Chapter 12 Magnolia #2
Step Two: Said trusted elderly relative yanks their victim to the victim’s parents and declares, “I have the perfect match for your son/daughter.” The victim’s parents’ eyes light up, their ears pricking, and they will be all agog.
“Who? Who is it?” they cry. The elderly relative says something like: “Xiuli’s son.
He just graduated from Boston College. Very clever and, oh, the palest skin you’ve ever seen.
” The victim might mutter something like: “That’s kind of really colorist. I don’t care about pale skin.
” To which the elderly relative and the parents will shush them viciously.
The elderly relative and the parents discuss animatedly about Xiuli and her husband’s business and how it’s been booming, and did you know they just went on a cruise across Europe?
Just think of the family vacations you could take together once you’re married!
Step Three: You are on your way for a lunch date with your cousin.
Or so you think. When you arrive, you find that it isn’t just your cousin who’s there, but a tall, pleasant-looking guy as well.
You think it’s your cousin’s boyfriend, but your cousin, who is acting shifty as hell, says, “This is Regus. He just graduated from Boston College.” You put two and two together and realize he’s Auntie Xiuli’s son, and your parents have somehow roped your traitorous cousin into helping put together this meeting.
You grit your teeth. Regus seems nice and isn’t actually as pale as your aunt made him out to be.
Just as you sit down, your cousin takes out her cell phone, gives the fakest gasp in the history of gasps, and says, “Oh no! There’s been a family emergency!
I have to go, guys. I’m so sorry. Stay and have lunch with each other, okay?
” She’s gone before you can ask what the family emergency is.
Step Four: You and poor Regus gape at your cousin’s rapidly retreating back before staring at each other, quietly panicking at the increasingly awkward moment.
Finally, just as you’re thinking about leaping up and crashing through the restaurant’s window to escape, he says, “So, you went to Berkeley?” Your shoulders relax a little, because this is a common safe ground that you can both tread on.
You exchange stories about Berkeley and Boston College and the Bay Area and Boston, and when it’s over, you think: Well, that was painful, but not too painful.
But out of spite to your parents and your cousin, you withhold every detail from them and refuse to be in touch with Regus, even though he really did seem perfectly pleasant.
· · ·
After Regus, I started being more wary when friends and family asked me out for lunch, coffee, brunch, or dinner.
I’d ask, “Who else is coming?” And if the answer was “Oh, my college friend might drop by” or “A couple of my friends might join us,” I’d flake out of the meeting.
But I quickly learned that this was a terrible strategy, because in Indonesian culture, it was par for the course for people to bring more friends to meals.
You’d make a reservation for two, and in the end you’d need a table for four or five.
And that was without people trying to stealth-matchmake you.
After a few months of this, I gave in. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had any social life.
I went out for meals and was unfazed when some random guy around my age materialized and my cousin or friend came up with a family emergency and disappeared.
I’d give a sympathetic smile and say, “Did they trick you into meeting me too?” And that would usually diffuse the awkwardness between us.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in dating.
Many of the guys I was introduced to were more than easy on the eye, and I did find myself attracted to more than one of them.
But the biggest problem was that I had absorbed a different way of thinking at Berkeley.
I’d taken a few women’s studies courses, and my head was a scramble of righteous rage and an infuriating feeling of helplessness, a lack of control over everything in my life.
I’d get into arguments with these poor guys.
They never took it well. Take this one guy, Eten.
(His parents were aiming for Ethan. It could’ve been worse. They could’ve ended up with Iten.)
“I don’t want to have kids,” I said within the first ten minutes of my friend abandoning us because her dog needed “emergency grooming.” “And if I ever did, I think they should take my last name.”
Eten choked on his latte. “Sorry? Why?”
“Why don’t I want kids, or…?”
“Why do you think they should take your last name?”
I glared at him. Now that I’d gone through at least half a dozen of these blind dates, I was quickly running out of fucks to give.
“Because whose vagina will the kid be ripping out of? Did you know that some women tear from vagina to anus during birth? Whose body is it going to destroy? Guys don’t have to worry about that at all, so why should they get all the credit? ”
Eten put down his latte with exaggerated care, obviously trying to buy time to think. “Because it’s tradition, that’s how it’s always been done.”
“So were public executions. They used to be tradition in many countries.”
“What?” Eten sputtered.
“I’m just saying, a lot of ridiculous things used to be commonly carried out and accepted as tradition. But we don’t do them anymore. Just because things used to be done a certain way doesn’t mean we have to continue doing them that way. It doesn’t make them right.”
Eten blinked. I wondered if he’d even registered half of what I just said.
Then I kicked myself for being so mean and judgy.
I forced a smile. The moment I did, I hated myself even more.
Because while I hadn’t meant to come off so aggressively, the argument I was making was actually one I’d been seriously questioning.
Why were children automatically named after their fathers?
The only explanation I could come up with was because it was easier to follow patriarchal traditions.
I was only smiling because I couldn’t help, even after all this time, playing peacemaker.
To instinctively feel embarrassed when I was too forceful about making a point.
Now I was going to be known as the bitch with ridiculous notions.
But my smile had done what it was meant to do. Eten’s shoulders relaxed, and he smiled wide. “Oh, you were just kidding.”
I was too tired by then to argue further.
And anyway, I thought I was never going to see him again.
Who cared what Eten thought about women’s rights and fighting the patriarchy?
And who was I to think that I could change the status quo?
To demand equality? I was just a dumb kid who didn’t know any better and who didn’t even have a real job.
I knew that the “job” I currently held at the clinic had only been given to me out of nepotism.
I was the last person that feminism needed.
With a fixed smile, I said, “Yeah. Anyway, tell me about your last vacation. Did you say you went to Budapest? What’s that like? ”
That was me at age twenty. Full of bright ideas sparking like fireworks in my head, but with no deep understanding of what it took to live by those beliefs. Eager to make my ideas heard, but without the eloquence required to get anyone to listen or any of the courage required to follow through.
No wonder, then, that for the next two years, although my parents and their extensive social network tried hard to get me matched up, none of the dates turned into anything serious.
I had plenty of female friends—mostly from my high school, all of them with equally impressive college degrees—but none of them shared my restlessness.
After graduating from whatever Ivy League they’d gone to as per the Chindo norm, they’d come back to Jakarta and quickly assumed the role of a good Chindo daughter, taking care to lose any of the weight they’d gained in the States, and then some, staying out of the sun so their skin turned as pale as milk, getting regular facial and hair treatments, and being seen at the right places with the right people.
Or so I thought. Much later, I learned that quite a few of them had their own reservations about the path rolled out before us, but none of us had the courage then to give voice to our doubts.
Especially when the path was so familiar, so comfortable.
Why risk stumbling and getting thrown into the dark wood when you could simply put one foot in front of the other and keep walking?