30 September 2009
Quakezilia
Another quake hit us here, on the west coast Sumatra, west of Padang the capital of West Sumatra Province. This is the second one this year on this line of quake zone. I was in a mall in Medan, North Sumatra yesterday when it happened. People ran out for a while but resumed their normal activities soon. The shake was felt in Singapore as well. Earlier yesterday another hot news incident was happening but got subsumed by the quake news. A group of gangsters stormed the counter of one airline in Jakarta's International Airport. They just went in and did the rampage. The concern for me was that my sister was there and joined the staffs and others that ran for life. That's insane right. Well, that's a snipet of life here, always around some CNN headliners.
My Little Prayer
I am saying prayer tonight for my sister and her baby girl. May they get well soon.
A Gondryesque Experience
Memory is a curious thing. This trip to the city I grew up until 12 years of old has been fascinating. What I like is not because it has been so long (16 years) but more of the heightened transient experience I got going inside. I don’t think I can have this rare experience again on my next trips.
Everybody, and the brain, is constantly producing new memory and probably shelve the old ones someplace in the multiplex of folds. Memory of sequences and spaces are recorded as well. More relevant to many people are places in the childhood. Some occasionally float through the present. Some come out and reconfigured in dreams. Some are retrieved by external means such as conversations, photographs, and retold stories by others. True? And as a natural biological process, these old memories are then reshelved again. The process continues indefinitely and produces one composite memory of a place, the official version that is reported by our brain to us. Wait, wait, did I just say “reported by our brain to us?” Let’s not wake-up Mr. Descartes. I think I am not I think therefore I might be something else.
So this time, I got to revisit places that have existed in memory for so long, and have gone through so many auto revisions. As I go to places physically, I am also making a parallel neuro-trip in my space/time memory, repatching and fixing the database of images inside. Some places are so familiar but also so unknown at the same time. This amnesiac experience is really surreal.
The most obvious difference is the scale of things and places. The version in the memory is always bigger and more spacious than the revisited realities. One common comment from me is “Wow, the streets are much smaller than I remembered.”
The other interesting moment was when I was lost driving around and stumbled on my grade school building. I parked my car and decided to go in. Fortunately, it was Sunday so no regular school activities and just some extra curriculars. The next thirty minutes of life was the most filmic and Michel Gondryesque experience in my whole life. I passed by the cart vendor with students buying snacks, myriads of good memories and good feelings returned. I continued walking inside slowly going places where the memory led. I went to the playground, watching little me climbing and running around. I went to the boys toilet, just seeing faces and smiles of all of us 20 some years ago queuing in a line to go pee. I went to several classrooms where I used to be. Here, unlike in the US, you only change classroom once a year. The teacher is the one that will come to your class. Therefore, each classroom that I visited is also a container of a very distinct set of memory. Each room has it’s own story of friend, fun, and fear.
Everybody, and the brain, is constantly producing new memory and probably shelve the old ones someplace in the multiplex of folds. Memory of sequences and spaces are recorded as well. More relevant to many people are places in the childhood. Some occasionally float through the present. Some come out and reconfigured in dreams. Some are retrieved by external means such as conversations, photographs, and retold stories by others. True? And as a natural biological process, these old memories are then reshelved again. The process continues indefinitely and produces one composite memory of a place, the official version that is reported by our brain to us. Wait, wait, did I just say “reported by our brain to us?” Let’s not wake-up Mr. Descartes. I think I am not I think therefore I might be something else.
So this time, I got to revisit places that have existed in memory for so long, and have gone through so many auto revisions. As I go to places physically, I am also making a parallel neuro-trip in my space/time memory, repatching and fixing the database of images inside. Some places are so familiar but also so unknown at the same time. This amnesiac experience is really surreal.
The most obvious difference is the scale of things and places. The version in the memory is always bigger and more spacious than the revisited realities. One common comment from me is “Wow, the streets are much smaller than I remembered.”
The other interesting moment was when I was lost driving around and stumbled on my grade school building. I parked my car and decided to go in. Fortunately, it was Sunday so no regular school activities and just some extra curriculars. The next thirty minutes of life was the most filmic and Michel Gondryesque experience in my whole life. I passed by the cart vendor with students buying snacks, myriads of good memories and good feelings returned. I continued walking inside slowly going places where the memory led. I went to the playground, watching little me climbing and running around. I went to the boys toilet, just seeing faces and smiles of all of us 20 some years ago queuing in a line to go pee. I went to several classrooms where I used to be. Here, unlike in the US, you only change classroom once a year. The teacher is the one that will come to your class. Therefore, each classroom that I visited is also a container of a very distinct set of memory. Each room has it’s own story of friend, fun, and fear.
