Jakarta, Indonesia

A barbed-wire fence surrounds the house for protection.My father yells behind large wooden doors-He listens to Willie Nelson, sipping whiskey while my mother smiles widely with her Gin and tonics.They dance and my young eyes watch late into the night, late into the monsoon air, late into complexity, late into nothing because I can.Servants are possible if you're middle class in a third world country-I become familiar, spying them with each trance of the day, each taste of the real.A driver, a cook, nanny/maid, an artistic gardenerall there for us to prolong a lie.Coming home from school, I savor the friendly cook's lemon merangue pies.The driver drives over speed bumps at alarming rates, our VW bus catches air and I scream, Repeat it!To repeat it because that's what seven year-olds do.My maid reads my face when I need to be held and bathes me when I'm overwhelmed with red, Southeast Asian mud.Meanwhile, my mother listens and jokes with our two-toned parakeets on the porch off to the side.Jakarta thirteen years ago.My immediate family flies to peculiar places-Singapore, Hong Kong.We stay in hotels with movie stars, ordering frog legs from room service, swimming in waterfalls, abusing the newest Asian technologythe fastest remote control cars, electronics galloping the streets and climbing elevators like imperials.We return to the smellsdeplorable sewers line my street with waste, and street games with the vibrant, tan "other" kids are halted when balls fall in the aqueducts.I mysteriously catch worms in my feet, a perpetual love for the barefoot.Behind my house I see a thin man in red shorts.He grips an axe, chopping downward.A chicken with its head cut off runs around for the pride of it all.We eat Nasi Goreng-rice with eggs and shrimp crackers.I grasp chopsticks, become at ease with spices and grin because I can.I ride in a beja'-a bicycle with a cart attached for passengers.I see men playing badminton in fields, going home to their kampungs, ten by ten feet village huts made of grass and cardboard, housing entire families.I attend an international school -I ride a bus while the villagers glance at my fine clothes and bulky books.They occasionally peer at me and my friends who are Canadian, Scottish, and Indian.I imagine where Matt, James and Aniel are now 20

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