Articles - The Cracked Door

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

This is a life snippet, a picture of a moment in someone’s life to see how different people around the world navigate the complexities of life (here are some other snippets). This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty.

(We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)

Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.

She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.

The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.

Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.

At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.

At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.

Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.

Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.

Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.

She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.

She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.

If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.

Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.

Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.

Indifferent Decisions (A Short Story)

(Here is a reading of the story if audio is more your thing)

“So, what should we put?” I asked, pen in hand, staring overwhelmed at the piece of paper.

“Maybe Christmas?” My girlfriend answered.

“What?” My other friend interjected.

“Like Christmas would be nice.”

“That strange creature came to us and bestowed on us the choice of what will survive the apocalypse tomorrow, and the first thing you think of is Christmas?!”

“Sure. It’s a start.”

“What other ideas do you have?” I intervened, as my other friend furled her brow at me. I wrote down Christmas for now.

“What are the most important things that our nation has to offer? Like democracy, our Constitution.” My friend shouted.

“But look what democracy got us now…” She quipped.

There was silence for several seconds.

“I don’t know,” he finally broached the silence. “We are bound to have some kind of legacy. Our culture must have built something great that we can bestow to future people to enjoy.”

I sat there. I thought about the incredible promise we once had: human rights, the dream that everyone would get a house, the Civil Rights movements. “We squandered everything we once had,” I finally lamented out loud. “It all turned out to be lies and false promises.”

“I know what happened, but there must be something in all that that is true and lasting, that future generations need to learn,” my friend almost begged. He so wanted this to be true.

I thought of how chaotic the last several years had been. Always, another disaster after another. A fanatical lunatic in charge. My mind hurt from thinking through all that happened. I could have survived so many mini-apocalypses, but the idea that something truly horrid befell us tomorrow only made me feel drained and depleted. Just let it be quick to get it over with.

“Maybe all we have left is our warning,” I finally concluded. “Maybe if we included the story of how we failed, others could avoid our mistakes and not become us.”

“I don’t think any future human would listen,” my girlfriend objected.

“They might,” I replied.

“We wouldn’t have listened.”

The truth of this hit me for a few seconds.

“It’s our only hope.”

Reclaiming a Quiet Life (Life Journey in Sandakan, Malaysia)

This is a conversation I had with a cab driver in Sandakan in Borneo, Malaysia. It shows one way someone navigates the complexities of life:

She is originally from Brunei. Her father is from Brunei, and her mother from Sabah/Malaysia. Her dad has decided to retire here in Sundakan.

She is the youngest daughter, so her parents expect her to stay back and help take care of them (a common expectation of youngest daughters across Southeast Asia). She doesn’t mind this. She likes staying with her family and finds their expectations reasonable.

She studied medical laboratory studies at university, and she worked in that field in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia’s big city) until the covid pandemic caused her to get laid off. She then did unrelated office work still in Kuala Lumpur. She said overall covid really hurt Malaysia’s economy, and it’s been struggling since. She was laid off at two different jobs during the pandemic.

Her last job in Kuala Lumpur ended about a month ago this January. She came back to stay with her family here in Sandakan, a small city on the eastern side of Malaysian’s Borneo. She loves it here. It’s so much less stressful, and things are cheap here (much cheaper than in either Kuala Lumpur or Brunei). She enjoys working for Grab because she can choose her own hours and still make enough to pay for things.

She said that here in Sandakan a really nice apartment (furnished and with things like AC) costs about 1,700 ringgit per month (about $425 a month), but there are even cheaper ones for about 1,200 ringgit (or $300) per month. Here she can afford her own place and her own car, so she doesn’t have to live with her parents. She plans to stay here for about a year.

When I asked her whether she felt happy and content with the life that she has built for herself so far, she said that she feels like some of her needs aren’t being met. She mentioned that she probably needs a vacation and said her next scheduled vacation is in August, a trip to Bali with her boyfriend and her cousins.

How to Write a Piece when You’re Tired

When you write a post a week, some weeks you must crank something out when you are exhausted. Here are my approaches to writing a piece on days when I am busy or otherwise tired:

1) Write something the day before:

If I know I will be busy one week, I often will make sure to complete two pieces that week just to get it done. Generally, if I do this, I combine that with my second strategy and…

2) Have writing ideas in your backpocket that are easy to write:

Some pieces require a lot of work, but having a few ideas be something relatively easy to crank out helps when you’re tired. For example, I have whole sets of writing projects that I find much easier to just write out without much thought.

