Moments of Upset, Road Rage, and Traffic

As an American living in a foreign country, sometimes I get this enormous urge to rant. Perhaps something bad has happened to me, or I've witnessed something horrible -- a messy experience in traffic, an upsetting interaction at work, sexual violence or discrimination. It has to be something so frustrating that my blood will boil, and I'll want go straight to my fellow expats who might be able to empathize, and I'll want to tell them all about it.

For smaller problems, I try not to rant too often, mostly because I'm afraid to make it a habit. It's easy to fall into a certain trap of ethnocentrism (as if we don't have our own issues to deal with back in America). The truth is, I've heard of expats out there who will meet with other expats, and dinner gatherings will involve complaining about the people they interact with on a daily basis. What started out as a therapeutic exercise to get something off their chests has turned into a gathering of hatred... and weren't we, instead, supposed to become more open-minded when we decided to go abroad?

When trying to come up with explanations for any tough situation, the challenge comes in trying to think about what just happened from a more wide-angle lens. It's not easy, because it seems natural to cross-reference our current experiences with what we're familiar with back home. It takes a certain amount of education, wisdom, and compassion to realize that sometimes our "advice" might not be entirely relevant because of such vastly different social, economic, and cultural circumstances. That's not to say we need to accept the upsetting thing that happened, but the question is more so, how do you deal with it appropriately?

It's during these challenging moments that I then turn to some of my local friends -- people who are arguably more equipped to analyze the situation, since they are more familiar with the local context.

The discussion is usually fruitful. Sometimes I'll learn that although I'm frustrated, my frustration is not a unique and entitled expat frustration. In fact, there are locals who are also frustrated by the same thing, and certain NGOs and groups exist to try and combat those very problems.

Traffic laws and road customs, for example, are not some kind of static, never-changing ideas. When you hear people tell stories about traffic in Southeast Asia, you might hear them talk about how limited rules (or "no rules") is the way of the land, and that if you want to live there, you have to learn how to drive like everyone else. Usually that means buying a motorbike and quickly adapting to the flow of traffic. I was once riding with a group of expats and Indonesians, and as we approached a red light at a major intersection, they decided to stop their vehicles in the on-coming traffic lane, knowing that no vehicles would come. One of them joked that everyone was riding "Indonesian style."

But do you ever hear about local groups that are trying to change how things work? Local groups that are trying to fight for bike lanes, pedestrian rights, and tougher enforcement of traffic laws? Groups that are trying to expand and improve public transportation? They exist, and they're there, even though they seem invisible among the roar of traffic.

I'm writing about this now because I got in a really weird, upsetting, and awkward accident yesterday on Maliboro. A becak (pedicab) rammed into my back wheel of my bicycle, and I almost fell off. We weren't going very fast because there were pedestrians scattered around us, but it was a noticeable impact for sure. When I turned around, the passengers -- two Ibu (middle-aged women) -- were laughing! The tukang becak (pedicab driver) was smirking. None seemed apologetic. It was one of those blood-boiling moments that left me feeling very confused about how to respond. I shot them all a mean, dirty look before moving on.

This is going to take me a while to mull over and come to terms with. I'm going to be thinking about how crowded that street was; could I have been riding differently? I'm going to think about the pedestrians I was avoiding on the road; I'm glad none of them were hurt. I'm going to be thinking about the laugher, and how laughter and smiles can mean something different here.

And should I have just ignored them or laughed it off, instead of getting upset? My co-worker once told me, "If someone gets upset, it means they're not from Jogja." We had just witnessed a motorbike driver get super angry when his rear wheel got bumped by a car that had been creeping forward at a stop light. The motorbike driver slammed his hands into the hood of the car to express his discontent. Apparently this action was very un-Jogjanese, which my co-worker confirmed by his license plate. I couldn't help but empathize with the motorbike guy, but my co-worker seemed to think differently, as if the biker's actions were not justified.

What it boils down to it, I think, is this: cities like Jogja are the kind that attract people from all over the country, as well as internationally. With over one hundred institutions of higher education, that's not exactly something you're trying to avoid. And if that's the case, we need to learn how to bring different kinds of ideas together to challenge some of these very real problems. If a newcomer gets upset, maybe there's a good reason for it. In terms of traffic, there needs to be a strategy in dealing with the vehicles that have increased in number throughout the last decade, the increased pollution and congestion on the road. It's definitely not an easy feat. The traffic all over SE Asia is changing, so how do we plan for positive solutions? It's a challenge that locals and newcomers are going to have to work on together.