No,I’m not sharing my banana fritters with you, thank you very much

What is it with the Indonesian culture? It’s driving me mad.

One day when I was having my lunch – which happened to be a very nice, very large salad, mind you – I couldn’t help feeling frustrated due to the interruptions I kept getting from my co-workers, “That seems nice, a rather large meal too… I’ve never seen you eaten that much before!” and “That’s a lot of crackers for a salad! Where did you get it from?” not to mention the “Can you actually finish that all by yourself?”

And what about the classic “Wah..makan sendiri aja nih? (Eating by ourselves, are we)?”

I’m not very good with interruptions, especially when I’m eating. And hungry too. Now, I don’t know why they seem to have some sort of a necessity to comment on what I eat and the amount of what I eat, and I’m having problem trying to figure that out. I have someone who is kind enough to explain to me that apparently, the whole purpose of the lunch-bugging thing is that they want me to (get this) offer them some of my food. And even if I do, they will usually refuse automatically in order to be polite, which renders the whole thing completely useless because what is the freaking point of offering it in the first place when they don’t even want some anyway?!

I’m not very good at manners. And in Indonesia, manners are big. Very big. It’s rude to have food and not offer it to practically everyone in your office, including the office boy himself. If you have something, you must share it, no matter how small the amount of it will be left for you. If you want to eat, you must greet absolutely everyone – for what I’m not entirely sure but I’m suspicious it has something to do with giving them cue to ask a share of your food. If you want to go out and grab a bite of a snack, you must make sure that you let everyone knows just in case they want you to buy something for them or even worse, so that they can scab off your food because they’re too much of a tight-ass to buy food with their own money.

Leaving the topic of Food manner, let’s now step into Privacy issue. The word itself doesn’t mean jack shit. In here, people seem to want to know everything about you – How old are you? Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Who’s that guy dropping you off to work in a black Panther, he’s kind of dark, I didn’t think you like the dark type of guy, who is he?

Now, if I answer all of those questions with the good ol’ “It’s none of your goddamn business”, it’s your turn now to be labeled rude. When this happened to me, I felt as if I was trapped in a parallel universe where the right is wrong and the wrong is right. Seriously, what is wrong with being private? Does everyone have to know about whether or not you’re twenty years older or younger and that you are still single but currently dating someone, and the guy dropping me off to work happens to be a driver of a friend’s? Are those facts enough to let them measure up what kind of a person I am?

And what about Race? What about it, you might ask. Well, apparently too, you can read a person’s characteristics and attributes through their races.

“Where do you come from?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where were you born?”
“Oh… Jakarta.”

And this is a very dissatisfying answer. Very dissatisfying, in fact, the persistency is even higher and the curiosity build up into a series of unrelenting questions and elusive answers.

“What about your parents? Where do they come from?”
“My dad is from East Java.”
“O really, which part in East Java? It’s a terribly big place.”
“Madiun.”
“Right…what about your mother?”
“She’s from Jakarta.”
“Ah…but you know, no one is really from Jakarta… they usually come from some place else right?”

In the end I got so tired and gave in to the investigation and beat them to it.

“My dad is Javanese, and my mum is Chinese. Happy?”

Maybe I should start hanging a piece of cardboard on my chest that states that fact because I’m getting so sick of everyone asking about my parents and their origins, when all they really want to know is what race do I come from. I don’t know why people seem to be curious about my race – I don’t look exactly like an alien, it’s not like it’s the most important thing in the world. What annoys me even more is that the minute they know the real deal, they usually go, “Ah…I see, so you’re Javanese right? Well usually Javanese people are always blar blar yada yada yada …..”

And there goes my personality being exposed by someone I hardly even know.

Then again, maybe I’m the one who’s being a nutcase and everyone else is normal – apart from me. Normal or not normal, I’m not going to change who I am and people can either deal with or fuck off.

Seriously.