3) Use something you have already recently written a while ago:

Can you submit something that you already wrote for some other reason? As long as they aren’t too personal or confidential. All I have to do is write a few quick sentences explaining the context and submit them.

4) Work on long-term projects

In addition to writing a piece a day, I spend 10 minutes working on long-term writing projects. This helps me slowly complete essays and stories that take longer than a single day to work on. Some days, after finishing it, I hold onto this longer piece for a busier day when I don’t have time to write a piece from scratch.

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Those are my strategies. Maybe you find yourself in a similar position and would find them useful to consider as well.

How Best to Respond to Anger? (Part Two in Philosophy of Anger Series)

This is the second part in my series about the philosophy of anger. In this part, I will focus on how to respond to anger.

When you are angry, you should first figure out why you are angry (that may seem kind of obvious). As you sort through that, you should evaluate how you feel about the fact that you are angry (in particular, what this tells you about what your needs are in life) and how you plan to respond.

In determining why you are angry, the following questions can help:

1) What injustice do you perceive, and/or what needs do you feel like are not being met?

This can often seem like an incredibly easy question to answer, since most manifestations of anger (especially rage anger) make us vividly aware of what we are angry about and what we are lacking.

But, it can err easily, so we should take this with a form of skepticism. In the heat of the moment, something may clearly seem like the source of our anger, but if we reflect a little more deeply, we may realize more complex issues underlie our feeling, that we rushed to a conclusion about what was happening, and/or that there was something wrong with our initial expectations in the first place. Anger can mislead us away from what truly matters.

Some forms of anger (especially the passive anger discussed in Part One) often blind us from what is making us angry and why. Such anger may orients us at ourselves only to have to realize that we were not the source of the problem. Rage anger has the opposite problem: it orients us towards external problems, which means that in some situations we need to pause and realize how our own actions may be contributing to the problem.

2) Is the injustice you perceive real and legitimate?

Like I already discussed in Part 1, a person can be angry at something that is not actually happening. Our emotions react to what we perceive to be happening, not what is actually happening, so we should pause to reflect on the accuracy of the interpretation of events that is causing us to feel angry.

Take, for example, a husband who thinks his wife is cheating on when she’s not. Maybe, he interprets whatever she is doing that day as her visiting another sexual partner when she’s just going about a normal day. Anger can lock this husband into his interpretation, putting him in a type of “go” mode by orienting him to do something about it.

It’s good to take a moment to determine if our anger is clouding our judgement about what is actually happening. Do you even have enough relevant information to know what is going on in the first place? In particular, what information do we have to understand what someone else is doing, and are we jumping to conclusions about their intentions?

Furthermore, maybe we need to reflect on our underlying expectations. We most often feel angry when some implicit expectation for how something will go does not occur. Sometimes our expectations are reasonable, but sometimes they are not. It can also be useful to reflect on our underlying expectations.

3) Who is responsible for the injustice, and how responsible actually is the person who I think is responsible?

Anger often orients us to blame a certain person or group. For externally-oriented rage anger, this tends to be someone else, and for the internally-oriented passive anger, that person tends to be oneself. Either way, reflecting on whether we are jumping too quickly to blame someone is useful.

4) What should we do to address the injustice?

This is the final and arguably most important question. Anger often orients us to act to fix the injustice in some way. This is reasonable: injustices are bad, and we should live in a world without that injustice or at least have the harm of what happened repaired as much as possible. If we cannot rectify the injustice, we at least need to develop a way to live with it resiliently. At the same time, anger can push us to act quickly to do something now, and whatever action feels right in the moment may not be the best way to resolve the injustice long-term.

The question of how to best address an injustice is a tactical question and an incredibly complex tactical question at that. Anger can cause us to narrow our thinking towards whatever specific response we are thinking about in that moment, but we often should pause and think about other types of solutions that may turn out to work better in the long run. For complex societal injustices, there will likely be legitimate debate about the best way to rectify the wrong.

For example, during the Civil Rights movements, different black leaders and organizations (such as Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X) proposed very different tactics for how black people should best respond to the racial injustices they encountered. Each strategy had their advantages and disadvantages, and thus probably different situations when they were appropriate. It may be better that the debate of how to respond remains open because different black individuals and communities will face different specific circumstances over time that will require them to adapt and figure out how to respond differently.

