Chapter 12 Magnolia
MAGNOLIA
I had the very best intentions when I moved back to Indonesia.
Of course I didn’t give up just because I was back home.
I had some fire left in me. I was no Iris, blazing a trail for herself to greatness, but I was determined to at least carve a tiny space for myself.
Mama and Papa celebrated the return of their golden child.
I say “golden,” but a more appropriate term would be “pliant.” They celebrated me and not Iris because I was the one they could mold into the daughter of every Chinese-Indonesian parent’s dreams.
Right away, I started working at the clinic.
It had grown into something arguably successful: a steady stream of patients and even more coming in through word of mouth.
There were now five doctors on the roster, six if you counted Mama, which most of the time they didn’t.
The other five doctors were all men, each of them well-respected OBGYNs or pediatricians with good connections.
In addition to the doctors, there were twelve nurses and three receptionists, all women.
Nurses and receptionists were very cheap and easy to come by in those days, and there was a high turnover at the clinic; they were being hired and fired at the doctors’ whims.
I suggested to Mama and Papa that I could maybe offer some counseling services to the expectant women and new mothers, and maybe even the kids if they needed it.
It seemed to me like an obvious way to expand the clinic’s services.
But at that time in Indonesia, mental health wasn’t a recognized part of a person’s well-being.
There was still a huge stigma around the subject—most people saw it in very black-and-white terms. You were either “normal” or you were “crazy.” And if you were the latter, then you belonged in a mental hospital, locked away from the rest of society.
There was no in-between, no room for those of us struggling with postpartum depression or anxiety or anything like that.
So when I broached the subject of adding a mental health section to the clinic, Papa snapped, “You want our clinic to be known for having crazies?” and Mama glared at me like I was the biggest disappointment in her life.
Later, after Papa had stopped raging, Mama came into my room and said, “I think maybe you should run these…American ideas by me first, before presenting them to your father.”
The way she said “these American ideas” felt like she was spitting out something foul, a cockroach that had somehow crawled into her mouth.
I was fresh out of college and angry that my idea had been smacked down so harshly, so I said, “If you didn’t want me coming back with ‘American ideas,’ why did you send me to America? ”
“Are you really that stupid? Have you learned nothing? You think any man would want you if you weren’t well educated?”
Of course. It was so obvious. Everything they had done was to ensure that I would make a good trophy wife.
An impressive degree from an American university, but not too impressive—wouldn’t want to overshadow my husband’s own achievements.
Just impressive enough to show my pedigree.
I was smart enough to run a household, and my parents were wealthy enough to have sent me to an American university.
I would make a good bride and my family would make respectable in-laws.
For the most part, my parents had given up on Iris.
When she was a teen, she was way too rebellious, too sexual, too loud, too everything.
Then she went to Caltech and studied computer science, which automatically made her way too smart to make a good wife.
No self-respecting Chindo guy was ever going to want to be with her.
So all hope of finding a son-in-law to take over the family business fell on my shoulders.
It took a while to figure out just what exactly my role would be at the clinic.
It would’ve been embarrassing for me to be a receptionist, because they considered that beneath me, but I was also woefully lacking in any other experience or ability to help out, so in the end, I was tasked with odd jobs.
Social media wasn’t really a thing yet—Facebook hadn’t even been invented—but I knew the Internet was only going to get bigger, so we needed more of an online presence.
I asked to work on our website, and my parents agreed, probably more to shut me up than anything.
The website took weeks to build, mostly because there weren’t many website builders back then, and also I was clueless about how to start one.
In the end, I used a site called Blogger to build one.
It looked terrible, but it was better than nothing, and once I got the bones down, I took my time prettifying the site.
My parents were pleased with the results. Or at least they weren’t displeased.
When that was done and there was nothing I could possibly add to the website, I turned my attention to the clinic’s filing system.
Nothing was online yet; all of our bookkeeping, our patients’ records, our prescriptions—they were all written down by hand, slipped into folders, and kept in these massive floor-to-ceiling shelves.
Whenever a patient made an appointment, some poor sucker had to root around the endless shelves to locate their file.
It was horribly disorganized. We lost things all the time.
I tried to convince my parents to switch to a digital filing system.
But when I presented the software options to them, they balked at the prices.
To be fair, these systems were extremely expensive at the time, around 20,000 US dollars.
It wasn’t a huge expenditure for a growing clinic like ours, which boasted some pretty expensive equipment, but it was significant, and worse still, it was for something that none of the doctors at the clinic believed in.
They thought a computerized filing system was frivolous, a passing trend that wouldn’t last.
“Where would it be stored?” one of the doctors said, snorting. “A computer? And what happens when the computer breaks?”
“Well, actually, you’d store it in an external disk—”
“And what happens when you lose the disk?”
I had no answer to that, which made the doctors around me smirk. Their expressions said: Silly little girl, coming in here acting like she knows anything.
Mama tried to lighten the mood. “These youngsters with their bright ideas!”
They all laughed indulgently, as though I were a little kid asking them to watch as I did cartwheels. Papa actually patted my head, like I was all of three years old. “Trust me, Magnolia, at the end of the day, people only trust hard copies. Handwritten records. You’ll never replace those.”
I remembered how, when I was about twelve, my teacher had asked us to write an essay titled “What I Think Life in the Year 2000 Will Be Like.” This was in 1994, which meant the year 2000 was a mere six years away, but all of us somehow failed to comprehend what a short time that was.
We were seduced by the turning of numbers from nineteen to twenty, and so all of us wrote about robots and flying cars and world peace.
So at age twenty, in the year 2002, when my parents and their colleagues told me I couldn’t digitalize the filing system, I was more than disappointed.
I was livid. I felt like I had come back to a dead end.
I thought of how Iris was out in California doing all sorts of wonderful things.
I thought of Ellery in London doing all sorts of romantic writerly stuff.
I wasn’t sure what being a writer entailed, but I always imagined her in some hundred-year-old London café that looked straight out of a fairy tale, scribbling in a leather-bound notebook.
I thought of all my friends from Cal, many of them now in politics, some in finance, others off having adventures in all four corners of the world.
And here I was, back where I first started, unable to even elevate our family practice in the smallest way.
Then one of the doctors said to Mama and Papa, “Magnolia is so pretty, and she went to Berkeley, you say?” As though I weren’t even there. “She’d make a very fine match for my nephew. He went to Stanford, graduated two years ago.”
Mama’s and Papa’s faces lit up. And that was how the dating carousel began.
· · ·
People often assume that arranged marriages still happen in many parts of Asia.
In fact, in 2002, it wasn’t really a thing anymore, at least not how it’s often portrayed in Western media.
There is no formal arrangement that happens—two families meeting and deciding that their progenies should marry—nothing like that.
But that is not to say we didn’t have our own form of proper dating practices.
Here is how, at least among the Chinese-Indonesians, it often happens:
Step One: A trusted elderly relative of the eligible bachelor or bachelorette goes to a big family meal or church event, where they spot a potential match.
They squeal with excitement and slice a path to the unsuspecting victim, pouncing on them and invading their personal space by touching their face or hair or hands and saying, “Oh my goodness, aren’t you so tall/handsome/pretty/pale-skinned?
How old are you now? Twenty? Are you seeing anyone?
No? I know just the perfect match for you. ”