How to not be a ‘problematic’ Expat?: On reading The Year of Living Dangerously as a Westerner living in 2015 Indonesia

As Peace Corps volunteers, we often wrestle with our status in Indonesia, with its history of European colonization, cold war neo-imperialism, ethnic and religious conflict, and the history of Peace Corps as an organization and all international development programs that have been criticized (rightly so) for being imperialistic tools themselves (explained in more detail here) and the history and status United States as an interventionist world super power. Even if we come to Indonesia with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts we, at some point, need to deal with the baggage and history that we bring with us. Many of us find ask ourselves similar questions everyday: Am I really doing more good than harm here, and if I’m doing more harm, then how do I fix it? How do I get better and not repeat the mistakes of colonial history? How do I do what I promised to do and actually help make the lives of the Indonesians I work with better? Is there a way to be a westerner working in a formally colonized country, especially a “developing country” and not be an (sorry for lack of a better word) asshole?

                I was recently lent The Year of Living Dangerously by a fellow Peace Corps volunteer. The 1978 novel is set in 1965 Jakarta and tells the story of an affair between an Australian reporter and British Embassy worker who are both close friends with a dwarf Chinese-Australian camera man. The novel was later adapted into a film starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt.

Mel...before the crazy? Picture from Wikipedia

 I have yet to see the film, but as a Westerner who currently lives a few hours outside of Jakarta it was thought provoking to able to compare the descriptions  of 1965 Jakarta to what I know of the city and West Java now. While the novel is set in Jakarta and ostensibly about Indonesian politics and society, it really can’t be read or understood in the same way that a novel starring an Indonesian character living in 1965 Indonesia should be read. In the tradition of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, it is essentially about the expat interpretation of a society, a status which is both insider and outsider, helpful and harmful, occasionally dreamlike, but surprisingly mundane, and both pride inducing and tainted with self-loathing . Though there are expats in many countries and many different time periods there are some things that remain strikingly universal, lucky, and problematic. Separated by 50 years, having a totally different job from the main characters, and living as one Westerner in a rural community instead of in a large city with daily in-person access to other Westerners, I obviously have a very different expat experience than the characters of Christopher J. Koch’s novel. Nonetheless, reading this novel this past week has caused me to rethink many of those stress-inducing questions in perhaps more nuanced ways.

                Before going further, I want to discuss the term expat. I have technically been an “expat” for almost six years now (four years in South Korea and almost two years in Indonesia). Only a certain kind of person who lives and works in another country for more than a few months gets to be called an expat and the term is arguably racist. An expat is someone from a rich country and who has a privileged enough life that living in another country is very much a choice and not an economic necessity. He or she generally works in a middle-class, white collar profession. In theory, any Peace Corps volunteer could be in the United States right now and find a decent paying job, even if it isn’t exactly in the field we want or the salary is not as high as we might wish. (in theory..)  

This differs us (unfairly or fairly so) from people from poorer countries who work in wealthier countries out of economic necessity, like the woman I live with in my village who worked as a maid in Saudi Arabia for nine years. She gets called a “migrant worker.” I agree that these labels and terms are imperfect and somewhat discriminatory. I have met wealthy Indonesians (and other nationals from ‘developing’ countries) who live in foreign countries very much by choice and with a lifestyle much more “expat” than “migrant worker,” but generally it is a term used only for Westerners living temporarily in another country and who tend to form a tightly networked community. Go to any city around the world and there are certain bars famous for tourists, and there are other bars that are famously haunts of the expat community, a community that may live and work in a country for years but never become a citizen and gain voting rights. In the case of many developing countries, this community may participate in some aspects of the lives of locals but generally lives with a much higher salary, different housing, slightly different diets, and different social norms and rules (i.e. Indonesians would probably be shocked to see two white people kissing in public but they probably wouldn’t be reprimanded nearly as badly as two Indonesians doing the same). How involved an expat is with an expat community or the local community is going to vary by profession, the exact place in the country where the expat lives, and by the personality of the expat herself.

To live as an expat is to live in the same place as host country nationals but to move on different roads and in different circles. It is perhaps like a picture made in PhotoShop—expats might be in the same pictures as their host-country neighbors but they occupy a different layer than the average member of host-country society. To be fair, nationals within one country may be in different layers and circles themselves, divided by ethnicity, region, religion, family background, profession, and interests, so this isn’t unique to expats. But national loyalty and connection to the country and land on which one lives is still so important in one’s conception of self that the expat often struggles with how to deal with his own nationalistic feelings towards his host country; as someone living on the edges of society does he have the right to have those feelings? Does he or she even want them? What does he owe this country that he has only partially accepted and which has perhaps only partially accepted him? And what does that country owe him in return?

                At one point in the novel, Wally, an obese Australian who has become the most famous Western journalist working in Indonesia says,

“I’m happy in this bloody mad country, you know. They might be on the wrong track at the moment, but the Javanese have everything, really: intelligence, subtlety, sense of humor, and sen-sensitivity [sic]… ‘I love them…This is my home, now. I may apply for citizenship…I have something to give them; they have something to give me. There are young men who are hungry for education and guidance that they can’t find in the present breakdown…I teach them English—supervise their reading—guide them in their political thinking. They’ll be leaders some day, and they’ll set this country on a civilized course. And I can be myself with them. Can you see that? I can’t be myself in Australia…I recalled his library outside…Outside the immense heat squatted like a malignant force, making these fragments of an alien civilization seem infinitely fragile; doomed…and very soon the military…would be knocking with their gun-butts at the door…If this was Wally’s imagined home, he had no home in this world.”  (94-95)