In this kind of big debate about how to respond to a major, multifaceted injustice in the world, I think the feeling of anger plays an important part in orienting us to act in the first place and helping us think through whether specific strategic responses feel like they would provide a lasting feeling of peace and justice, but we obviously also need to employ our many other mental faculties to think through what the best ways to address them.

All these questions may be answered at once or in a different order than the logical, linear order presented here. An emotion like anger may even direct us to process these matters in a nonlinear way. That’s fine, but I think these are all four important questions to think through before carrying out one’s desired response to anger. Even in an emergency situation, one can take a second or two to work through all of them. Anger tends to direct us to act quickly even potentially impulsively, so these questions form “doubt reflexes” that help reground us and think through our actions.

Now, none of this is meant to imply that anger, or any emotion for that matter is bad. I do not believe that emotions are bad or that “reason” is a better guide for making decisions than emotions. Insofar as these are separable, I think both are incredibly useful psychological tools humans have, and they work best working alongside each other.

On a practical level when making a decision, it’s helpful to think through a few different lenses or angles, including working through how one feels and what decision feels satisfying emotionally and what decisions seem best from the perspective of a rational calculation. This is both because undergoing multiple decisions making strategies slows us down and slowing down helps people make better decisions, and because these two ways of thinking seem to complement each other well, often picking up on the biases and blind spots from the other way of thinking.

A Philosophy Anger Part One: What is Anger?

How would you define anger to an alien from outer space who has never experienced the feeling. Anger is the type of thing that pretty much everyone seems to understand but is incredibly hard to define or describe, but I find thinking through what anger is to be incredibly useful in thinking about how to respond to the world around us, most specifically how to respond to injustices in the world. I think anger has far broader manifestations that the everyday understandings of the feeling don’t explore.

In this series, I will define anger, describe some of its different forms, and discuss how to best respond to anger.

Part One: So what Is Anger?

To me, anger is any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If I had to put words the most common everyday definition of anger, I would describe it as “an intense conflictive feeling against a perceived injustice that directs us to act to counteract that slight.” I think it takes many different forms far beyond this everyday definition though.

What I like about this definition is that it situates anger as a response to a slight as a way to orient us to act towards addressing that slight, but I think it limits too much the types of emotional responses people have when they experience such injustices. Humans have a variety of intertangled emotional responses to injustices that direct us towards different strategies of action, and I think in understanding this, we can think through how to approach the injustices in our world.

Defining a Few Key Words in My Definition

So, let’s first talk about what a “perceived injustice” means. First, we have “injustice.” What is just or unjust is an incredibly complex philosophical questions debated for thousands of years, so I will not venture into that discussion here. But suffice to say that every individual has a sense of what justice is that grounds our expectations for how people will interact with them on a daily level. This, often, intuitive or implicit set of expectations often seem to ground our emotional responses to the world. If I say, “Hello,” to someone, and they rob me, then this disrupts my sense of expectations of what that interaction would entail in a way that I would perceive as “unjust,” meaning I will probably feel angry. Whether robbing me in that moment was justified according to some abstract sense of justice or morality is less important for my emotional response because these implied expectations, not a rationale assessment of true justice, seem to form the basis for our emotional responses.

Next, “perceived” is important here. We get angry when we perceive an injustice. To be angry, we only need to perceive that something is unjust. That perception may or may not be true, but we could still feel angry about it. For example, if a partner believes their other is cheating on them even though their partner is not actually doing so, the emotions the first person feels is still anger, despite the fact that no injustice is not actually happening. One can be misinformed and yet still have an angry response.

Finally note that the injustice does not have to happen to the person in question. If I experience someone else receiving an injustice, then I may still become angry, even though I am not the person who experienced the injustice directly. One can even feel anger at an injustice that occurs in a fictional story where the injustice never occurred in the literal sense. The “perceived injustice” that causes one to be angry could just as easily happen to oneself as to another or a group of people.

A Broader Definition of Anger

The most important single difference between my definition and the normal definition is that the normal definition views “anger” as a specific emotion; whereas, I see anger as any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If the perceived injustice makes someone sad, then that sadness would constitute “anger” for them. Any time we perceive an injustice whatever emotions we encounter is anger, so when one experiences an emotion, the question becomes:

1) What kinds of emotional responses do we have to that injustice?
2) How do these emotions direct us to act?
3) What does all this say about us in general?

