at first, but I slowly learned to not care. It didn’t matter that I had a different perspective of the world than my peers near me. I had multiple perspectives and a diverse ecosystem of heritage and culture that I had known and experienced. Middle Eastern, Chinese-Indonesian, with a little bit of American sprinkled on top. I didn’t fit in any of these tightly labeled margins and that’s okay. I am my own person with my own dynamic ideas and am ready to develop myself to be my most optimum version.
My Mayonnaise Jar 