                While I was living in South Korea, many of the other English teachers and I had a mean spirited joke. Occasionally we would meet a Western man (usually a white male English teacher) who acted like he lived like a king in Korea. Suddenly he had a lot more attention from women, and he often talked about how he was saving local girls from dating local men who he claimed were more misogynist or abusive. He enjoyed Korea’s drinking culture without the pressure of a demanding boss, or the demands of having a family, and he spoke with “authority” on the ills of Korean society as though he were an expert and as though his solutions were totally insightful and revolutionary and never thought of by Koreans themselves. He spoke this way while barely being able to understand the language and rarely reading or understanding local media or literature. There was another thing striking about these men. They were usually, at least by Western standards, unattractive. Either they were physically odd looking or their behavior or dress was off putting. These men, my female friends and I used to joke, were known as “losers back home.” In their home countries they were unpopular or outcast, but here they lived in some odd fantasy that they could inhabit because of their unique situations.

Wally is revealed by the narrator to be a gay man who regularly sleeps with young male Indonesians. He is eventually exiled from Indonesia when this is brought to the attention of the government. Indonesia was not any more liberal on gay rights than Australia was during 1965; it was only his place as a wealthy foreigner outside of normal society that gave Wally the freedom to be himself. And his “love” for Indonesia might be pure, but it is also paternal and patronizing. His love of Indonesia does not stop him from paying for sex from much poorer men or for disregarding the voices or philosophies of local people in favor of Western words. Up until the last third of the novel he is immune from the power of the Indonesian military, unlike an average Indonesian person. He doesn’t quite love Indonesia, but really the position of being an expat in a poorer country.

The plot of the novel is fairly thin, and although the novel is billed as a romance, one looking for a great love story won’t find it here—while there certainly are romantic elements, the heart of the novel lives in its long, poetic descriptions of Jakarta, the West Java country-side and the various faces the narrator meets. In many ways, the narrator treats Jakarta, Java, Indonesia, and the political turmoil of 1965 as a surreal painting that he wants his audience to be able to recreate exactly as he sees it in his own mind. The narrator, a fictional version of the author, is a journalist, so it is no wonder that he wants you to see the situation, his stage, his story, exactly in the way that he was struck by it.

One review I read online, written by an Indonesian, claimed that the novel is “racist, sexist, and ableist.” I am not reading this novel as an Indonesian, but as an expat, so my opinion might not be the most authoritative. There are definitely odd choices made by the author that occasionally were cringe-worthy; his description of some Indonesians as looking more Indian or European and therefore more handsome, his obsession with distinguishing between Billy’s Chinese and European faces and expressions, the fact that the lead female character mentions having a career but does little else than get pregnant and beg for her lover’s love when he begins to withdraw from her, and that for the most part, Indonesians are described in strange detail, reminiscent of how one might describe animals you see in the forest. However, one has to keep in mind that just because a narrator says or feels something doesn’t mean that the author supports that opinion. The narrator is an expat trying to understand a society he lives on the outside of, so naturally his descriptions contain his own bias, his own distance. The fact that he doesn’t talk about Jill’s agency and career could be that he has also sexualized her as one of the few Western females he has come in contact with.  

The movie was also banned in Indonesia until about fifteen years ago presumably because of its description of revolutionary violence and critique of aspects of President, revolutionary figure, and national hero, Sukarno.

Mr. President and well-known ladies man. Photo from Wikipedia

 Despite his violence and corruption, he is still a national hero for many Indonesians. I have Indonesian friends that have decorated their Facebook profiles with pictures of him or keep posters of the president on their walls. This sounds odd, but how many American national heroes have hands clean of blood or angelic dispositions?

The novel is not perfect in regards to racism, but it has to be understood in its context. One has to understand that this is written from the perspective of a Western expat in 1965, and I think that the author is aware of many of his narrator’s shortcomings. We aren’t meant to agree with everything the narrator thinks, but we are meant to see that living as an expat can cause the expat to develop a unique form of ‘racism’ (for lack of a better word)—she is overwhelmed and the environment around her gains a weird mysticism for all the things she doesn’t understand while also being comfortably familiar—it becomes like a street cat only partially tamed; you may love it, but you never know when it might bite you. That develops into a dream-like paranoia. You gain a feeling like you are swimming in a society, a reality, instead of just walking through it. The world around you becomes heavy, and her guilt of having more privilege than the people around her, combined with her resentment of being othered and objectified twists the world around her into some kind of amorphous blob that must be categorized, labeled, and dismissed as a defensive mechanism. She must think of herself as different and disconnected to make up for her only partial understanding of the local reality and history. She must battle against this urge to dehumanize those around her and to turn them into caricatures every day.

If I am honest, I remember moments when I was living in Korea where I came up from out of the subway in Seoul, and I saw a sea of Korean faces moving towards me and felt so completely overwhelmed, as though this world around me would eat me up and spit me out in some neon-lit, kimchi-smelling mess. As an expat you often only interact with the surface level of society; your language skills or the way people interact with you (ignoring you, deferring to you, attempting to make you see their country in a certain way, etc), your limited time and your own insecurities prevent you from digging too deeply and you are inundated with the national symbols and mythology of a country and never able to relax totally. It is hard sometimes to fight against our impressions and imaginations enough to acknowledge the diversity of lives and realities that exist in every nation.The fact that Peace Corps makes us live in rural communities, most of which are far from other Westerners, and we are given local style housing and salaries, perhaps gives us a bit more insight than other expats. On the other hand its also more stressful and can lead to bitterness that pushes out new information and tolerance.

