Sunday, March 20, 2016

6:30 a.m. Room 7, Tamariah Losmen

Siantar, Sumatra

I didn’t make much progress in my search for a new smart phone yesterday. Once I started my research into the Xiaomi brand, things got very complicated very fast. In a way, it’s connected with my concerns about Xiaomi (and the other Chinese brands): I get confused by the language they use and the naming conventions. It’s difficult to make any sense out of the different models. Their names are all over the place and very confusing. And they aren’t generally accurate. With Samsung, it’s straightforward for the most part. The J series is their low-end series. And the models are named J1, J2, J5, and J7. The J1 is the cheapest. The J2 is better and more expensive. Then comes the J5. And finally, the J7 is the top of the cheap line. After that comes the A line. It’s their mid range line. They you get the S line—their premium line. It’s easy to figure out. But the Xiaomi names are not organized or systematic. You have to guess what kind of phone each is. And even when you look at the phones in the store, it is still confusing. They don’t label their boxes clearly. I’m worried that this kind of organizational madness will extend to the operating system they use. The Samsung system is very simple and clear. And it appears to be efficient and well-engineered. Who knows with Xiaomi?

Xiaomi even uses names incorrectly. I learned quickly that there are at least two variants of the Redmi 2 and the Redmi 3. The Redmi 2 has a 5-inch screen. And the Redmi 2 Note has a 5.5-inch screen. Similarly, the Redmi 3 has a 5-inch screen and the Redmi 3 Note has a 5.5-inch screen. It was good that I figured that out. However, the word “Note” is generally reserved for phones that have a stylus that you can use to physically write on the screen. The Samsung Note series is a good example of this. But Xiaomi calls their phablets “Note” even though they don’t have that feature or capability. It’s sloppy. And I think Chinese products in general are sloppy. They’re more concerned with image over content, style over substance. They like to have fancy features and fancy names even if neither of those is applied very well.

Having said all that, I’m still considering a Xiaomi. If I don’t buy a Samsung, then a Xiaomi is probably the next best option. I’ll go back to the Anda Hotel later this morning and do some more research. I also have to look into the other Chinese brands: Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo. They are attractive compared to Samsung models because they offer a lot higher specs for the same price.

Not much else to say this morning. My mood is very low. I’m still being affected by the theft of my phone. I’m angry about it, and I’m taking it out on all Indonesians. I’m far less inclined to be nice to people or give them the benefit of the doubt. I read hostile and malicious intent in everyone around me now. When some fairly scruffy person calls out to me and wants to talk, I ignore them now. They always just want money anyway. When anyone gets too close, I glare at them and move away. I had a typical encounter with a neighbor woman yesterday. I ran into her while she was standing outside of her house and business. I think I mentioned her once before. She used to be a teacher, and now she runs a business with her husband making the large flowery banners that are placed on streets to celebrate birthdays, births, graduations, weddings, etc. She told me a story about meeting another foreigner a few months ago. This guy was from Britain, and he was also staying at the Tamariah Losmen. The woman struck up a conversation with him, and this guy asked her if she knew how to get to the immigration office. The woman offered to drive him there. Afterward, this British guy told her that he had never in his entire life met someone as nice and friendly as her. His saying that seemed to be the point of the story. She wanted me to understand how wonderful she was, I guess.

Well, I ran into her a second time, and we chatted for a minute or two. I got bored pretty quickly, because it was clear that she wasn’t listening to me at all. Her English was pretty good, but she lacked the ability to pay attention. This is very common among Indonesians. I’ve realized that I could say anything and it wouldn’t matter. I could just say, “I’m a vampire, and I’m a thousand years old” or “Yesterday, I got in a spaceship and flew to Venus” and it would make no difference. They’d just agree with me and then keep talking. They don’t listen. I had been on my way to the variety store next door to buy a cold drink, so I said goodbye to the woman and left.

A few minutes later, I came out of the store with a cold coffee in a box. I was sipping on the straw. I assumed the woman would have gone into her house long ago. But she came over when she saw me, and she said, “You bought only one? Why didn’t you buy one for me?” There was no twinkle in her eye to indicate that she was joking. She was dead serious. In a funny twist, I HAD purchased two cold coffees. I had a second one in my pocket, and I planned to enjoy it after a quick cold shower. But now I whipped it out and handed it to her with a smile. She took it without saying thank you. She didn’t even smile. In fact, she didn’t even drink it. One of her young children came toddling up and grabbed her leg, and she handed the cold coffee to the kid. It was a strange encounter, and it did nothing to make me feel better about Indonesians.

