Of the past 72 hours, I had only spend 5 in a bed. It would be another full 24 hours before I finally laid down to blissful rest on an airmattress on the floor of a missionary’s house nestled in the Papuan mountains. But now is not then. Now is hot, and now is crowded, and now is overwhelming, and now is … not good. Indonesia and I did not start off on a very good foot.
The arrival experience in five sentences: Customs was hot, sticky, and unairconditioned. Came out to find a porter holding my bag; he motioned, I followed (which was actually useful), he asked for either a $2 (20,000 rupiah) tip or a $20 (200,000 rupiah) one, I was so delusional and blinded by zeroes that I’m ashamed to say I honestly don’t know what I gave him. So he was either a divine guide or a dirty rotten bastard thief, I’m still on the fence. My taxi driver kept on calling me ‘boss,’ the enjoyment of which faded when I realized that I could get out and walk faster than our car was going. He let me off at Mastapa Gardens Hotel in Kuna beach, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tip him (no), but I was still too confusedly bitter over the porter to care if I was being culturally sensitive.
It was then, 1 hour into my 12 hour layover, that I realized something. I didn’t like Bali. Or rather, more accurately, I loathed Bali (1). The beaches are amazing, the prices are low, and the people have the sort of petite exotic beauty that I’m sure made many WWII navymen love Bali. But maybe that’s the thing. Maybe it plucks the last chord of puritanical piety left within me. I… hate… tourism. I hope you are cozy, because I’m about to climb on my soapbox.
I love the free exchange of cultures, I think it’s great when people want to see new horizons, and I’m all for FDI. Spread the love, whatever. What turns my stomach is when a location becomes a ‘destination.’ And Bali is definitely a destination.
Kuna Beach is filled with people. The ones that moved were white, the ones that stood still and hawked were locals. “Rolex? DVD?” “Hey boss, you want to buy a shirt? How about a dress for a pretty lady?” “Massage?” Being a white male walking (relatively) alone, I got a lot of the latter. Young Balinese women littered the streets, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, every twenty feet or so, offering the same service. And while their lips said massage, their lingering gazes and soft touches suggested the possibility of a bit more.
Walking down the road, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, while everyone was crowded on the same streets, no one was actually seeing each other. I felt like a walking dollar sign. And who can blame them? People don’t go to Kuna Beach to find Balinese culture, they go there for cheap eats and mass-produced “I heart Bali” shirts. Walking past a shop named ‘Suicide Dreams,’ I wondered what it said about our culture that this is what was found to be most attractive to prospective shoppers (us). After glancing in a few stores, I tried to keep my eyes on the road ahead. It just hurt too much.
Is this what we do? Drive our Explorers from the suburbs to work, play at living out our ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lives until we make enough money to go someplace else and get our freak on? Find some place beautiful enough to be distracting and poor enough to be bought? It sounds like prostitution to me. Only a fool blames the bed of the whore, especially when he is the one making that bed. There is no free love, and cheap love only exists when there are people to buy it. We have created Bali, we have created the tee-shirts emblazoned with “Drop Pants, Not Bombs” and “Toughen the Fuck Up;” shirts that we would never allow on our street corners, but that, on a street corner far far away, we find clever and hilarious. Who can blame them for looking at me like that, because I have created them, and now I must sustain them.
And us? When we look at them, we see … nothing. I don’t think we see anything. The locals are part of the background, speakers that hawk goods and disembodied hands that exchange money. We are not there for them; they are there for us. We take what we want and give them enough money to make sure that they are there the next time we want something. No one cares who it is that is behind the counter, just that there is someone there. They are interchangeable people. Are interchangeable people really people at all?
What I hate about tourism, or definitive tourism at least, is that it dehumanizes people. Tourists set aside their humanity and become pure consumers, and the local industry sets aside its cultural distinctives in favor of whatever happens to be marketable. We become dollar signs and they become reflections of our hidden self-indulgence. Sometimes it manifests itself as perverse, sometimes garish, but in a twisted sense, I don’t know if either is worse than the other. Both the keychain phallus and the hibiscus-print shirt represent our willingness to throw money at whoever will allow us to be someone other than who we currently are. Maybe the point is that they both represent our dissatisfaction with ourselves. A dissatisfaction that we find so distasteful and taboo that we ship it off to some distant country - on call when we need it - but with no thought for the place and the people who we have reduced to indulging our own guilty insecurities.
(1) My trip back through Bali was completely different, and I think it’s quite nice. Ish.
Showing posts with label Ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ethics. Show all posts
Monday, February 2, 2009
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Strife
Life amongst the English teachers has smelled of a harmonious utopia, and I was getting sick of the bullshit. Tonight held its first touch of conflict. And it felt so good.
Monday was the day that we were handed our curriculum. Monday was the day that we found out that we had curriculum. For some, this was a weight off of their shoulders, but others felt shackled by the questionable vocabulary and farcical situations. Do grad students really want to learn how to navigate their way around a phone booth in English? When I first read through it, my first instinct involved lighter fluid and a match. It was so comprehensive and detailed (inanely restrictive) that I think a monkey could do a very good job teaching not very good English [sic]. I was chagrinned when Mr. Wang informed us that this book was the sole resource for the English competency exam.
Fast forward to today, when Grins and I were riding a turtle bus back towards our house. She was telling me how useless she thought the curriculum was. I agreed. She then told me how she would give a courtesy nod to the curriculum, but then teach something more interesting that would spark the students’ interest. I should have agreed. The nice thing would have been to agree. But I was sick of walking on eggshells.
