So Fat, so Beautiful: An American Woman in Indonesia

I had the remnants of a cold but was feeling good as I slipped into my running shoes for the first time since my bike accident.

As I stepped out the door, Shienda, my Indonesian co-teacher, called my name, “Grace!”
I stopped in my tracks, “What?” She looked up from her laptop to study me, then pronounced, “Grace you are SO fat.”

I looked down at my 120ish pound body. I didn’t feel fat, or at least not any fatter than usual to deserve one of the most damning judgments in the English-speaking-female world. Seeing the disbelief on my face, she assured me with her matter-of-fact voice, “Yes, Grace, you have definitely gotten fatter. Look at your stomach, your face- everything is now bigger.”

I think I rambled off some lame excuses: I’ve been sick, I haven’t been exercising because of my leg, blah blah. Shienda, agreed and generously added that, it “must have been the food” from the conference in Lombok that I had just returned from.

With the causes of my fatness agreed upon, Shienda went back to Facebook and I returned to my running, making a mental note to eat less deep-fried tempe.

In Indonesia, you are either very fat or “need to eat more”, and someone must always remind you, lest you forget the size of your own waist. Perhaps one reason you need to be reminded so often is because weight tends to fluctuate in Indonesia more severely than it does in the Western world. There have been times when I have been told, “Grace your face looks like it is sinking in, please, you must eat more” only to be asked hours later, “You used to be so skinny, how did you become so fat?”

Or perhaps this is a way of looking out for your pals. In America, we expect our friends to be honest to us when we’re drinking too or dating a jerk so that we will not wake up married to God’s-greatest-punishment-to-the-female-race. But in Indonesia, your girlfriends just want to make sure that you know when you look less “cantik” (pretty) so that you can whip yourself back into shape and attract a spouse before the ever-approaching marriage deadline- age 27.

But the problem I have with that theory is, Indonesians never really sound concerned when they tell you you’re too fat. I’ve seen Indonesian students introduce their classmates as, “the fat one” with a mean-sounding laugh and even call their teachers “big and ugly” to their face. Office-banter usually involves someone pointing out the fattest person in the room.

The whole phenomenon of weight-bashing can be unsettling and even damaging to the frail self-esteem of the average, sheltered American who has been told all her life that it is “okay to have extra curves” and has only, only talked about weight publically in the following context: Girl A- I’m so fat, Girlfriends of Girl A- OMG, no you’re not.

But having grown up in a Korean-American household where every pimple and weight fluctuation has been monitored by the watchful eye of my grandparents, I wasn’t too surprised by the sudden attention my butt received and was even amused by the contrast between the matter-of-fact attitude Indonesians take towards weight (one Indonesian explained that telling someone they are fatter is like commenting that their hair got longer) compared to the culture of deceit that pervades American fat-talk. Just think: how many Americans have told their friends, “Oh you look so skinny” while silently thinking, “ those pale rolls of fat gushing from the sides of your pants are repulsive.”

I’m not saying that children should call their teachers fat or that you should start telling your friends what you really think about their rolls of pasty blubber. I just find the contrast between blunt honesty and deceit, well, interesting.

After all, even my tough ego was ever-so-slightly wounded after Shienda’s evaluation of my anatomy. But fortunately, there is a panacea to the wounds inflicted upon the over-sensitive.

No matter how fat you really are, if you are a female American, you will always be cantik (pretty) so long as you live in Indonesia. In fact, I get reminded about a dozen times a day how “cantik I look with my jilbob” or how “cantik my white skin is” or how “cantik I look” in my hideous school uniform. When I walk through the hallways in my school, I hear, “I love you!” “You’re beautiful!” from my students- male and female- and if I need an afternoon ego-boost, I need only to walk around my neighborhood to hear, “Beautiful woman!” from the local construction workers.

And from what I’ve gathered, this is not unique to me, but common to all the Fulbright English teachers- big and small- who live and work in Indonesia. We American women are exotic and yes- beautiful- even in our slightly-chunky state to the eyes of Indonesians.

So if you’re a little curvy or slightly malnourished, remember that no matter what Indonesians have to say about your waist size, you’re still damn sexy.

Questions from Mount Ijen

Looking down into the crater, I saw nothing but endless miles of white-streaked dirt and rocks descending into a sea of smoke. But a few obligatory photos later, I saw what we came for. A strong, sulfur-infused wind lifted the fog, revealing at the bottom of the crater, the vast robins-egg-blue lake which put Mount Ijen in Lonely Planet's guide to Indonesia and brought me to the summit of the active volcano.

The lake, which sits on Ijen's summit, is superb and certainly worthy of any backpacker- lonely or not. But what emerged from the desolate crater (kawah) impressed me more. One by one, a man appeared over the cliff, carrying two baskets filled with hefty blocks of bright-yellow sulfur over his shoulders. I crept over the edge to see where these hardy miners were coming from but the path was too steep and whatever I would've been able to see was obscured in smoke. So, I went down.

Most of the men I passed on my way down looked about my height, but thinner. My hiking buddy pointed out that the upper backs of older men- which you could glimpse through their shirt collars- had been blackened from years of carrying the sulfur (usually 70 kilos at a time) over their shoulders. They wore worn and torn rubber boots. Perhaps these protected the mens' feet from getting wet, but I wondered if they could keep a man from slipping down the steep muddy mountain paths after one of Indonesia's regular downpours. I saw at least one worker in rubber flip flops.

As I carefully made my way down path, using hands and feet to keep from falling 500 meters or so into the crater, miners briskly passed me up and down the steep, rocky path , like mountain goats seemingly unaware of the danger of one misstep. I asked a couple if they were ever afraid, "Ngak, no!" they would respond with a smile, "Biasa,"- the usual.

When the sulfur wind picked up again, the men mining below still looked like small toys in a lemon-yellow, baby-blue world. The workers continued to pass, some with cotton cloths tied around their noses and mouths, but most directly facing the toxic wind, occasionally coughing and spitting. Despite burying my nose in my shirt, the sulfur chocked me and brought back that rattling cough I'd battled my first month living in Indonesia. My vision blurred, my eyes burned and my breath became wheezes. When my friend suggested we head back up, I took the opportunity to escape the suffocating crater. My last memory from climbing out of the crater was seeing a worker near the top casually smoking a cigarette.

When we emerged from the kawah and I had recaptured my breath, questions flooded my head, nagging me throughout the day. How do the workers come back every day? They're paid about $4 for each trip they make down into the crater and few men can make more than two. That's more than you can make as a farmer in East Java, but surely the dangers are greater. Why can't the companies using the sulfur (and no doubt, profiting) invest in their workers by making conditions safer? Where are the pulleys? The gas masks?

What is the value of one life?