I pondered this encounter and everything else as I walked downtown yesterday to shop for a new phone. I was angry with all the people around me, and I thought about why I was even here. In a general sort of way, I think I spend time in these countries because I want to learn about the world. But, to be honest, I think I know what I need to know. I’ve been to enough places to come to a conclusion, and more trips to more places really won’t add anything. And, sadly, my conclusion is that these places suck. The life here sucks. Indonesia is an awful place. Living here is an awful experience. The people I meet think I’m rich, and they want to steal everything I have. The people aren’t very smart. They’re harsh and kind of vulgar. And most of the countries in this part of the world are a variation on that theme: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Philippines. As a man from Canada, I don’t belong in these places. They are too harsh for me. Life is too difficult. People are aggressive. They see Western people as rich victims that they can steal from with impunity.

I was thinking about how I can get revenge against the man who stole my phone. And the best revenge really would be to simply leave Indonesia. Go back to Canada. Enjoy what life has to offer in Canada. Just sit there in Canada and live a good and pleasant and interesting life and laugh about the guy stuck here in horrible Siantar. That is a terrible thought, I imagine, but it is how I feel right now. I could see coming back to Indonesia or the Philippines or any other Asian country. But I’d come back not with the idea of learning about life here but as a normal tourist—for pleasure. I’d come and spend money and enjoy the good things here and screw the rest of it.

Not for the first time, I ended up thinking about how my thoughts have changed over the course of my lifetime. Ever since I can remember, I’ve thought about doing good. I’ve never had burning ambitions for myself. I never really even saw the possibility of becoming rich or successful. Those words never had any meaning for me. That’s probably a lack of imagination on my part. I wouldn’t know what to do with money even if I had it. I’ve never had an interest in a house or anything remotely like that. When I thought about what to do with my life, the best answer I could come up with was to help people. I’m a classic beta wolf. I’m not an alpha. I like to be behind the scenes and help other people do what they want to do. It gives me pleasure to help other people. So when I went to university, the best I could come up with was social work. Then came my trip to India, and I switched over to International Development. I thought I wanted to help people. At least I had no other particular plans for my life.

My plan to help people never quite worked out. It’s not entirely clear to me why that is. I often tell people that once I started traveling, I discovered that international aid did much more harm than good. I saw firsthand the damage that it did in Ethiopia. And I saw how corrupt and perverted it was in Guinea. And I saw the examples of Taiwan and South Korea—countries that just a few decades earlier were classic “poor” countries and now were highly advanced and they did it entirely on their own. I also tell the story of how my courses at the university were not really about how to effectively offer international development aid. They were more case studies in all the ways that international aid went wrong and caused problems and how it was just a political tool to benefit the donating country. The aid offered was never about helping the other country in the first place but about benefiting the donor country. Cynicism abounded.

I don’t know if the story I just told is accurate or true in any way. It might be just a convenient construct. The more accurate story might be that I was just wrong about wanting to help people. I thought I did. But deep down, I don’t have the helping gene. In fact, I generally don’t like people at all. My brief forays into social work left me cold. I did some volunteer work, and I found I couldn’t stand the people that I was supposed to be helping. I disliked spending time with them. In your mind, you imagine poor people as noble and struggling, and you think that helping them will feel good. But these people end up being rather stupid and boring. I was never able to understand them or their lives. They’ll take whatever you give them and come back for more, but nothing ever gets better. They are not noble people striving for something better. They are quite content living the life they’re living. It’s who they are. And you can’t change them. So there are no good feelings to be had in the helping department.

This idea gets twenty times stronger when you apply it to other countries. If I can’t begin to understand most of the people in Canada, how could I possibly relate to someone from another country entirely, speaking a different language and living in a different culture? The short answer is that I couldn’t. There are probably lots of poor people out there in Siantar right now who could use some help. I saw lots of them yesterday as I walked around looking at smart phones. But these people were yelling at me, were dirty, had a cigarette hanging out of their lips, were shirtless and shuffling around in flip-flops and were generally unpleasant. I don’t like them as people. And any single one of them would rob me blind if they had the chance. And if I gave them money or anything else, they would take it with both hands and then hate me for it. They’d smile to my face but laugh at me behind my back for being so dumb. They’d think of me as a child—and they’d be right. I am a child by comparison. I’m a child of Canada. I’m not comfortable in a place like Siantar where you have to fight for your existence.

This is a very dumb example, but it gets to the core of what I’m talking about. I left the Tamariah Losmen in the afternoon to walk downtown to look at smart phones. I had only gone about twenty steps along what passes for a sidewalk when a woman on a scooter came up beside me. She was driving down the street, and she wanted to turn into some area off to my left. She was moving slowly, and she got in front of me and then she turned. She cut me off, nearly hit me, and then she stopped her scooter directly in front of me. And she just sat there while she called out to someone and conducted her business.

