Page 40 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
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 mytime 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.”
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. Veryclever 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 didfind 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?”