Instead, I questioned if she was departing from the curriculum for her sake, or because she didn’t want to get bored. I asked her what she thought her students needed, and told her that I thought what they needed was to pass the test. I said that, being grad students, they already had four years of education where they had the opportunity to learn English if they had so desired. I said that, as a matter of integrity, we had an obligation to the students to prepare them for what they needed to succeed, even if that was not the most interesting or efficient way of teaching English. I said that, though it is a formality, and though there is a good chance that the grade people get on the competency exam will make little real difference (who is going to give a brilliant chemist a hard time because his English isn’t perfect?), that we couldn’t act on the assumption of the University waiving its own standards of competency. I said that to do so would be to gamble with other people’s future, and that would not be fair.
I wanted to say that it would be ludicrous to claim any real passion for “teaching English,” because if we wanted to lay any claim to the sanctity of the language, that we would have studied ESL in school. But I had already said enough.
The conversation spurted and spluttered after that like the flames from an empty gas canister. Eventually it was just easier to let it fade away into the darkness. I wondered if I should have held my tongue, but I was tired of homogeny. There can be no harmony when everyone is playing the same note. No one has expressed any frustrations about anyone else in the group, and many minor offenses had already been allowed to fly under the radar. It was more complicated with Grins and I, though. As the only two Christians in an outspokenly anti-Christian group, there was an unspoken expectation of camaraderie, the thought that “we need to hold the line for Jesus.” We were two very different people, but since we both love Jesus, we should always agree, right?
I now had a greater appreciation for the plight of teaching in America. What do we do when the standards by which our students succeed or fail run counter to their education? At the same time, what good does it do the student to be properly educated if they cannot advance? When do our lesson plans and aspirations become less about the needs of the students and more about our desire to be an ‘interesting teacher?’ On one hand, I agree with Grins, and I think we could teach this better were we given a looser leash. On the other, I think we need to play the hand that we are dealt with the players that we have been given. Namely, that we will be teaching a group of nominally interested graduate students who have a heavy and specialized course load, but who need to pass a general ed competency course based solely on the curriculum provided. I will be thrilled to be proven wrong, but that’s what it sounds like from people who know better than I.
Home was still fifteen minutes away, and there were a few attempts at small talk, but conversation was strained. By voicing disagreement, I had broken a taboo, and neither of us were sure how to get around it. I want to think that I provoked some thoughtful introspection, but I wonder if I might have just established myself as a soapboxing asshole. We walked the last five minutes without speaking, the wind whistling through the trees, mocking our silence.
Monday was the day that we were handed our curriculum. Monday was the day that we found out that we had curriculum. For some, this was a weight off of their shoulders, but others felt shackled by the questionable vocabulary and farcical situations. Do grad students really want to learn how to navigate their way around a phone booth in English? When I first read through it, my first instinct involved lighter fluid and a match. It was so comprehensive and detailed (inanely restrictive) that I think a monkey could do a very good job teaching not very good English [sic]. I was chagrinned when Mr. Wang informed us that this book was the sole resource for the English competency exam.
Fast forward to today, when Grins and I were riding a turtle bus back towards our house. She was telling me how useless she thought the curriculum was. I agreed. She then told me how she would give a courtesy nod to the curriculum, but then teach something more interesting that would spark the students’ interest. I should have agreed. The nice thing would have been to agree. But I was sick of walking on eggshells.
Instead, I questioned if she was departing from the curriculum for her sake, or because she didn’t want to get bored. I asked her what she thought her students needed, and told her that I thought what they needed was to pass the test. I said that, being grad students, they already had four years of education where they had the opportunity to learn English if they had so desired. I said that, as a matter of integrity, we had an obligation to the students to prepare them for what they needed to succeed, even if that was not the most interesting or efficient way of teaching English. I said that, though it is a formality, and though there is a good chance that the grade people get on the competency exam will make little real difference (who is going to give a brilliant chemist a hard time because his English isn’t perfect?), that we couldn’t act on the assumption of the University waiving its own standards of competency. I said that to do so would be to gamble with other people’s future, and that would not be fair.
I wanted to say that it would be ludicrous to claim any real passion for “teaching English,” because if we wanted to lay any claim to the sanctity of the language, that we would have studied ESL in school. But I had already said enough.
The conversation spurted and spluttered after that like the flames from an empty gas canister. Eventually it was just easier to let it fade away into the darkness. I wondered if I should have held my tongue, but I was tired of homogeny. There can be no harmony when everyone is playing the same note. No one has expressed any frustrations about anyone else in the group, and many minor offenses had already been allowed to fly under the radar. It was more complicated with Grins and I, though. As the only two Christians in an outspokenly anti-Christian group, there was an unspoken expectation of camaraderie, the thought that “we need to hold the line for Jesus.” We were two very different people, but since we both love Jesus, we should always agree, right?
I now had a greater appreciation for the plight of teaching in America. What do we do when the standards by which our students succeed or fail run counter to their education? At the same time, what good does it do the student to be properly educated if they cannot advance? When do our lesson plans and aspirations become less about the needs of the students and more about our desire to be an ‘interesting teacher?’ On one hand, I agree with Grins, and I think we could teach this better were we given a looser leash. On the other, I think we need to play the hand that we are dealt with the players that we have been given. Namely, that we will be teaching a group of nominally interested graduate students who have a heavy and specialized course load, but who need to pass a general ed competency course based solely on the curriculum provided. I will be thrilled to be proven wrong, but that’s what it sounds like from people who know better than I.
Home was still fifteen minutes away, and there were a few attempts at small talk, but conversation was strained. By voicing disagreement, I had broken a taboo, and neither of us were sure how to get around it. I want to think that I provoked some thoughtful introspection, but I wonder if I might have just established myself as a soapboxing asshole. We walked the last five minutes without speaking, the wind whistling through the trees, mocking our silence.
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