I’m sure this woman was a very nice woman. She looked like a normal sort of woman in her early forties—a wife and mother going about the errands of the day. But when she wanted to turn off the road and stop, she just turned and stopped. She didn’t look. She didn’t care if anyone was there. She didn’t care if she hit me. She didn’t care if she blocked my path. Not only didn’t she care, she didn’t even notice. And THAT is the difference. In her world, you just do whatever you want and you don’t even notice whether it hurts someone else. You don’t have the luxury of caring whether it hurts someone else. That’s not your problem. You take care of yourself, and everyone else is not your problem.

My mindset is completely different. I’m constantly aware of other people and my affect on them. That’s part of growing up in Canada. I don’t make noise if that noise will disturb other people. I don’t throw garbage on the ground. I hold open doors. I see this difference a hundred times a day. For example, people here routinely stuff their money into their pockets. And the bills are crumpled up into a little ball. When they go into a store to buy something, they just pull these crumpled balls out of their pockets and toss them on the counter. Every time I see that, I think it is the rudest thing imaginable. Just the gesture of tossing the money onto the counter is bad enough. It seems so disrespectful to the clerk. But to leave the money in a crumpled ball so that the clerk has to open it up and smooth it out before he or she can put it in the till is even worse. To me, that is extremely rude. All of my money comes out of a wallet, so it is flat to begin with. But even so, I instinctively smooth it out and unfold any folded corners and otherwise make it presentable while I’m waiting for my turn. Then I hand it to the clerk—usually with both hands because that is considered polite in Asia.

And when I’m riding my bicycle or if I were driving a scooter, and I had to turn into a parking lot, I would wait and let the pedestrian pass and then turn behind them. I would never turn directly in front of them and then stop and block their way. When this happened to me yesterday, I became a bit stubborn. I had to come to a sudden stop or be hit by this woman as she turned. And then I had to walk around her to keep on my path. But I refused at first to do that. I just stood there beside her scooter and waited patiently for her to get out of my way. It was the patented passive aggressive mood—the one that ends up hurting me more than the other people. I was intending for her to notice me and then realize what she had done. I wanted her to feel bad. But that’s hopeless. I stood there for what felt like forever. And not only did this woman not care, she never even noticed. She didn’t know she had nearly hit me. She didn’t know she was blocking my path. That’s how life is here, and that’s why I get so upset and so stressed out.

Another good example occurred inside the convenience store when I bought my cold coffee. Stores in general in Asia are very poorly designed as far as traffic flow is concerned. The space in the lanes is generally too narrow. And coolers will be placed in such a way that if you open the door, you block the entire lane. No one can get past. In fact, if you stand in front of the cooler to think about your purchase, you also block the entire lane. I’m intensely aware of all of this, and when I go into one of these stores, I make sure that I don’t block access for anyone else. I’m aware of the people around me. If I see someone coming down the lane, I make room for them.

Well, when I went inside to get my cold coffee, I found a man standing at the long line of coolers containing all the cold drinks. He happened to be right in front of the one beside where I wanted to go. This man had opened the cooler door wide. It was wide open. And he stood there looking at the various drinks for a long, long, long time. He even grabbed two drinks in his hands and then started reading the ingredients on the back. This went on for a long time. Just think about all the rude things this man was doing. He was letting all the cold air out of the cooler, which is going to cost the company money. He is letting moisture and condensation build up on the inside of the cooler so the glass door will be obscured for the next customers, and it will mean having to clean the cooler later. By standing there looking at the products for so long, he was blocking everyone else from getting past him. People couldn’t even approach him to ask him to scooch over because he had the door open and he was standing on the inside of the door. The door completely blocked the lane and it was not possible for anyone to get by no matter what.

Me being me, I stood nearby and patiently waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. I ended up wanting to scream at the man for being the bloody rude idiot that he is. But of course I didn’t. He was almost certainly just a nice, normal man – just like the woman on the scooter. He didn’t know he was being rude. He wasn’t aware that I was waiting. He wasn’t aware that people couldn’t get past him. If I yelled at him, he wouldn’t know what I was yelling about. He’d think I was rude or crazy. Then came the funny capper. The man finally decided which drink he wanted. He turned and left and didn’t close the cooler door. He sort of swung it just enough so that he could get by, and then he left it wide open.

What is that? Where does that behavior come from? And the scooter lady and the cooler man were just two examples of dozens of similar things that happened as I walked around downtown Siantar. The city is a disaster zone largely because no one cares even the slightest about causing problems for anyone else. They all do exactly what they want to do without any regard for the comfort or discomfort of anyone else. This extends to driving (of course), walking, standing, sitting, and the design of businesses. You do whatever you want to do. You take what you want. It’s a rough, discourteous, dirty, uncomfortable, unpleasant world. You fight for your place in it. To survive here, you have to be tough and you have to push and shove and argue and demand. And that isn’t my personality. I’m the exact opposite of all of those things. As such, I get trampled.

 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01