Thursday, May 21, 2009

Longing for Siberia

Posted by Danielle

Over the course of my research, I have found that many Russians and Indonesians feel a sense of nostalgia for the periods when they lived under more authoritarian systems. The possibility that people are nostalgic for a time when their lives were more constricted strikes most people in the West as alien. But such nostalgia can be quite rational when it comes from a longing for conditions that are more stable, if limiting.

Even though I’ve thought a lot about nostalgia and analyzed its causes and consequences in Russia and Indonesia, I had never felt a true sense of nostalgia until we arrived in Surabaya, the capital of East Java. After a week and a half in Indonesia’s second-largest city of 3.5 million, I am nourishing a deep sense of longing for…Siberia. Yes, it is true, I am missing the industrial city of Krasnoyarsk, where I spent fall 2008—that very location that I was eager to depart only a few months ago.

As frustrating as my time in Krasnoyarsk was in some respects, Indonesia has its own share of challenges that can make one miss the relative predictability of my life in Siberia. In trying to understand the source of my own nostalgia for a formerly closed industrial city where people took me for a spy, I’ve identified three primary factors: 1) bureaucracy; 2) public infrastructure; and 3) living conditions.

First, my journey through the Indonesian bureaucracy has reached a further stage of absurdity since arriving in East Java. On my first day in Surabaya, the local sociologist I hired took me to the special research section in the governor’s office to hand in my letter from the Department of Internal Affairs. The office was on the outskirts of town, a completely inconvenient location that I would have never found. Once in the office, we were given another letter that we were told to photocopy seven times. However, there was no copy machine on the premises, and we ultimately had to drive about a half an hour looking for a copy shop.

Unfortunately, the headache did not end there. After we returned with our seven photocopies, each was stamped and I was given five copies for myself (I still haven’t figured out why I need five of my own officially stamped copies of the letter.) The staff at the governor’s office told me to take one letter to the mayor’s office, which I did the following day.

At the mayor’s office, I was asked specific questions about my research. In particular, they wanted to know in which of Surabaya’s 33 districts I would be conducting research. I tried to explain that I didn’t know yet, but they insisted. To cover all my bases, I said I’d be doing research in all of the districts. That seemed simple enough. They told me to return the next day at 11:00 a.m. to pick up my official permission letter.

After hearing countless stories about my bureaucratic adventures, John joined me at the mayor’s office. When we were finally called in, I was shown a letter and told that I would need 35 photocopies of it. Yes, that’s a copy for every single district in the city, plus one for me and another for the Department of Internal Affairs. I began to worry the next step was to make 3.5 million copies of the letter and hand-deliver them to each of the residents of Surabaya.

Luckily, the civil servants in the mayor’s office seemed to take pity on the poor American and actually made the copies on their machine (for a nominal fee)—a privilege I am sure is not extended to the multiple college students who were also waiting for their official permits to write their theses and term papers. And yes, you read that last sentence correctly. Every college student conducting research in Surabaya needs official permission from the mayor.

After the photocopying was done, each letter still needed to be stamped, placed into an envelope, and stapled shut. Since the process looked like it could take over an hour, John and I volunteered to help.

Curiously, the letters are not actually addressed to anyone, they say “to the district of X.” My research assistant confirmed that I don’t actually need to send them anywhere—they’re just in case anyone asks for proof that I have permission to conduct research. So now all these important official letters from the mayor are just sitting on a pile of books in our room.

After all these bureaucratic shenanigans, the obnoxious little issues I dealt with in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk—registering visas, not being able to buy a cell phone plan without a Russian passport, going to multiple offices to get a dorm room, and submitting a final research report—seem trivial.

The second factor causing my nostalgia for Siberia—Indonesia’s poor public infrastructure—has also taken a bite out of my pocketbook. Most people don’t think of a modern metropolis when they hear the word “Siberia,” but I’ll take their public transportation system over Surabaya’s any day.

So far, I have spent an average of $13 a day on taxis in Surabaya because the bus system remains undecipherable. (Today, John ended up stranded across town attempting to return from the mall and ended up having to catch a $5 taxi back home.) There are no maps or posted routes. The only way to figure out where a bus is going is to ask someone familiar with the particular neighborhood you are in or are trying to reach. You can’t ask the driver, because he’ll say yes to any location if it will get you on the bus.

Asking someone for bus information is easier said than done since Indonesians who can afford a motorcycle opt out of the public transportation network. Others assume that foreigners should only take taxis. They see us as incapable of protecting ourselves from pickpockets or fear we would shrivel up and die from the experience of crowding onto an Indonesian bus. We’ve figured out which bus we can take to get to the mall and check e-mail, but otherwise, we’re confined to taxis for now.

Not that taxi travel ensures efficient passage from Point A to Point B. Indonesian cities, lacking any meaningful urban planning, are essentially networks of alleys that form little urban villages connected by larger roads. These alleys are rarely passable by a car, so my typical trip to an interview involves a drive to a general neighborhood, where the taxi driver has to ask an average of three passersby for directions to the correct alley. Yesterday, it took me an hour to find my interview location, even though it was only 5 miles away.

I have often praised the public transportation system in Russia, with its logical bus routes that nearly all city residents use. Right now, I long for Krasnoyarsk’s number 2 bus, which for 50 cents would take me from my Soviet-era dorm on one edge of the city clear across town to visit my Czech friend Magda. Or the slow, steady number 3 that I often took to visit my friend Marina. I’ll even take the unpredictable traffic jams in Krasnoyarsk, which seem benign when compared to the polluted congestion of motorcycles, cars, pedicabs, and bicycles that clog every inch of free space in Surabaya (sidewalks included).

Our sub-optimal living conditions in Surabaya also have me missing Siberia. After searching in vain for either a host family or a short-term rental here, we have ended up living in a $22/day bed and breakfast. The bed takes up 90 percent of the space in our room and the layout is such that we can barely stand up at the same time. The building is safe and secure and on a nice street, but both the space itself and the neighborhood leaves much to be desired.

Aside from the daily breakfast of rice and some mystery side dish, we need to eat all of our meals elsewhere. Since I came back from Indonesia in 2007 with a parasite, we’re trying to stay clear of street vendors, which basically means that we’re eating a lot of fried noodles at the cafĂ© located a few steps behind our guesthouse. John’s discovered that the best place to pass the time when I’m working is to walk to the Dunkin’ Donuts shop at the train station.

All of this has me wistful for my old room in the Krasnoyarsk obschag. Maybe it had a broken window. Yes, the kitchen ceiling almost collapsed when a pipe burst in the flat above ours. And then there was the ongoing construction. But there was a kitchen where I could make tea any time of day or night. The room I shared with Petra, a Czech exchange student, was actually big enough for us to walk around in. And we had a washing machine—I did not hand-wash a single article of clothing in Krasnoyarsk. The toilet flushed. There were no insects or rodents. All this for a mere $70 per month.

One of the things I’ve learned from my research about nostalgia is that it can be paralyzing. If you fixate on the past, you risk inflating the positives and discounting the negatives of that previous time. I’m confident I don’t really want to go back to Krasnoyarsk, but after several hours of searching the winding alleyways of Surabaya and struggling to interview people in my inadequate Indonesian, it sure would be nice to come home to a room where I could sit at a table and drink some tea.

No comments:

Post a Comment