27 September 2009
About Medan
Medan is the capital of North Sumatra Province. It is sandwiched on the top by the Aceh Province, a place well known for it's unbelievably strong willed people or the rest of us would simply call hostile, the Acehnese. They have been fighting all foreigners in the widest range of it's meaning for as long as the name first noted in history. Below, it is sandwiched by the Riau Province, the richest province in Indonesia, so says the newspaper. So what's up in North Sumatra today? How would one sum up its character. I would say probably a combination of Riau and Aceh, of wealth and the roughness of the people, but without the extremes. Medan is the number three city in Indonesia with a significanct commercial influence for the country.
The areas surrounding the city have been the traditional home land of Batak, or Bataknese, a group of people with a proto-Malay facial or racial characteristic. Some of the names of these people are the Karoneses, Tarutungs, Mandailings and few others that mostly refer to the locales where there are from. The source of uniqueness of Medan actually comes from it’s colonial past. It’s a major Dutch trading post with the harbor, Belawan. The city was contending head to head with other British ports right across the straits, Penang, etc. In addition to that, the areas around Medan were spread with plantations (probably sugar as the bigger one) hungry for man powers. So the Dutch transported hundreds of thousands of Javanese from Batavia and the inlands of Java, and other Dutch subjects from around the archipelago. As in many parts of the country the Chinese were also part of fray. Some were from the previous waves of immigrants. Some were from more recent ones. One of the hikes of these “more recent” incoming Chinese laborers was in the 1920s-30s, a time of great turmoil in the mainland. My grandparents were part of this group. Set off from villages in the Fujian province, they joined thousands of others and departed from Xiamen port to seek for a slightly better life. I can’t imagine how difficult life must be there in their homeland that they were attracted to go to a new place, the Dutch colonies in the south, to work for their gruesome economic machines, to be laborers in sugar plantations there. The Malays have always been the regular character in the region. They had been crisscrossing the cities and ports between the Malaka straits for centuries before the Portuguese arrived. They sewn the trading net between the Sumatra coast and the Malaysian coast. Their traces and imprints are very clear in our daily life even until today, most obviously in Indonesian language. Medan also has a sizeable amount of people with Indian origin. Again, this was because of the geography and the presence of the Belawan port. No other cities in Indonesia that I know yet have historical Indian immigrant enclaves like in Medan.
So although the demography in Medan may seem like the typical composition of major cities in Indonesia, the bits of history above make the difference. The Javenese, Chinese, Indians, and Malays in Medan today are the descendants of migrants but they have deep roots to the land. Through out these times they all live and blend relatively well with each other. Sometimes they fight and most of the time they are good neighbors. So it is this character that differentiate Medan or North Sumatra from Aceh to the north and Riau to the south.
The areas surrounding the city have been the traditional home land of Batak, or Bataknese, a group of people with a proto-Malay facial or racial characteristic. Some of the names of these people are the Karoneses, Tarutungs, Mandailings and few others that mostly refer to the locales where there are from. The source of uniqueness of Medan actually comes from it’s colonial past. It’s a major Dutch trading post with the harbor, Belawan. The city was contending head to head with other British ports right across the straits, Penang, etc. In addition to that, the areas around Medan were spread with plantations (probably sugar as the bigger one) hungry for man powers. So the Dutch transported hundreds of thousands of Javanese from Batavia and the inlands of Java, and other Dutch subjects from around the archipelago. As in many parts of the country the Chinese were also part of fray. Some were from the previous waves of immigrants. Some were from more recent ones. One of the hikes of these “more recent” incoming Chinese laborers was in the 1920s-30s, a time of great turmoil in the mainland. My grandparents were part of this group. Set off from villages in the Fujian province, they joined thousands of others and departed from Xiamen port to seek for a slightly better life. I can’t imagine how difficult life must be there in their homeland that they were attracted to go to a new place, the Dutch colonies in the south, to work for their gruesome economic machines, to be laborers in sugar plantations there. The Malays have always been the regular character in the region. They had been crisscrossing the cities and ports between the Malaka straits for centuries before the Portuguese arrived. They sewn the trading net between the Sumatra coast and the Malaysian coast. Their traces and imprints are very clear in our daily life even until today, most obviously in Indonesian language. Medan also has a sizeable amount of people with Indian origin. Again, this was because of the geography and the presence of the Belawan port. No other cities in Indonesia that I know yet have historical Indian immigrant enclaves like in Medan.
