My mom leaves for Beijeing in 7 hours. She’s going to be doing a series of ESL seminars.
It’s only now really settling in that my parents are seriously preparing to head overseas long term in just six months. Back to Indonesia, where I got my first glimpse of just how big the world is.
I’m really going to miss them. I often take it for granted that my parents are just amazing people and that I can talk to them and go grab a meal with them pretty much whenever I want. They’re terribly wise people, and I’ve learned a lot just from watching them. I’m seriously going to miss them, and suddenly six months doesn’t seem as long as it used to.
Yet I understand the draw. There’s something special, something more human in a way, about the people of Indonesia (and of most of the other places I’ve visited in southeast Asia). Something that I miss a lot here in the States. I suppose I might just be looking through the tinted glasses of nostalgia, but I felt the same thing when I was in Venezuela a couple of years ago.
There’s always a strong temptation to talk about the rampant materialism in the States as the culprit, but I think that’s too simplistic. It’s a significant cultural difference, and I think it’s tied into the way we view community. There’s this amazingly tight sense of community, and I sort of wonder if it might be linked to the crushing poverty.
As terrible as this sounds, the literal interdependency of the community gives it a vibrancy that I seriously feel deprived of. In the States, for the most part, we have everything we need to survive, and we have it independent of the community around us. I could, quite literally, support myself working a crappy part-time job. It wouldn’t be a great life, but I could do it. (Of course I have no dependents, which is a huge deal.)
This is true even of many people in the lower class, at least based on my exposure to them (which is, as always, biased and limited). They don’t depend on one another for their needs. This is partially due to the fact that an impersonal government provides some (if not enough) assistance, but I think it’s primarily cultural.
Anyway, that sense of community, of inter-dependence, is incredibly attractive to me sometimes. That sense of needing and being needed, and that sense of depending on dependable people… Well, I miss it.
Of course I say all this with the realization that I’m a guilty party here. I mean, I’ve pretty strongly bought into the “be self-sufficient” thing, which undermines genuine dependence. And I’m not really talking so much about material dependence. It’s the fact that I fight so hard to be emotionally independent that is so interesting to me.
It’s something I should work on. If you’re one of the few locals reading this… next time you see me, bring this up. Maybe I’ll have made some progress.
Thomas
My girlfriend is Hispanic, and she lives next to one set of grandparents, across the street from an aunt and uncle, 2 minutes from the other grandparents and another aunt and uncle….you get the idea. After almost 6 years, I’m still trying to get adjusted to the incredible tightly-knit family structure that she takes for granted. Especially because my family is way more spread-out, smaller and from a number of cultural backgrounds.
So, yeh, I think “American” culture is very different, regardless of income level, and you can see it to varying degrees among American people who still have a heavy investment in their root cultures. I blame the Puritans. And the cowboys, a little bit.
I hope you work some of it out, and that your parents have an awesome time in Indonesia (randomly enough, my parents used to spend a lot of time there, I have memories from Indonesia as a child. Maybe we’re secretly the same person!)
-Nathan