I get overwhelmed in Java; at bus terminals, when my language skills fail at what should be a simple task, when I realize my thoughts on something are totally different than everyone else's around me. Sometimes being overwhelmed is exhilarating; when the call to prayer rings out at dusk, and I’m riding my bike through birds and bats whipping around me—society becomes an animal, and I am a prey. Is it a logical way of thinking? No, but living as a foreigner in another country leads to strange psychological tics.

Another reviewer asks why this book couldn’t be written by an Indonesian. It certainly would be a lot different. Should this book exist as is? Is it right that foreigners are writing of the national history of Indonesia and are the ones characterizing it for the rest of the world? Every time I share a blog or a picture of people I meet in Indonesia, am I taking away their right to depict themselves as they want to? To give themselves a voice? But isn’t there also merit in having an outside perspective, even with the shadow of colonialism? I would love to read a book about American society written by an Indonesian living and working there. I would love to know what shocks him and overwhelms him and disturbs him. I would love to see how he mystifies my country or caricatures us. But Americans are powerful enough on the world stage to move out of caricatures. 

Well...maybe not exactly...

Have Indonesians been properly given that chance?

At one point in the novel the Australian reporter is sitting with his Indonesian assistant by the pool. They are both young men in their twenties. The Indonesian compares their skin colors and tells him that his brown is ugly compared to his white. He tries to goad the Australian into agreeing with him, and the Australian tries to unsuccessfully deny this assertion. How many times have I had Indonesians talk to me about my skin? And I never know how to respond. Do I deny it? Do I tell them I think they are beautiful, and that women in my country are obsessed with tans? But doesn’t that erase the racism in my own country? Haven’t whiter Asians been treated better than darker Asians in the US for the most part? Should I ignore it? Is it simply empty words? Am I putting too much weight on this? In America some people are obsessed with having blonde hair or cuter noses or bigger eyes or thigh gaps. Am I imposing my own understanding of racism on people who might not see it that way? When I see a casting call asking for only girls with “white” skin, and I tell an Indonesian that that is wrong, do I have that right? And is it hypocritical from someone who has been privileged for her skin color in her own country? Am I like Wally, deciding how Indonesians should be based on my own “enlightened” philosophies that aren’t relevant here? I don’t know. I never know.

                History will judge me and Peace Corps. There are already so many books about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of Peace Corps and people will continue to write. Maybe years from now, one of my students may write about me and how I helped him or say that I was a good teacher, friend, example—I hope so. Most of my students will probably remember me. I might be the only American they will ever meet. Perhaps to a degree all expats are “losers back home.” We are a little in love with this feeling of only having one foot in society and one foot out of it, and even if we learned that all we were doing was exaggerating imperialism and stereotypes, maybe some of us would still selfishly want to stay and never admit it to ourselves. Maybe. I like to think most of us are better than that. I hope.

                When I lived in Seoul I used to occasionally volunteer with South Korean organizations that promoted human rights investigations, freedom of information, and North Korean refugees. I helped out at a fundraiser one night with another American woman, and a very drunk Spanish man started harassing and screaming at us. “You Americans are always interfering with other people’s business!” He said but with less nice words. “There are so many sick and poor kids in your own country, why are you bothering raising money for North Korean children?” The whole North Korean issue is complicated and for another blog post—I have a lot of thoughts on it—but I can’t say I wasn’t struck by some of what he said. What was I doing helping North Korean children? What am I doing now in Indonesia? Isn’t it true that there are plenty of American children that need my help? But isn’t the idea that you are somehow more responsible for children in your own country a lie of nationalism?

 No doubt there are political and selfish reasons for the things we care about. Part of the reason why I cared about North Korea was because of my fascination with the image of North Korea; the mystique of being privilege to information about one of the most mysterious societies in the world. And part of my interest in helping Indonesian children learn English is simply because I wanted to keep traveling in Asia.

Everyone who joins the Peace Corps or becomes an international journalist has, at some base level, a hero complex. No one can totally divorce their selfishness or imagination from their altruism. I eventually came to this conclusion: there are so many people in this world that never find any issue that moves them or makes them feel passionate. Therefore, if you find something that stirs your imagination and that you can champion with your whole heart, with the caveat that you are prepared to reflect on your actions and are prepared to change your behavior if you’re doing harm, don’t ever throw that passion away. If you have a skill that can help someone, and you are willing to give it, then just do so.

                Even now I am perhaps making a mistake. Does the Western world need to hear more expat voices writing about Indonesia or Asia? Am I overthinking everything, and is my overthinking actually patronizing? If Indonesians are happy to have me in their country and want to learn English because the reality of the world is that, whether or not it’s fair or efficient, English is the most useful language to know, and if they are excited to see me just because I have a different face, then all I can do is accept these facts. Just live, a part of me demands. But that isn’t right either because no human can divorce herself from the weight of history. Live with kindness and the ability to listen. Live with wisdom and conscience. Live knowing you will make a thousand mistakes.

                I want Indonesians to be telling their stories to world, and of course I want to tell my own story. That’s only human. I am only human. Indonesians are only human. And humans have the urge to make others see exactly how they see and understand themselves exactly how they are. But if all your mysteries were really opened up and analyzed, then who would you become? Something of everyone must be left to the realm of the imagination--we must let ourselves move in and out of reality and fairy tale, to be both real and character, to be American and Indonesian and something in between.