As a parallel, consider “anxiety.” Clinical psychologists will often broaden their definition of anxiety to include not just the regular definition of nervous anticipation of the future but to also include excitement, nervousness, enthusiasm, dread, and many other emotions related to the anticipation of a potential future event. They do this because on a practical level, people experience combinations of these emotions at the same time when they anticipate a potential future event, so it is useful in a clinical setting to combine them into one category.

Likewise, I consider it useful to combine the totality of our responses to a perceived injustice under the umbrella of “anger.” To me, when a person experiences an injustice, they experience a plethora of emotions, which include rage anger, frustration, fear or insecurity, sadness, disgust or repulsion, indignation, etc. Because of this, anger can look very different.

What all these different specific emotional responses have in common is that they are an emotion in response to a perceived injustice, and as such, the emotion directs the individual to act in a way to resolve that injustice. But specific elicited emotions may direct that individual towards very different (even contradictory) ways to act to resolve that injustice, but determining how to act to resolve the injustice is a core, if not the core, question in creating a healthy way to process and express our anger (something I will discuss in detail in Section Two).

A Few Different Types of Angry Responses

To show the variety of forms anger may take, here are two, opposite examples of patterns of anger, each of which fundamentally orients the given person to respond to the perceived injustice in a very different manner:

1) Rage or Active Anger: The first is the everyday understanding of anger: the person gets “mad” and starts acting, often aggressively (such as shouting or physically attacking someone), to counteract the perceived injustice. People often view this as a “hot” response since often when we are in this state, our bodies feel hot, and we feel the urge to do something. This form of anger seems to urge us to act to determine 1) who is responsible for the perceived injustice, 2) address or resolve the injustice by actively confronting/challenging what they did, 3) bringing those responsible “to justice,” and/or 4) preventing that injustice from being able to happen again.

I think there is a time for such responses, for example a time to turn over the proverbial tables and confront the “powers that be” for their injustices. Though, this form of anger can also error and/or become unhealthy when 1) it clouds other forms of judgement causing us not to use our other mental faculties to evaluate what is going on and how we should respond, 2) it only makes us aware of how others are part of the “problem” and blind to our own culpability; 3) directs us to act in an excessive, inappropriate manner, especially an excessively violent manner; and/or 4) causes us to go after someone who is not at fault, especially to “punch down,” directing our fury against those who are more vulnerable than us.

2) Passive Anger: In this angry response, we tend to perceive the injustice as a disruption or departure from tranquility. In contrast to the first form, which directs us to seek a resolution by changing the external world, this form of anger directs us inwards to do or become what is needed to restore a sense of peace and tranquility. For example, say in a conversation the other person says something offensive. The first form of anger may direct you to pushback and argue, to directly counteract the person for their statement (and if that fails, leave in a hush); whereas, the second form of anger would direct the person to say nothing and silently shrug, maybe steering conversation away from that topic without “ruffling feathers” so that the conversation can continue in “peace.”

This is a form of anger, although it contradicts the typical definition of anger. Instead of being directed externally against whatever seems to be causing the injustice, this form of anger gets directed inwards, orienting the person to act to reorient themselves to maintain stability, tranquility, or at least stasis. There are times when these kinds of actions are useful, but they tend to error and/or become unhealthy when 1) the stasis being pursued contradicts a better, more lasting resolution to the injustice, 2) when it leads to the person directing guilt or hatred onto themselves, especially for problems beyond their control, and 3) when doing what is necessary to maintain such stasis involves sacrificing essential aspects of oneself.

Conclusion

These are not the only two ways anger can manifest, but they provide a sense of the variety of what anger can mean for different people in different circumstances. Each orients the person towards a type of action in response to the perceived injustice, even if these two examples happen to orient towards partially opposite response. The first may direct one to aggressive action against an external threat and the second towards a passive, inward response

Now, just because one experiences an emotion that directs one’s action does not mean that that person necessarily performs that action; for example, maybe they become enraged, wanting to do something violent, but decide not to. Emotions seem to direct us towards certain types of actions/responses, but of course, we may also use other mental faculties beyond that emotion to ultimately decide to have a different response.

Finally, since anger is the emotional process a perceived injustice, the way in which that individual perceives the injustice will significantly shift how anger manifests in that specific circumstance, and overtime, our various emotional responses may form dispositions or habits that we subconsciously use to process the next unjust situation. In the next part of this series, I will talk about the best ways to respond to anger and the habits of anger we form over the course of our lives.

