Page 42 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
“What didn’t you like about it?” I said.
Parker rolled his eyes. “Joseph here wanted the American experience, whatever that is. He kept moaning about how SGV was too Asian and felt like we never left Asia. Which I told him was pretty racist.”
“I’m just saying, if I’d wanted to be surrounded by Chinese supermarkets and restaurants, I would’ve stayed in Singapore,” Joseph said.
“Should’ve gone to U Mich, like me,” Anabelle said.
“I get what you mean,” I said. “When I first arrived, I was also surprised by how Asian the place was. I liked it though. I found it really comforting because I was so homesick.”
“Yeah,” Parker said. His eyes met mine, and his expression went surprisingly soft. “That was how I felt about it. I moved toWestwood when I transferred to UCLA, and man, I really missed SGV then. I felt so out of place in Westwood.”
I nodded. “I always thought it was funny how different all the neighborhoods in LA felt. And yet you wouldn’t know it if you’ve never been. Before I moved there, LA was just…LA. I never thought about how you could drive down to a different city within LA and feel like you’re in a completely new place. But yeah. I remember driving to Santa Monica once in a while and I enjoyed the place, but I never felt like I belonged there. I was always relieved to go back to San Gabriel.”
“Spoken like a true FOB,” Joseph said, not unkindly.
“Yep, that was what we were. FOBs and proud of it,” Parker said. He grinned at me, and I found myself returning it without even thinking about it. With a start, I realized I was having fun talking to Parker. For the first time, I wasn’t annoyed at the sneak date setup. I wasn’t on edge or defensive. I didn’t feel the need to know exactly where Parker stood on feminism or politics or anything. I was happy, for the moment, to just have a good meal and a nice chat about pleasant things.
I feel it’s important to tell you, my dear Izzy, that at the time, I still wanted to have more control over my own life. I still wanted to carve out a space of my own, to strive for something better than just being somebody’s wife. But like I said, I was worn down, and my fight was without a clear cause. I had no idea what equality might even look like, and so had no idea how to achieve it, and at a certain point, I just wanted to stop fighting. I’m telling you this because I want you to know that it’s okay to feel tired and have a break from time to time. Regroup and take a breather. Gather your thoughts. I didn’t know that then though. I thought just because I was tired, it meant that Ihad given up. Either or. All or nothing. That was me back then. Either I was a feminist icon, swearing off all men, or I was a fifties housewife with zero rights.
So, then and there, I laid down my load. I resolved to stop thinking about all those women’s studies classes I took at Cal, stopped picking apart everything Parker said, trying to look for flaws. More importantly, I resolved to stop thinking of Ellery. I might as well have resolved to stop breathing. But while I never quite stopped thinking of Ellery, over the past couple of years, she’d stopped dominating the forefront of all my thoughts. She took a back seat, letting me know of her quiet presence, and many nights, as I lay in bed, I reached out into the dark recesses of my mind and held her hand. But I only did that when I was alone, when the world was quiet enough for me to breach the surface and step into the past, and so I thought I was okay, on the whole. I was finally ready to open my heart up to someone who wasn’t Ellery.
• • •
Mama and Papa were elated with Parker. As far as boyfriends went, he fulfilled their every requirement:
Came from a good, affluent Chinese-Indonesian family. Check.
Had a degree from a well-known US/UK college. Check.
Was hardworking, with a bright future ahead of him. Check.
To be fair, the last point was still in progress. At age twenty-six, Parker was still unsure about his career path. He’d spent thelast two years working at HSBC’s private banking sector, which earned him a decent wage but was nothing compared to what the most affluent Chinese-Indonesian family companies could earn. He did have a family company—a large corporation manufacturing baby products, but it was in its fourth generation, and by now, there were too many cousins and uncles and aunts already involved in the company.
“They’re always fighting each other too,” Parker told me. “I hate it. After college, I worked there for a couple of years, and oh man. I hardly spoke to my cousins outside of work. It was destroying our relationship. I had to leave.”
I liked that he’d decided to put family before a position at the company. I liked a lot of things about Parker. He seemed different from most of the guys I’d come across in Indonesia. He liked to discuss philosophical questions with me, we picked apart current events and found each other to be on the same side more often than not, and above all, I felt like he talked to me as an equal. Something that was sadly a rarity here.
In those days, there wasn’t much to do in Jakarta. Jakarta was a metropolis designed for motorists. There weren’t many sidewalks or parks or anything you could do outdoors. On weekends, people just went to these huge indoor malls and hung out there. But Parker opened up a whole new side of the city to me.
On Saturday mornings, he’d call and say something like “Wear something you don’t mind getting dirty.”
Then he’d pick me up and not tell me where we were going until we got there, and I’d discover a beautiful, airy little pottery shop that ran pottery classes on the weekends. We’d spend the morning there, working with wet clay until we created cute little misshapen pots, after which he’d hold my hand as we wovethrough the unforgiving traffic to a nearby breakfast place that specialized in everything bacon—another rarity in Indonesia, which was a Muslim-majority country.
Another weekend, he told me, “Wear workout clothes and sneakers you don’t mind trashing.”
We ended up driving outside of the city to a place called Sentul. Sentul was an area just outside of Jakarta that was surrounded by national parks. Parker had arranged for us to go on a hike. I’d never gone hiking in Indonesia before. Back at Cal, I’d been to Tahoe and Yosemite a couple of times and considered myself a decent amateur hiker, but Sentul fully kicked my ass. First of all, the tropical heat was no joke, and the trail was so muddy it was impossible not to keep falling down. But I had fun anyway, because it had been years since I’d left the city and gone back out into nature, and the silence out here and the sweet air, free of pollution, cleared my mind.