                So in the end, all mystifying , all myth-making, isn’t always bad. There is artistry to every country, a magic. And sometimes a pair of outside eyes can capture that beauty and describe with awe, a feeling that only someone new and half in understanding of a place can express. For all of the problematic elements of the novel, Koch’s descriptions and passion makes us see Java as a great, confusing, and powerful thing as he sees it. So I’ll leave you with a little piece of his awe:

“No kingdom on Earth can equal this one, which is the Gate of the World. Its countless islands from the Moluccas to northern Sumatra, balanced in an arc between Asia and Australia, shield it from the storms of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Active volcanoes form its spine and Vishnu, its guardian god…protects it from all harm. Its children are more numerous, its women more beautiful, its soil more fertile; foreigners covet it. And most favored of all is Java. As you fly into Java from Sumatra, over the Sunda straights, the most crowded island on Earth appears mysteriously devoid of human settlement. Indigo cones of volcanoes rise into the clouds from jade territories which seem as empty as those of the world’s dawn. But these are the paddy fields and terraces the people cultivate to the very rims of the craters. President Sukarno, Vishnu’s incarnation, tells us in his speeches that Java’s spirit is the terrible volcano Merapi, which seems to sleep but is always ready to explode in violence.” [147]

“The Jade green of Java is like an hallucination…the slow breeze of the south-east monsoon moved in the coconut palms beside the road, and a sweet-sour mixture of smells reached him: scents of frangipani and jasmine; reek of copra and moist earth. The humid land was like a huge creature stirring to life. Beyond the wet rice paddies and the tea estates rose the deep green cones of terraced hills, and finally the silk-blue cones of the great volcano chain that is Java’s spine. All colors were more intense here, in this land of cones, all smells more insistent…Dignified West Javan peasant women pedaled gracefully, comical yet gravely charming, their Junoesque figures outlined in tight, multicolored kains and kebayas, their hair in gleaming antique buns; goddesses on wheels…

Out here, if you wanted to pretend so, there was no real poverty…” [150].

*This blog uses page numbers from Penguin's 1995 print of The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch

What Rests On the Bodies of Foreign Women

Men often like to
criticize how those other
men treat their women.

Many female volunteers (and some male volunteers, too) complain that they are subject to sexual harassment or sexually inappropriate comments in Indonesia. I haven’t lived in enough places around the world to know if Indonesians really sexually harass people more than any other group of people, and such a statement would be nearly impossible to prove one way or another. I would argue however that foreigners, especially foreign women (and minorities) are sexually harassed and objectified more often than local (or majority) women in nearly every country around the world. Not only that, but much of how one culture views another culture can be gleaned from how that first culture speaks about and treats the other culture’s women.

When I was living in South Korea, I often passed by underwear and lingerie shops. After a few months I began to notice something odd; the models wearing the lingerie were almost always white people. Even when the pictures changed, they would all be replaced with more pictures of white men and women. I asked some Koreans why they never featured Korean models. I received a range of answers including, “I don’t know,” “white women have bigger boobs or butts, and white men have bigger muscles” “white people are prettier,” “it’s just a poster,” “it’s not important,” and “because white people aren’t Asian like us. We can look at their bodies like statues and not like real people. If we used Asian models the pictures would be too erotic.” Regarding the first few comments, there are Korean actresses and actors that have large chests and backsides and read any magazine about Korean Pop Stars, and there are many pictures of Korean men with muscular and toned bodies. So those comments aren’t exactly true. The interesting thing about the last comment is its specificity and that when I shared this story with other foreigners, sometimes they would recall hearing a very similar thing from their Korean friends.

I was reminded of this when talking to a different Peace Corps volunteer, who is Indian American. She shared with me that she gets a lot of comments about her clothing and how she is dressed, and I commented on the fact that it seems that she gets more than I do. 

[you can read more about her personal experiences in Indonesia here: http://peacecorpskruti.blogspot.co.id/2015/10/special-brownie-pros-and-cons-of-being.htm] 

This could be the result of a variety of factors: she is in East Java, I am in West, she is at a madrassah (an Islamic high school) while I teach at a public vocational high school where the rules for female dress are a bit more liberal. It could also just be her specific village or the specific people that work at her school. Alternatively, it could have to do with the fact that she is brown, slender, and short, and I am white, tall, and “so big,” as the people in my village tell me. In other words, her body is more similar to theirs while mine is different. It’s possible that her body is more real and erotic to Indonesians than my body, which is more foreign and strange.

But if a more familiar body is more erotic, then why are foreign women more often sexually harassed? Well as smarter people than me have pointed out, sexual harassment and rape usually really isn’t about sexual attraction or desire; more often, it’s about power. When a middle aged man I occasionally talk to near my local convenience store starts shouting at me one day and asking me if I want to “mate” with him, he’s not doing it because he really wants to sleep with me. He’s doing it because I am big and foreign and intimidating, and to reduce me to a sex object that he can obtain and control makes him powerful and accomplished. The “friend” who texted me in the middle of the night asking me to sleep with him in a hotel so he can try having sex with a white person doesn’t really want me, he wants to get something he is told he isn’t supposed to have, of accomplishing something his friends will never be able to. When I am grabbed on the street or followed by men or asked about my virginity or sex habits, this is not out of attraction to me; this is out of a desire to control and shame me.