(Read Part 2 in this series here.)

Sleeping with “Bar Women” in Siem Reap, Cambodia as a Way to Meet Someone (A Conversation)

One morning while I was getting breakfast in Siem Reap, Cambodia I had a long conversation with a white US American living there. For anyone unfamiliar, Siem Reap is a small, tourist city in Central Cambodia withu a population of around 350,000 most known for the absolutely amazing Angkor Wat ruins, one of the marvels of the world.

This account is just one perspective on complex dynamics between Western men and Southeast Asian women. It exemplifies the types of inequalities and power dynamics in these kinds of relationships and how both he and the Cambodian women he have met navigate these relationships.

The guy had lived in Siem Reap for about 7 months. He is deciding whether to settle here long-term or go back home. He says he has everything he wants in life (such as a nice home, food to eat, etc.) except for a woman.

He has gotten frustrated, though, with the transactional interactions he’s had so far with Cambodian women here. He’ll meet different women at bars, take them home, sleep with them that night, intending for them to be a one-night stand. But then the next morning, they ask for money. He says the amount of money they ask for is not much, but he finds it insulting. It makes him think, “I thought the woman was simply interested in me, but then I realize, ‘Oh that’s what kind of relationship this is.’” He also said he usually meets “bar women” or women who specifically go to bars to meet guys there, which to him are “like this.”

He said he felt frustrated in the US with having to pretend to like people’s personalities or have someone play a wingman in order to get to sleep with them. In Cambodia, he can say, “I think you look pretty; do you also think I’m attractive? Okay,” and go have sex. He also likes that women are more upfront about complimenting his body, for example strangers telling him he looks attractive.

In contrast, he got frustrated with how in the US, women are selective and would seem to judge him on things like his job and salary (he worked a blue collar job often labeled as “lower status”). Here he is comparatively more desired. He admits that Cambodian men seem to have it harder than white men such as himself, though. They often have to go through several hoops like justifying their career path if their work is considered menial.

In his opinion, Cambodians require less in life here in Siem Reap: often just wanting a place to sleep, enough food to eat, and a motorbike to get around. For him, people do not seem to know what they are lacking materially: if they lived in a Western country, they would own so much more monetary wealth and material stuff. But to him, this ignorance prevents many in rural Cambodia from seeing what they lack, lowering the material standards of what a “successful life” looks like, almost like a coping mechanism. (Note: This is his opinion. I do not agree that rural Cambodians do not know what they are “lacking” but find the reasons for these differences in cultural expectations for material things to be a bit more complicated.)

Thus, when the women he sleeps with asks him for things, he can hardly fault them for their request. They are often asking for basic needs like food, and compared to the US, what they are asking for is not that expensive. At the same time, the requests make him feel uneasy

I found it interesting talking with him. I could relate to the frustrations and hurt about having people so frequently ask you for money, but it seemed like he was in some way using his status given to white men in that community to have one-sided, short-term sexual encounters. One-night stands are okay when both sides reasonably know and agree on what to expect, yet I sensed that the women he was having sex with had very different expectations and assumptions than him, seeing the sex as a beginning of a relationship, not just something they are doing that night.

Because of his privilege, he could enforce his expectations that this was a brief sexual encounter. He obviously controlled whether he helped others financially, and he could move on to another woman if this woman had what he considered too unreasonable an expectation. That allowed him to satisfy his own desires (both for sex and to be complemented for his attractiveness). To me, this seemed like a vain and ultimately self-defeating approach for finding satisfaction emotionally, relationally, and even sexually.

I found it sad. He seemed to have some kind of insecurity, which he sought to satisfy by continually having sex with different Cambodian women and seemed either oblivious or indifferent to how that subtly positioned the women as a type of object for him. Then he got frustrated by the ways those women tried to respond within that.

These kinds of cross-cultural relationships can be complicated to navigate, though, especially given differences in power. Everyone has expectations for how to interact, which are influenced by one’s cultural context, and when in another culture, it’s definitely okay to communicate your expectations and find people who respect and abide by your expectations. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of where others are coming from and to be aware of how your power and privilege may unfairly impact the situation. I think he simply felt frustrated with how the women did not abide by his expectations, moving swiftly to get what he wanted without thinking through what their encounter must have looked like from their perspective and how his power and privilege shaped the interaction itself.

