EDW: Excessive Display of Wealth

I am sitting on my bed of my Balinese homestay.

My homestay cousin, Ayu, sits crossed-legged on the other end of the bed, listening to my ipod.

Her phone has broken, and thus her access to Justin Bieber and Avril Lavigne has been paused.

She works as a waitress in the nearby tourist town, speaking phrases of broken English she has been taught for the purpose of becoming a better waitress.

She asks me if I like studying, and I say I do, although I am here in Bali now, ‘studying’ abroad, for a break from the intense studying that got me into the place I now want a break from in the first place.

I ask her if she likes studying.

She does, she says.

Then why aren’t you in school, I ask, in my Bahasa Indonesia that’s smaller than her English.

Mahal.

Expensive.

It costs money to learn, even in what Westerners escape to and deem as Paradise with a capital P.

Even in Bali.

I tell her I’m sorry.

Ma’af.

She says, “No problem. I work,” and offers a brave smile.

I know she is telling the truth.

And that she also isn’t.

In my stay here of six days, she has come to my room each night.

The first time she asked me if I was going to sleep. I said I was, but she came in anyway, and now she no longer asks.

We talk in the ways we can. Eye contact. Smiles. Shrugs. Words exchanged through the passing of a Bahasa Indonesia-English dictionary back and forth across my bed.

A few nights into my stay, she feels comfortable enough to inspect my stuff. My laptop, ipod, iphone, and kindle are out charging. I hadn’t thought to put them away, thinking of my room in terms of an American sense of privacy that does not exist in Bali.

She wants to know what the kindle is. When I tell her it is a bucu, she doesn’t believe me.

I show her the books, with words like “the” and “I” the only identifiable ones, and I show her how to flip through the pages with her fingers.

She does not know what the words mean, but she flicks through multiple complete books from start to finish until she gets bored.

She tells me she doesn’t have any friends now. That if I go back to America, which we both know is a when, she will be very sad.

She had one friend in the village, she tells me, but she is now gone, now with another girl.

I only know two weeks worth of Bahasa, so I cannot ask her why they cannot all be friends, why eighteen year-old girls in Bali must choose one.

I do manage, however, to ask her why she “tidak bicara ini taman?” Why she doesn’t speak to this friend?

She doesn’t know, she says. She is a lonely girl, she says.

Her words, not mine.

I have already maxed out the permutations of my limited Indonesian vocabulary and cannot say anything more that is appropriate (I eat fried rice everyday for breakfast did not seem relevant), so I put forward another Ma’af.

Sorry.

In class this week, our fearless leader Bu Ari has told us about the current suicide epidemic amongst Balinese teenagers.

Recently, she said, she read of a teenage son committing suicide when his father couldn’t buy him a new phone; the social pressure was too much.

You read of one every week in the paper, she says.

Apparently it got bad fifteen years ago. Globalization. Materialism. They say comparison is the root of all unhappiness.

These maxims of humanity, which have always been true, seem to be getting truer.

Bali has been privy to brutal Western forces for hundreds of years, from the Dutch colonial bureaucrats to lost yuppies on an Eat Pray Love tour today.

But based off of youth suicide rates today, somehow the latter appears to be having a worse impact. Or at least a more brutally palpable one.  

Which is shocking. Tourists, unlike colonialists, at least pay for their damage.

I am reminded of a story I once heard from someone who had spent two years in the Peace Corps on the remote, sinking Pacific island of Kiribati.

She told me many stories of her time there, but the one that stayed with me was how the first time, not so long ago, a movie had been brought to the island, multiple people killed themselves after it was over.

Their whole world had been that island, its stories and storms, the fish one could eat and the fish one couldn’t. And now their whole world was gone.

And for as long a time as any, they had been as happy as you or me. As much as anyone else is, always returning to one’s internal equilibrium, floating in his own paradigm, the turtle steadily carrying the world on its back.

But then images from the outside flooded in, of snow and big cars and shops and cowboys and God knows what else, and it was too much to bear in one two-hour sitting.

Not because stuff is the source of life’s goodness.

Not because people in America are any happier than the people of Kiribati, or Bali.

In fact, the evidence, last I checked, seems to point to the contrary.

But in the moment of impact, the sheer shock and brutal force of the comparison, beyond comprehensible or natural distances in space and time, obliterated another abiding truth.

Wherever you go, there you are.

I believe this applies to everyone.

It doesn’t matter if it’s because you got: the-Porsche-you-had-been-eyeing-for-months-and-at-first-you-were-excited-but-now-you-feel-just-the-same-as-you-did-before-you-spent-all-that-money.

Or if it’s because you got: a-new-sharp-knife-that-cuts-fish-better-than-your-old-one-and-at-first-you-were-excited-but-now-you-feel-just-the-same-as-you-did-before.

I’m not a psychologist, but I’m willing to bet a lot and them some that this phenomenon applies equally to Bali or Kiribati as it does to America.

Then why all of the suicides?

Because knowing that wherever you go, there you are takes time.

It takes exposure. It takes the luxury and privilege of having, and realizing that as wonderful as it is at first, that it bides the time, how it wanes faster and stronger, and you will soon be just a girl again, or just a boy.