 For four hundred years much of modern Indonesia was colonized by the very tall and very white Dutch people. I am very white and very tall compared to most women in my village. I am American, a country known as the richest, most powerful in the world. But I also have a vagina, which gives me weakness and vulnerability in their eyes. Add to this the idea the in the West sex is “free.”  Women aren’t controlled. They have multiple partners. I am wilder, perhaps, than an Indonesian women. I am something to be caught and tamed. My sex is so obvious because it is the thing that makes me approachable and less scary than a white male. It is something to be grabbed for, to contain, to ogle without fear; there are no social repercussions, no angry mothers, no pissed off brothers that will come get you if you do not treat me properly. I am not Muslim, so I will not call on your God to punish you, either.

One of my counterparts was watching an Indonesian music video and it featured women in tight dresses and men with open shirts. “This,” he said to me, “this is all Western influence. It’s not from our culture.” And yet, Indonesia (like many countries around the world) has a long history of prostitution, child marriages, teen pregnancy, ancient highly sexualized dances, polygamy, extramarital affairs, and parties in which men pay to touch women and dance provocatively with them. Of course the West (so has India, Arabia, Africa, China, and all the other waves of migrations that have gone through these islands) has likely had an effect on sex in Indonesia. However, to totally blame the West for all forms of sexual “deviance” is ridiculous and ignoring both Indonesian history and human nature. 

I had a Korean female friend once tell me about her Korean friends who lived in Canada: “they were good Asian girls. They weren’t like those white girls who just sleep with everyone.” While watching a Korean music video once in which the female lead singer pretends to masturbate and is fawned on by attractive male dancers, a male Singaporean friend rolled his eyes and said “this poor girl being abused by the music executives who make her act like this.” I suggested that perhaps it was her idea; the video was sexually empowering and she seemed in control of her feelings, her body, and her male lovers. My friend told me that she is a good Asian girl and wouldn’t have those feelings on her own. In this view point, the foreign white woman becomes a thing to blame and be jealous of. She is both something that has been sexually corrupted and sexually liberated. She is something to compare “good” and “proper” Asian women to.

Sexually harassing, objectifying, or idealizing foreign women is not unique to Asian cultures. Websites are filled with Asian women (either from Asia or of Asian ancestry) posting rude, objectifying comments that they receive from non-Asian men stereotyping and objectifying them. Most Americans are familiar with the stereotype of the Asian prostitute who says “me love you long time” in broken English. Even when I lived in Korea, I would meet many Western men that would insist that Asian women were more docile, subservient, feminine, and less feminist, shallow, or materialistic. Many countries in Asia including South Korea and Thailand have long histories of colonial occupation or near colonial histories with the West. Some Asian governments actively encouraged young women to sell sex to American and other foreign soldiers as a way of boosting the economy. So Asian women became viewed not as equal partners and lovers, but as polite, refined servants.

Black women in the US are simultaneously hyper-sexualized and treated as sexual objects or props while also neutered and depicted as too aggressive, free, or strong willed. The US has a long history of experimenting on the bodies of black women—even gynecology began with the poking and prodding of black female slave bodies. In this case black women are seen as good for sex, and the onus of blame for fact that their bodies have been historically sexually abused is placed on them instead of on the men who have abused them by calling their actions or dress too sexually free and aggressive. They are fine as sex partners but not as relationship partners.

In France, much has been made of the decision to ban headscarves in school, and even more recently in Canada there is national debate about whether or not women should be allowed to wear the Niqab, a form of Islamic dress in which the woman covers everything but her eyes. As many Canadian Muslim women have pointed out, the Niqab is worn by less than 1-2% percent of all Muslim women in Canada, however an issue that affect so few people has taken up a huge portion of the national media and debate at the expense of other women’s issues. In the case of Muslim women in the West, so much is made of the idea of rescuing women from oppression and oppressive clothing, whether or not a woman chooses to wear it or at the expense of issues that women might say are more important to them. 

Although on the surface this is a debate about clothing, it is essentially a critique of how the Muslim world asks its women to deal with and present their sexuality and reflects the viewpoint that many Westerns hold that somehow the Muslim world is less modern. I might add, however that this focus on clothing goes both ways; I can remember being told during my first months of teaching in Indonesia that I wasn’t allowed to wear a bikini if I went swimming with the students, and I had to explain that even in America a teacher wearing a bikini while swimming with a bunch of teenage boys would also probably be considered inappropriate.

The more I travel, the more it seems that when I hear people (especially men) complain about how a different country or culture treats their women, it isn’t really a comment on the actual happiness or welfare of those women, but an attempt to depict the other culture as less civilized. There are, as mentioned above, Westerners that obsess over the dress of Muslim women. One of my Korean landlords told me that Vietnamese men didn’t treat their women properly when he was a soldier in the Vietnam War. When I visited Malaysia and told my Chinese Malaysian guide that I was living in Korea, he immediately said that he didn’t really like Korean tourists and that they didn’t treat women well. When my white English female friend began dating a Korean man while living in Korea, the reaction of many of the older white men that we met was to immediately tell her that she was going to be beaten or abused and to disapprove of the relationship despite the fact that they themselves were married to 

Korean women.

It is not only men that fetishize and stereotype foreign or minority women. As I have mentioned, some of the comments I’ve gotten about white women in South Korea and in Indonesia have been from women. Another Peace Corps Volunteer in Indonesia wrote a blog post about how she feels being treated as a “Barbie.” 

[you can read her post here: https://prairiestateofmind.wordpress.com/2015/10/01/barbie-girl/] 

In Korea, some white women would bitterly insist that all Korean girls were materialistic or childish. The difference in how men usually talk about foreign women versus how women usually talk about foreign women is that for men they are resource and a tool, while women seek to neutralize them or use them to prop themselves up. A white woman who is called “Barbie” by her community is allowed to be beautiful but de-sexualized; she is a doll without actual sexual parts. When my Korean friend compared white and Asian women like that, it was to insist that Asian women are somehow exceptionally pure or proper compared to white women. When white women in Korea compare themselves to Korean women, it is usually to insist that they are somehow more adult and independent.