This kind of obliviousness can be common among those who are in a position of power in society: particularly white men in other cultures. It can also make one think about how positions of power could lead to similar ignorance in our own lives.

Covering for a Flight (Short Story)

Putri quickly uncovered her face. The security officer needed to see her face to compare with her Indonesian ID card. She rushed to cover herself back off with her niqab before anyone else could see her, but she struggled to tuck the fabric back in place. She had never really worn a niqab before and struggled to get it just right.

Ok, done. She did a doubletake around to see whether anyone had spotted her.

“That’s all,” the officer said. “Have a safe flight.”

She walked over to her gate, worried that she be spotted. She hoped no one was around who might recognize her. Her family didn’t know she was taking this trip, and she wanted to keep it that way. The airport was small. Only a couple gates as it was a small town.

She began to look for her gate, but her stomach started to growl. She still had an hour before her flight left plenty of time to grab lunch. She walked up to the line to order some food at a nearby counter. After she told the lady what she wanted, she turned around to find a table. That’s when he spotted her.

“Hello Putri, is that you?” a voice called to her from behind her in the line after ordering her food.

She turned around, and there was Ismail in a casual yet professional suit jacket and button down shirt. What was he doing here?

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Or, I guess I didn’t know you were going on a trip.”

“Yes sir,” she replied.

She got a better look at him when she turned around to find a seat. He looked like he was wearing nice clothes that he hadn’t tidied up yet, almost as if he was flying to a business meeting and would button his collar and apply his tie after he arrived. He smiled at her as she walked by.

He approached her table a few minutes later after he had gotten his food, “Funny thing seeing you here,” not asking if he could join her.

She said nothing. “You look nervous,” he said to keep the conversation going. “Have you never flown before?”

She nodded yes.

“I see. I was nervous the first time as well,” he tried to reassure, but she got the sense that he had been too young the first time he had flown for him to remember. From a wealthier family in the town, he was now a business man. He was always going somewhere on some trip.

“Yes, my flight heads out soon,” she replied, hoping to use this as an excuse to leave the conversation.

“Where are you going?” he responded.

She had been so anxious she had completely forgot where she was flying to. She got out her ticket from her pocket, which read that she was flying to Bali. Too frazzled to say its name, she showed him the ticket.

“Oh, that’s a fun place,” he replied. “Today, I’m going to Manila, but I wish I was going there, though. It’s much more fun,” chuckling.

“Are you traveling alone?” he filled the resulting silence with.

What an unfair question. She had never been able to lie, so she simply nodded her head yes. He looked at her like one coming upon a nice cake at the shop of a bakery.

“And are you meeting anyone there?”

She nodded no.

“Wow, have you traveled alone before?”

Again, she simply nodded no.

“That’s very brave of you.”

“Thank you,” she murmured politely.

Never mind that he traveled alone all the time. She leaned back in her chair as if to get away from him as much as possible. He now saw her as available.

“You know, it’s very nice to get out of this town every once in a while. It puts things into perspective. To see new possibilities.”

She eyed the clock and checked the time of her flight. She was about to say that she had to go catch her flight, but he came in too fast.

“When is your flight?”

She read him the time.

“That’s not for another hour. You don’t have to worry about it now. As the first time you’ve flown, you must be a little nervous, but trust me, it’s fine. You have plenty of time.”

Ugh, why won’t he let me leave?

She looked throughout the hallway of the terminal to think about her options. How could she get away from him? She saw a sign for the toilet. That would work.

“I have to go to…” she began, but before she could mention the toilet, he came in again.

“I was talking with your mother the other day.”

She paused and sunk a little into her seat. This wouldn’t be good. She couldn’t leave whatever he was about to say unsettled. She would have to stay.

“She said you have an exciting interview coming up. That’s amazing. Congratulations!”

He paused, clearly anticipating something from her other than the blank stare she gave him.

“I didn’t know it was in Bali, though. I thought it was somewhere closer.”

That was the lie she told her mom about this trip. That she was heading to a nearby town for a few days for an exciting job interview. Her mom even took drove her to the bus station. Instead of catching a bus, though, she took a taxi to the airport to head to Bali. When she got back, she was going to say the interview didn’t go well and that she didn’t think she’d hear back from the employers. This was the only way she could think of to get away from it all. Her family would never have approved of her taking a trip alone so far away.

“Yes,” she finally spoke. “It’s in Bali.”