So although the demography in Medan may seem like the typical composition of major cities in Indonesia, the bits of history above make the difference. The Javenese, Chinese, Indians, and Malays in Medan today are the descendants of migrants but they have deep roots to the land. Through out these times they all live and blend relatively well with each other. Sometimes they fight and most of the time they are good neighbors. So it is this character that differentiate Medan or North Sumatra from Aceh to the north and Riau to the south.
23 September 2009
22 September 2009
Email and His Friends
Did you ever travel without your laptop or any familiar mean to get connected to net? It's a blessing isn't it? You would feel a dire feeling but eventually it will cause you to pay attention more to your material surroundings.
In a somehow related matter, I have also been thinking seriously about all these recent internet fuzzes, What and how much should I follow the flow, Facebook, Twitter, those kind of things. All my good friends have been tempting me to use them. I almost did many times but fortunately I haven't. Sometimes being labeled or feeling old-fashion is not that bad at all. I grew up in the nascent age of email and I think I will be proud to stay that way, to always see email as a phenomenon of the century, to continually be fascinated by it, a real revolution in communication. Maybe some of my "younger" friends will see this attitude as I see my "older" friends relation with other previous communication tech phenomenon such fax machines.
Another obvious downside of all those social networking gimmicks is that you are not too socially networking. I got to find a name for that later. I still prefer the primitive way to socially network, whenever possible, which is to meet and chat over a meal or coffee, to converse through sounds, eyesights, and bodies. I prefer the primal intensity of human communication versus the spread-out frequency of virtual e-bytes exchanges.
On Sep 09 National Geographic Traveler magazine, they did a page on Tweeter. One part of the article that caught my attention warns that, "twittering so much that you're not living the moment , which is akin to seeing your vacation through the camera viewfinder." That's kind of true isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I know it is argueable... But come on, think about it longer. It has some truths to it. Go email! You are still the best!
In a somehow related matter, I have also been thinking seriously about all these recent internet fuzzes, What and how much should I follow the flow, Facebook, Twitter, those kind of things. All my good friends have been tempting me to use them. I almost did many times but fortunately I haven't. Sometimes being labeled or feeling old-fashion is not that bad at all. I grew up in the nascent age of email and I think I will be proud to stay that way, to always see email as a phenomenon of the century, to continually be fascinated by it, a real revolution in communication. Maybe some of my "younger" friends will see this attitude as I see my "older" friends relation with other previous communication tech phenomenon such fax machines.
Another obvious downside of all those social networking gimmicks is that you are not too socially networking. I got to find a name for that later. I still prefer the primitive way to socially network, whenever possible, which is to meet and chat over a meal or coffee, to converse through sounds, eyesights, and bodies. I prefer the primal intensity of human communication versus the spread-out frequency of virtual e-bytes exchanges.
On Sep 09 National Geographic Traveler magazine, they did a page on Tweeter. One part of the article that caught my attention warns that, "twittering so much that you're not living the moment , which is akin to seeing your vacation through the camera viewfinder." That's kind of true isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I know it is argueable... But come on, think about it longer. It has some truths to it. Go email! You are still the best!
21 September 2009
Some Ramblings on Eid
It's the second day of Eid. As has what happens every year, millions leave for their hometowns in the villages all across Java or as they call it here, the "mudik". The city is deserted. Like an old piece of furniture that is just dusted-off, you can experience it differently with a new charm. Now I am in Palembang. Quite nice, got to see some old friends. We went to eat, cruised around the city a bit, saw the Ampera bridge, and the fame Musi river. This is actually another big trip for me, to set foot on Sumatra. A small leap for a jetplane, but a giant leap for me... haha. Saturday will even be more historical or maybe a little religious, I guess... I will be returning to Medan my hometown for the first time after 16 years, that's a perfect time to realize or reflect what "long" means in real time...to think how old I have come to be.
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