In other cases, foreign become ideals and alternative for men frustrated in their own societies. Type in the words “Foreign Women” into Google and one of the first websites to pop is a blog by an American man living in an unspecified foreign country with the title “Ten Reasons Why Foreign Women are Better than American Women.”  You can find it by yourself. I’m not comfortable linking to it because the content is so insane. The entire article and comments are a confusing illogical rant. The first issue, of course being that “foreign” in this case refers to any woman who is not American, an extremely diverse and large group of people. One of the strangest things that the author claims is that American women put pills in their vaginas to stop bleeding over themselves. 

According to the author, American women are also too fat, lazy, materialistic, aggressive, and feminist. But the foreign woman is kind, not extreme, not materialistic, and she will never get angry at you. The people commenting on the article also cannot seem to agree about what makes a good woman; one the one hand, there are people complaining that American women are so lazy and do not want to work and will stay home all day, and yet there are others complaining that American women won’t stay in their place at home and raise children as they are supposed to. I have met American black men that say they won’t date black women because they are too aggressive or mean or put too much pressure on them. A Korean Taxi driver told my friend that Korean women were no good because they wore too much make-up and hide their faces. In South Korea, North Korean women are often fetishized as being more pure, beautiful, and naturally Korean than her corrupted Southern sisters. They are foreign and native in a unique way that causes a very specific kind of objectification. These wonderful, magic "foreign" women don't actually exist.

 They are the fantasies of men that have not had luck securing sex or a partner in their home communities. They are the frustrations of men that do not have as much power as they feel they they should. They idealize foreign women not because any of those things reasons why foreign women are better are universally true but because foreign women do not have the same cultural capital that women from one’s own culture do. They do not always know if someone is saying something inappropriate or rude because they are unfamiliar with the culture. If they are living in a different country than their birth country, they do not have the same networks of family and old friends living around them that can help push men to behave more responsibly or more in the woman’s favor. She perhaps also does not know enough of the man’s language (or the man doesn’t know enough of hers) for her to make her more complex thoughts or ideas known. These factors make it harder for foreign women to hold men accountable when they behave badly or negatively towards them.

Most societies are dominated by men. The foreign women represents a foreign culture or an imagined foreign culture that is more accessible and vulnerable. She can become however a community imagines and wants her to be because she does not represent the public face of a culture. She does not have the same social power, network or cultural understanding as a local woman, so men and women can get away with treating her and describing her however they like with less fear of any social backlash. She is not as threatening as a man. She is a warning. She is an ideal. She represents all the things that local women are not (or imagined to not be). For women she is a rival that must be put down. For men she is a way of ignoring and avoiding responsibility for bad behavior towards local women. I am not the problem, he says. It is the women here who are the problem. You want too much from me. How can I be unfair or cruel says the man in Culture A—I can’t possibly be that bad when those women over in Culture B are treated so much worse.

I Wish I Could Promise You They'd Love You: A non-Muslim American living in a Muslim country’s perspective on American Islalmophobia

On my last New Year’s Eve in Seoul, South Korea, while out with friends at a restaurant, I happened to meet a young woman co-worker. She and I were about the same age (25), she had been in South Korea about as long as me (more than three years), and she was also American and from the North East coast. She was out with her boyfriend, a soldier in the US military, and by the time we ran into them, they were both pretty drunk. We spoke for a little bit, and she asked my friend and me if we wanted to move places. I said that I wanted to wait because I was trying to convince a male friend of mine to come out and celebrate the New Year holiday.

“Do you like this friend?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I answered. “But we can probably leave. I don’t think he will come out. He is Muslim and doesn’t drink.”

They both stopped and looked at each other.

“Do you want to date this guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many other girlfriends does he have? Are you going to be one of his wives?”

“…what?”

“You know, we were looking for a friend to bring out with us, and you could be that friend, but we won’t allow our friends to date a Muslim.”

“Um…okay…”

This conversation continued for a good ten minutes with them both ranting about how absolutely terrible it would be for me to date a Muslim man and how terrible Muslims were until finally our group split. Looking back, I should have told them what they said was wrong more aggressively, but I didn’t because they were drunk and it was a holiday. I didn’t feel like arguing or fighting.

After that, I only saw them a few times in passing, but the incident stuck with me. I wouldn’t call their reaction normal, but it wasn’t unbelievable either--especially not after reading some of the news coming from the US lately. Although I was aware of prejudice against Muslims before this, what struck me about the incident was that it was coming from two people that were presumably well educated (one had finished a Master’s and another was in Master’s program at a fairly well-known liberal arts school), from a relatively liberal part of the US, and both were well traveled and working in another culture (albeit, not a Muslim one). All of these factors presumably should make for a fairly open-minded individual, drunk or not. At the very least, they should have had the sense or shame to stop ranting or apologize for their offensive comments.

At the time of that incident, I had no idea that Peace Corps would send me to Indonesia, a country with 249 million people, 90% of which are Muslim, and incidentally the home country of the friend that I had been texting in the previous story.