“I kind of wish it was somewhere closer to here. Maybe then we’d be able to see each other more…”

“I know,” she said. She couldn’t have him go blather to anyone that he saw her at the airport, but how could he convince him of that without explaining that this was all a lie?

“Are you considering moving to Bali?” he asked.

“We’ll see.” She was just going on a trip to get away from it all here, but she didn’t need to tell him that. Part of her would love to move to Bali. She’s seen all the pictures, but deep down, she knows that would never happen. She’s just taking a trip. He didn’t need to know that.

“Don’t you have such a nice life for yourself here?”

Absolutely not. She hated this small town, trapped in the same set of relationships with the same people, far away from any semblance of a good economy, but instead she just sat there and said nothing as he continued. He knew he had his life set here with his family business, so of course, he’d prefer if she stayed too.

“What are your plans?”

“I don’t know yet. I am just going for a single interview. I don’t know if it will even work out. If it does, I will figure it out from there.”

“I wish I had known you were going to Bali. I had friends there who you could have stayed with. What are your plans after your interview? You still could hang out with them if you’d like. They could show you around.”

“Thanks, but I won’t have time. I have a tight schedule.” She wished she could stay with someone she knew. It would have saved her a lot of money, but she would never stay with any of his people.

“It’s not a problem. I can text them right now…”

“No!” she shot back. He looked almost taken aback by an assertiveness in her voice that she had not before in the conversation. “Don’t tell them!”

He looked puzzled at her sudden conviction. “Why? It’s not like you visiting there is a secret? Do you…”

He saw her look of horror at this statement.

“You haven’t told anyone in town that you are going to Bali. Have you?”

She didn’t say anything but just looked at him dejected. Her secret has been found out. “I just don’t want anyone back home to think of me differently, as someone with such an opportunity, unless I actually do get the job.”

“That’s fair. You may have to tell them eventually, though, but I’ll keep your secret.”

He agreed to keep it under wraps. She no longer had a reason to stay in conversation with this man.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “Now if you would excuse me, I really have to use the toilet.”

She left too quickly to look at him give an excuse for her to stay. All she heard was him faintly calling back that she hoped she had a good time. She didn’t care. She was free. Would he actually spill the beans? That was a problem for another day. After the toilet, she’d find a different place to wait in the airport, one where he was unlikely to be.

The Box’s Joy (A Short Story)

There once was a box. It packed a toy truck that a mother bought for her little boy for his second birthday. The box was excited to be taken home to see what his life would entail now that he was leaving the boring store.

The boy tore open the gift wrap surrounding, ripped him open, and took out the truck. He ran it around the home for a few minutes, but then he ran up to the box.

The boy gazed at him excitedly. The box got to be a rocket ship that day, blasting off to Mars. Then, he was a time machine, taking the boy back to the days of the dinosaurs. They played for weeks, and each day, the box was thrilled to become new things.

Soon, however, the parents put the truck back inside him and stuck him in a closet, where he sat for years. Eventually, the boy took him out. He was much older now. All he did was put some clothes and items into the box to take off to college.

There, he sat for many more years in the dorm closet, only to be moved a few years later when the man got his new home. Again, he gathered dust as he aged, remembering the time when he could be a rocket ship.

One day, a new person opened his closet and gazed upon him. It was a young girl.

She looked at him dazzled and dragged him out. She threw open all the stuff inside him. He got to be a castle, then a throne, then a tall mountain, and the vastness of space itself.

He was older now; some of his walls started to fold. After she was done playing, her parents took one look at the box with his sags and new holes and carried him out to the curb.

The next day it started to rain. His skin fell apart.

The girl ran up smiling with delight. She picked him up with his sagging wetness and danced together in the puddle. He dripped with tears of joy as he got to be a prince in his final moments before the garbage collectors came and took him away.

The Freezer (A Short Story)

There it is, the Cooler. The place I’d have to go. My boss asked me to do an inventory to count every single thing in that cold dark room.

I walk into the huge fridge. The door automatically snaps shut behind me. It’s a long corridor with one bend, which leads to another narrow sliver of a room. A passageway to nowhere. On all sides are piles of boxes of frozen foods, almost squeezing me shut at any moment. No matter how many times I come I can never get used to this space.

