The Motorbike That Didn't

When Owl was offered a Fulbright to teach in Malaysia for a year, she came up with a list of lofty personal goals and one very concrete one. Learn to drive a motorbike. She lusted after a motorbike. As a child, when Owl visited her cousins in India, they plopped her on the back of a motorbike and drove her up and down dark green hills. 

During orientation Fulbright officials explained the lay of the land. Everyone would be sent off to their towns and there local teachers would help them get settled and buy motorbikes, which were the cheapest way to get around.  

On the best of days Owl is an unsteady driver and has shit coordination on a bike, but no matter. Owl was going to learn to drive a motorbike. She pictured herself zooming across Malaysia on weekends, and becoming a road warrior. She was going to be such a badass.

Then Owl arrived at town and realized that it wasn’t going to be all that easy to materialize dreams of badassery. Owl’s mentor winced when Owl brought up a motorbike.

“Motorbikes are dangerous,” Owl’s mentor said. “I understand you need transportation…how about a car?”

Owl could not precisely afford a car. Also she had her heart set on a motorbike. She asked other teachers for help, each fobbed her off on someone else. Most said they drove cars, others redirected Owl back to her mentor. Everyone ended with a story about how dangerous the roads were. Finally, Owl’s mentor pointed her to a teacher who had a scooter for loan. 

Every week Owl went over to the teacher and asked about the scooter. Every week the teacher smiled at her and said something about waiting. It was a delightfully sweet interaction, Owl clearing her throat because she was nervous about being a pest, the teacher all apologetic froth. 

Meanwhile, Owl tried to picture herself on a motorbike and got more and more nervous. She heard stories about students who ended up in accidents. Owl herself tended to daydream when she was behind the steering wheel of a car. What if Owl got into an accident? 

And while Owl’s town wasn’t exactly walkable, Owl could make do. There was a small strip of stores within walking distance. Owl could figure out basic food and laundry. For anything else, well, it’s good to practice living a simple life, right?

On spring vacation to Laos, Owl convinced her friend Peter to teach her to motorbike. [Peter’s motorbike story was comparatively simple. He arrived at school. Teachers brought him shopping for a bike and gave him some lessons.] 

Owl clambered onto the bike. Owl’s shit balance kicked in, the bike wobbled, Owl revved up the bike, shot forward and nearly knocked over a backpacker.

“You almost killed me,” the woman screamed. “Stay off of those.”

“I think we better end lessons,” Peter mumbled. It took Owl’s girlfriends glaring at Peter and talking about strong independent women to get the lessons started again. This time Peter sat on the back. Owl’s girlfriends cheered and clapped as Owl wobbled around a street corner. 

“You aren’t bad,” Peter said. “With some practice you could learn to drive this thing.”

Owl went back to school and continued her campaign for a bike. The teacher with the scooter was even more apologetic than usual. She was busy, she said. Her mother had cancer.

Cancer! How could Owl be selfishly pestering someone about motorbikes when there was cancer afoot? She decided to wait a few weeks.

Shortly afterwards, Peter swung by Owl’s town to take her to a friend’s English camp. On the way they crashed into a pole and tumbled off, splattering against the road. They were lucky: they were wearing helmets and thick clothing. They walked away with no more than a few bruises. Still, Peter still has the scars and it would be a full year before Owl was able to run or walk without limping. Lesson learned: motorbikes are dangerous.

When Owl came back to school with a bloodied arm and knee, her mentor looked her over.

“I told you to stay away from motorbikes,” she said and stalked off. She did not speak to Owl for the rest of the day. It was up to Owl to figure out where the doctor’s office was, walk over, and get treatment. For weeks Owl figured if she got into a second accident she’d rather get smashed up and shipped home in a box than face her mentor and explain she’d been riding motorbikes again. She promptly gave up her campaign for a motorbike.

 In flat comparison, Peter was given the day off and a teacher took him to the doctor’s office to be patched up. 

Owl grew during her year in Malaysia. She walked places. Every weekend she wrote up a list of whatever she needed that couldn’t be procured on foot. She befriended a taxi driver who took her to the bus station every week so Owl could go out of town. They practiced speaking Malaysian together. Owl had the bus time tables and routes memorized.  

Owl got by. During Ramadan when everything was closed during daytime and Owl was too tired to walk to the restaurants and shops when they opened at night, she lost some weight. C’est la vie. 

During her last night in Malaysia, Owl went to dinner with the teachers at her school. Owl was fairly pleased with her year. She’d crossed off her list of goals plus a few more, she was sad to say goodbye, but excited to go home. The conversation swung towards next year’s Fulbrighter who would be replacing Owl. All anybody knew was he was male.

 “Ah, we’ve got to see about getting him a motorbike,” one of the teachers said. “He’ll need to get around. I’ll have to take him to the shops.” 

Owl ate a disgusting amount of dinner to soothe her feelings.

To cap off the end of the year, there was a closing ceremony where all the Fulbright grantees gathered to discuss how the year had went. Transportation came up as a point of contention. A lot of the females in the program said it had taken them a long time to get a motorbike, if they had managed to get one at all. The boys mostly talked about how they’d been taken to the shops immediately.