Since I came to Indonesia about a year and a half ago, I often find myself thinking about what would happen if someone from my village, located a few hours’ drive outside of the capital, Jakarta, moved to America. What if they moved to a small, rural, and economically depressed town in America, perhaps in upstate New York or Pennsylvania, a few hours’ drive to New York City? I wonder how much attention he or she might attract, especially if she were a woman who wore a hijab; probably not nearly as much attention as I do in my village, where people almost daily ask for pictures and barrage me with questions about my origins. You are much more likely to see a foreigner in a small town a few ours away from New York City than you are a foreigner (especially a young, white, female foreigner) in a small village outside of Jakarta. But what if he or she went to some remote Appalachian town in Kentucky, or a fishing town in Maine, or some very small town in Alaska? It’s hard for me to say what the reaction would be because I’ve also never been to those places.

I do think that a random Indonesian coming by his or herself to a small town near where I grew up on the North East coast might at least get a lot of questions about her home country from curious people. Americans don’t really know much about Indonesia at all, and I guess that very few even realize that Indonesia is a majority Muslim country. I took an anthropology class in college once with the extremely broad title of “Islamic Culture,” and we barely spoke about Indonesia.  I don’t think this was an intentional oversight of the professor, but simply the result of the fact that he had worked in the Middle East and Africa. But it doesn’t change the fact that for the most part most Americans are very ignorant of Indonesia, and I believe most of them have a very narrow image of who a Muslim person is.

At the risk of generalizing, I think for many Americans, the average Muslim looks like a Saudi Arabian, or maybe someone from Iraq or Egypt. These images aren’t necessarily wrong, but rather narrow. A woman in Saudi Arabia might cover most of her face in public with a black cloth, but a woman from Kazakhstan might go out with bare soldiers to a club and drink vodka, while a young Indonesian woman might dress with a brightly colored headscarf and wears extra covering when she prays. Ask a black American Muslim and an Afghani Muslim how each one interprets a verse of the Quran, and you’ll probably receive very different answers. Similarly, a Catholic Pope from Argentina seems to interpret church doctrine very differently than a Catholic Pope from Germany.

Before moving on, I want to say that I don’t mean to stereotype entire countries either; there is great diversity in how someone practices a religion even within the same country, same province, same town, same community, etc. because people are individuals, not labels. My point is that while many Americans can accept two different Popes with radically different viewpoints as both Catholic, they seem to have a much harder time realizing that Muslims, too, are individual people. Islam is not some static, unchanging force unaffected by local culture, history, economic situations, power dynamics, technology, or global and local politics.
In Indonesia I have met Muslims who drink, smoke, and have multiple girlfriends (and in some cases wives, though this is pretty uncommon in Indonesia), and I have also met Muslims who never do any of those things and are extremely devoted as family men and fathers. I have met Muslims that dislike Western culture influences and others that totally embrace them. If someone tells you that they are Muslim, the only thing you can assume about them is what holidays they celebrate because Islam is a religion almost 1500 years old spread across countries, borders, cultures, and languages. It is not a recent cult, a tightly knit organization, a membership club, or a corporation.

ISIS and other forms of Islamic terrorism are not inevitable, constant, or ubiquitous in the Muslim world. In the United States, we have the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church, both of which are influenced by Evangelical Christianity but are not representative of everyone that practices the religion. They are groups born of the political and historical climate of the American South, and it would be ridiculous to claim that all Evangelical Christians are violent racists or homophobes or that Evangelical Christianity inevitably leads to violence. And consider that the entire Muslim world is much more populous, spread out, historically older, and vastly more diverse than the population of Evangelical Christians. You don’t have to like or agree with Islam as a religion to see the logical fallacy in categorizing all Muslims as dangerous or as having some Western Society destroying agenda.

Despite these obvious facts, there are Americans at political rallies claiming that the US has a problem with Muslims and “secret training camps” where Muslims are training to destroy us. Muslim students are humiliated or isolated for their religion or treated as dangerous. Muslim travelers in the US are often harassed at airports. People make up rumors that our president is Muslim as a way of de-legitimizing him, never mind the fact that legally, even if he were a Muslim, he still has just as much right to be president as a Christian in a country with freedom of religion. They imply that as a Muslim he would not be able to defend his country from Muslim terrorism or would somehow be sympathetic to Muslim enemies, ignoring the fact that sharing a religion does not automatically make two people friends. Furthermore, it historically has rarely made two peoples immune from violent conflict. ISIS kills more Muslims than people of any other religion. People suggest that solutions to the problems in the Middle East should involve nuking the entire region, and our country is loath to accept Muslim refugees from the Syarian civil war, an awful conflict that we helped escalate.

Eighty years ago, another political group became powerful by making the ridiculous claim that all the people in a global, ancient religion were part of some world destroying networked conspiracy. We look back at the Holocaust with disbelief—how could Germans and Nazis really believe that all Jewish people were part of some ancient conspiracy? And yet now we have Americans that seem to think that anyone who practices Islam, a much more populous religion than Judaism, has the potential or desire to become a violent terrorist.

I live and teach in a nearly 100% Muslim community. I have been here for a year and a half and guess what? The vast majority of the people in my community do not care one bit about what the average American person is doing right now. They care about their jobs, their families, their wives, their husbands, their children, their Facebook accounts, their cell phones, their plans for the weekend, their prayers, their dreams. The average Ahmad in my class does not care about building bombs, he cares about building a speaker so he can play Bob Marley or Metallica loud enough to annoy his neighbors. To him, ISIS is just as much a scary boogeyman as it is for Americans. He is not thinking of boarding a plane to destroy America, he is thinking of going to Saudi Arabia to make his pilgrimage. He isn’t worried about whether Western influence is destroying is soul, he’s picking the movies, games, and books that he likes from countries all over the world. He doesn’t care if Americans are having pre-marital sex or if they are converting to his religion; he cares that Fitri, the girl in the next class, smiled at him this morning. He’s wondering if he should get her phone number and try to text her. Like most teenage boys in America, his biggest dilemma is how to get a girlfriend, not how to topple the American empire.