On the phone yesterday, when I told her what I was chewing on, my Mom shared my thoughts back with me in the biblical terms of the apple and the fall from Eden, how you can only truly know Eden for what it is once you have fallen from it. How to fall is a tragedy, but also a privilege.

Don’t get me wrong.

I think stuff matters. I’m a fan of stuff.

I wouldn’t want to give up my house, or my retainer, or my favorite pair of jeans, or that burrito I ate last night for dinner because I was homesick and I could afford to. Or my education or family travels. Or my personal library. The list goes on.

I could fill this page with the stuff I love.

Stuff is nice. It helps. It does. Money matters. Not as much as people think it does, but more than English majors like myself like to think.

There’s all the research on how much and how little money matters.

But that’s not why I’m writing this instead of my essay for Field Methodology and Ethics class tomorrow right now.

I am writing this because of two memories.

Two years ago, I left an NGO peace and conflict school in Wales that was a social experiment in multicultural understanding through exposure and communal living.

Of the many special parts of this school, the one that shocks most people I know in America, even more than the communal showers, is the policy of EDW: Excessive Displays of Wealth.

We had a socially enforced policy of limiting our public usage of ostentatious goods, being a part of a community comprised of everyone from princes to refugees.

There was no punishment for breaching EDW other than shame and scrutiny, and for the most part, at least beyond what any American I know can imagine, it was followed.

Ipods, iphones, and computers were only to be used for individual pleasure inside one’s room. If it was for music or a movie to be communally shared, that was OK, but other than that, luxury goods were limited to the private sphere only. Even the wealthiest kids, the seemingly flippant ones, bought clothing that showed no particular affiliation to a fancy brand.

Without being asked, because that was how it was done.

Over the course of my two years there, I completely forgot about how special and rare EDW was until I arrived at an elite private liberal arts college.

My first night of college, everyone sat around in our common room on their Mac laptops and iphones, chatting and texting and facebooking simultaneously.

I walked in, shocked. I was horrified, but I also felt liberated.

No more pretending like I wasn’t the white upper middle class girl I was. In America, there is no pretending when it comes to class or race.

The second memory is also at this same school, when my dorm had a fire and I lost every item of stuff that was at all relevant to my current life, two years of letters from my Mom, and pictures, and jewelry, and my prom dress, and books, and class notes.

And how little it mattered so very soon, how little I thought of it all.

But the flip side of that coin, the side we don’t talk about, is how six weeks later, I already had a suitcase full of stuff when I left.

From friends who had stuff to spare, and from stuff my parents sent me, and from stuff I bought. I had insurance and a family who could spare whatever needed to be spared for their daughter to have what she needed. And wanted.

I forgot about the favorite dress I had intended to wear for graduation and my books. But that’s because there were new dresses and new books, more dresses and more books.

You can describe this phenomenon in cosmic terms, about how when you create space, the universe rushes in.

As much I like aphorisms, this sentence is an abstract way of avoiding talking about the reality of stuff, how stuff and cosmic truths repeatedly defy each other, about the costs of being alive that have nothing to do with what we would like to believe.

Two years later, I still love what the EDW policy stands for, for equality and respect, for no one having to feel lesser than because of a lack of stuff, because the playing field should be level.

But it’s not.

EDW tries to make stuff not matter, but it’s very existence illuminates how much it does.

Not because of any intrinsic value, not because people with ipods are any more enlightened or loved, but because of what stuff does to people.

What were the creators of the policy scared of?

In Bali, sitting across the bed from my homestay cousin, I think I now understand a little more.

Stuff doesn’t matter, and yet it does.

I know see EDW’s meaning as this:

Stuff shouldn’t matter, but it does, and not in the ways you would think, and this is scary and awful, and because we can, in our bubble, in the middle of nowhere, full of comparatively like-minded individuals, distract you from it for as long as we possibly can, not because of how little it matters, but because of how much it matters, because of its unfathomable ability to tear lives to shreds. We cannot save the islanders of Kiribati, or all of the lonely Balinese girls with broken phones, but we can save you, for a while, because you are here.

It is an easy thing for me to say and know, an American girl who has never wanted anything, an American girl who will, mayahashem, one day go home as planned with the return ticket her Dad bought for her on his computer with his checking account.

I know how little lasting impact buying the next, new, shining thing will have, but I also know this because of having had the very privilege of having it.

I do not think Ayu would be any happier in America listening to Justin Bieber than she is here, surrounded by many generations and branches of her family, living in a family compound that has existed longer than my family has been American.

She does not seem to fully know how special her part in the ancestral ceremony every six months is, how special her familial ties are, everyone she knows having equally strong ones too.

How lucky she is to know of ancestors to pray to, to know the rhythms of temple life, to belong to the Balinese concept of Desa Kala Patra -- space, time, person -- to be connected to spirits, to believe in cosmic harmony, to not have to fight against everything around her to live a life that is also good to other people.

But I do. And that’s a privilege. And a luxury.

So I sit on my borrowed bed with Ayu, in a house belonging to her family for longer than my own people can possibly imagine.

I say Ma’af.

I let her borrow my ipod.

It’s hers for as long as she wants.