I begin my inventory count with boxes of canned peas. For each box I see, I make a mark on my little notepad. Then I move onto the next item. It’s pretty boring. Why did I even accept this job? I had little choice at the time. It offered a paycheck after I graduated, the only way I could find to pay my student loans and afford rent. I can still picture my father’s dejected expression when I told him about the offer. My dad was too polite to say what he thought, and just gave me a blank congratulations, but I could tell he was realizing that all his dreams for what his son would amount to would come to nothing.

Anyways, where was I? I was now counting ice cream carts. If only I could eat one. There’s a new cart. I mark a check on the page, but wait? I check where I marked it. Was that the group for ice cream or one of the other foods? I can’t remember. My little notepad is becoming filled with little groups of marks, too many to remember which is which.

I’m such a fuck up?! I can’t even count carts of ice cream. No wonder I can’t find a good job. I’ll be stuck working here until the day I die.

I guess I never really liked my job anyways. It’s so boring. That is the real reason I can’t keep anything straight. I just don’t care. If I had a real job, I would do it well, or at least, I hope I wouldn’t find a way to mess that up too.

A loud crash in the other passageway snaps me back to reality. What on earth is that? Something must have fallen. Was that me? I’ve been shifting boxes around to do this count, but I hadn’t touched anything over there. Why would something have fallen over there?

I place my clipboard down and walk over to see what happened. There’s nothing. No strewn boxes. Maybe I just heard something. Maybe someone dropped something on the other side of the wall.

I come back, and I can’t find the notepad. I thought I had just set it down on this one box. Where could it have gone? I look around. It’s not on the other boxes. Did it fall somewhere? I start rummaging through a few boxes, moving some around and looking through them. No notepad. I can never seem to find anything anyways.

Kneeling before a box, my butt accidently knocks the stack of boxes behind it. A couple of them crash loudly onto the ground. Just another example of me failing. I begin to look over to see the damage.

But several more boxes fall. This time, they’re in the other room. I shoot straight up. That can’t be me. I hear a growling noise. Something is there.

I don’t have time for this, and I run straight to the door, but it’s locked. I try to pound against it, but no one is outside. The door is pretty thick to seal in the cold. It’s not like they could hear my knocking anyways. My phone has never worked in this deep part of the basement. The creature moves as I knock, as if the noise is stirring it.

This can’t be happening. I do the only thing that makes sense, and that is to go back to work. It’ll keep my mind off of whatever is going on on the other side. That’s all I am here to do. I count the boxes of items. I don’t have my notepad, but that’s okay. I can keep track of the numbers in my head. I hear it moving about. It knocks over boxes, and its breathing grows strained like it’s choking on its own droll. I desperately cling to counting my canned mangoes.

WHACK! It sounds like an entire shelf of stuff has fallen over there. I completely lose track of my count. The bang seems to dig into my very bones. “I’m so dumb?!” I shout reflexively. The creature stops for a few seconds of eerie silence. Then it makes its way towards my room. It must have heard me!

I instinctively dive behind a set of boxes in a vain attempt to protect myself. I’m too much of a wimp to take it on. This is why I deserve death. I wasted my life; why wouldn’t I also waste my death, just sitting here waiting for it to come pounce on me. And what a way to go? In the very bowels of my employer, who doesn’t care enough about me? I bet they’d just clean up my body, make an insurance claim about the goods my blood got spilled on, and move on like nothing happened. Why did I waste my life here?

I hear the monster on the other side of my tower of boxes, gurgling and foaming. That’s it. If I am going to die, I might as well do something. I knock over a box of cans on the top of my stack so that it falls directly on top of it. I hear it whimpering in pain. That slowed it down, but it’s still making its way up my tower.

I plunge my hand into another box and the first thing I can find. It’s a small metallic can of tuna about the size of a fist. This will work. I can use it to punch the beast. Its ugly head rears the top of my fortress as it climbs down, coming straight for me.

I draw back my fist when I realize that it nuzzles its head against my leg. What does it want? I don’t know, but it seems friendly. It looks at me, whimpering in a high pitched voice at my shaking body that I have curled up in the fetal position. I feel an immense compassion towards it: it was simply trapped in this dungeon just trying to get by, like me. When it realizes that I’m not going to give it food, it wanders over to the puddle of food that fell out of their packaging all over the floor in another part of the freezer, slurping it up desperately.

I seize the moment and rush to the door, trying to jiggle it open again. It turns out it was unlocked the whole time. I guess in my panic before, I couldn’t get the latch at the proper angle. I rush outside and don’t look back.

Screw this job. I’m going home.