                I won’t claim that there is absolutely no prejudice or ignorance about non-Muslims and foreigners in my community. One of my students told a Peace Corps staff member that she thought all Americans were sadists until she met me. I have had people ask me to convert and made passive aggressive comments to me, such as “you would look so much prettier if you wore a hijab.” Men have asked me impolite questions that they would never ask a Muslim woman. I have been harassed on the street and shouted at because of my skin color. I cringed when a teacher at my school thought that my new principal might be Catholic because he used to work at a Catholic high school, and she was nervous about him leading the school if that were true. I have seen a couple of Indonesian friends post anti-American memes or articles that generalize about Americans or Christians on Facebook. I had an Indonesian friend tell me that Hitler wasn’t that bad because “he only killed Jews, and Jews are evil, look at what they do in Palestine” (as awful as that statement is, at least that person was willing to listen to me and reflect on his opinion when I told him how offended I was). There are cases of religious violence in Indonesia. Every once in a while, churches are burned or protested (and in Christian provinces, sometimes Mosques are also burned). All Indonesians are legally obligated to pick one of five religions (Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist), and marriage between religions is technically illegal. There are extreme political parties in Indonesia that want to ban pre-marital sex and alcohol, and there is often some controversy when non-Muslims gain very politically powerful positions at the federal government level.

  [Some of these issues are further discussed in the blog of a different Peace Corps Indonesia volunteer who is a Muslim American, which you can read here: http://blackhijabiinindonesia.com/2015/09/13/hijab-privilege/ ]

                All that being said, the vast majority of people that I’ve met here, have accepted and loved as I am. I have been welcomed. I have never been told to go home. I have never been called evil, violent, or accused of conspiring against the people in my community. I have never been the suspect of a crime, had my things destroyed, or been overtly bullied. I have never been held responsible for things other Americans or Catholics have done. I have never been blamed for the actions of my government. No one has told me that the world would be a better place if my entire country were nuked or destroyed. I have been invited to religious ceremonies without being forced to participate. I have had Muslims offer to find churches or Catholic communities for me. Furthermore, just because some reverse prejudice exists doesn’t make other prejudice excusable or okay, especially not in the US, a country that preaches liberty and opportunity for all peoples, no matter their background.

 

A fellow non- Muslim Peace Corps Indonesia volunteer wrote in a recent blog:

            
“The people who took us as strangers into their homes are in fact Muslim. These are the people that taught me how to eat with my hands, how to use a squat toilet, how to get from point A to point B, which bus to get on when I am traveling, invite me to their family gatherings, and take care of me when I am sick. Most of these people would give me the shirt off of their back…This is my country of service and these are the people I am serving alongside. I consider that to be a privilege. It is disturbing to me that just because the Extremists also claim to practice their religion, they get a bad reputation for it, and it is not fair in the slightest. One of my students was actually under the impression that Muslims were not allowed in the United States because of all the hate she has seen on the media. That breaks my heart…So for the next person that wants to try to preach their  “Islamophobia” towards me, please take a step back, because that is my family you are talking about.” (taken from katindonesia.tumblr.com/post/129467015440/ignorance)

Questions I have gotten from some Indonesians include, “Do all Americans hate us?” “Do they think I am a terrorist?” As I said at the beginning of this post, I spend a lot of time wondering how my students and friends here would be treated if they came to the United States. I spend time reading the things people from back in the States post on Facebook. Although I rarely see someone post something explicitly Islamophobic, I sometimes see my “liberal” and “tolerant” friends posting some meme comparing Republicans to Muslims as a way to disparage them or some passive aggressive joke implying that Muslims as a whole are extreme, or that Islam is some kind of static, blanket belief system with no diversity or subtlety. I think back to those two idiots at the bar in Seoul.

Sometimes my students tell me that they want to come to America. I look at their smiling faces and think of how genuinely excited most of them are to see me and talk to me. I want to be able to tell all of them that if they went to my country, they would be accepted and loved as much as they have accepted me. I want to tell them that my country is great and beautiful and that they could travel there proudly as Muslims without being harassed or garnering suspicion. I want to tell them that Americans would be curious about them and ready to learn from them. I want to promise them all these things. And I do think they probably would be welcomed and loved and treated well by most people. I have to have faith that the majority of my countrymen would treat my students as the beautiful individual people they are and not as potential criminals or ticking time bombs. I must believe that most Americans would accept their religion as a part of their unique identities, not as a character flaw that needs to be corrected.

I need to trust that most Americans are smarter and better than the sickening phobia tainting our politics and rhetoric, that most Americans are open to learning and accepting, that most Americans would give my Muslim students a chance to teach them about themselves, and that most Americans want to move closer and closer to the ideals of freedom and tolerance on which our nation was founded. I am the only American my students and most of my community has ever met. I am representing our country. To consider that the alternative might be true, that our phobia of them might be stronger than our tolerance, would make me ashamed to represent our country to them.

 So, to my friends and family back home, I ask you to examine some of the beliefs you might have. If there are any that wouldn’t make me proud to walk into my Muslim Indonesian students’ classrooms and represent America to them, then I ask you to take some time to think about whether those beliefs have come from a place of love and logic or one of irrational fear and hate.