Everyone was tired. Everyone was somewhat out of temper with each other. It had been a long hard year full of routine failures, small victories and homesickness. Emotions ran high.

A Fulbrighter got up. He was the pull yourself up by the bootstraps type, and he’d bought a sick beast of a motorbike.  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why couldn’t you all just cut through the bullshit and walk into a store and buy a motorbike by yourself?” 

Owl was filled with a deep shame that somehow it had never occurred to her to find the motorbike shop, walk in, spend roughly $500-$800 on a vehicle she didn’t know how to drive in a foreign country and get it back to her house without any help. Weak indeed.

If Owl could do it over again she wishes someone had sat her down and said: you deserve a motorbike but the cards are stacked against you. Fight. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s too dangerous, and don’t let anyone shame you for fighting. Fight like a motherfucker because this isn’t a fair game and there’s no way you’re winning unless you put in everything you’ve got. Don’t stop until you get what you want.

Owl lost that fight. She wonders how many other fights she’s lost because the cards were stacked against her and she didn’t realize.

The Shores of Malaysia

For the New Year Owl washed up on the shores of Malaysia. More specifically, she arrived in a five star hotel in downtown Kuala Lumpur to begin Orientation for her Fulbright grant to teach English. At first she did not know what to do with herself. She had sailed through the month of December in a delicious haze of sleep and books, and she was not prepared for the dazzle of Kuala Lumpur, the chatter of her fellow grantees.

Actually it is a wonderful thing to have the run of a five star hotel in the middle of downtown Kuala Lumpur with forty nine other like minded people. Kuala Lumpur is a city of glass buildings and towers squashed between extravagant shopping malls built of marble and light. Here, the days stretch into the nights, and the nights into day. Everyone is bright with laughter and fellowship. The party is all the more hectic because everyone knows the time is short. Orientation is three weeks long, then the party is over, everyone disperses to a remote town.

People are easing into Malaysia, some sinking comfortably into its softness, others landing awkwardly and bruising. It is not easy. Malaysia is different, roughly 70% Malay, 20% Chinese, 10% Indian; three cultures folded into one, and so mixed that their edges blur and it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.

The breakfast buffet has Chinese porridge, Malaysian nasi lemak, Indian dosas and while most of Owl’s cohort marvels (or despairs) over the food, Owl is jaded. Owl has seen it before. This is exactly what Owl grew up eating, it is a combination Owl never expected to see outside of her house.

And this is where Owl struggles.

Malaysia is more home like than home.

Owl is the product of an Indian father and a Chinese mother who was born and brought up in Indonesia. Owl grew up in the flatlands of the Midwest where non-Caucasian people were a rarity and anything like her combination was unheard of. Owl grew used to explaining her heritage constantly, almost hopelessly in an attempt to explain who she was and what she knew, because still, no matter what she said people would say, oh you are Asian! Oh you are Indian! And the combination of all three was always lost.

It is too complicated, a professor told Owl once when she tried to write a story about her heritage. You must choose one culture to write about.

He did not understand, poor man, that he was saying, pick your mother or pick your father.

At some level Owl grew to accept that she would never fully be understood, and conversely that she would never fully understand a culture and for this reason alone she would always be somewhat of an observer.

Occasionally to fit in with her cohort—Owl has learned by now that it is on her to fit in, not for the world to fit around her—she feigns surprise over whatever it is that is being presented. Oh my. A dosa. Now what is that again? A paper crepe stuffed with potatoes and onions and, good lord what are those black balls? (Mustard seed.) How strange. But oddly delicious. A little bit of condescension is the hallmark of fitting in, Owl has discovered.

And sometimes Owl does this so she doesn’t come off as a complete asshole, because, because my God, Owl walks down the street and it’s an explosion of Bahasa. Owl with the proprietary ignorance that comes from growing up as a minor minority, considers Bahasa to be her private language, something to use in public. Woven into the Bahasa are bits of Chinese, lumps of Hindi, everything sprinkled over with English, and this is Owl’s language, this is the language she grew up hearing and never, never expected to hear anywhere outside the walls of her house. In her mother’s family it was always Bahasa-Chinese, in her father’s family, Hindi. Never, all three together.

And Owl’s Bahasa, broken, inarticulate, bubbles out of her, Owl is stuffing her face with her mother’s food, her father’s food, her food, and Owl is spinning around and around looking at the streets, the stalls, trying take it all in, cram it into her soul, because this belonging, this strange strange familiarity is utterly foreign.  

Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur

And in the midst of all of this, Owl discovered something else.

Owl has a passing knowledge with food and gestures of her heritage, enough to make polite conversation about eating and the weather, but beyond that her cultural and literal vocabulary is limited, anything more complicated than “I am fine, a little tired,” or eating bread with her hands, is utterly beyond her. Morals, values, ways of thinking? Owl is utterly American in her thoughts, and her philosophy.

It’s not easy to identify what it means to think like an American, it is one of those things you discover during a conversation with someone else in another culture. The conversation goes, it goes, and then it hits a wall and the two people are left staring at each other bewildered. But why do you do things like that? It is wrong. It is unthinkable, one will not say. And of course the only, also silent, reply is, What do you mean? You’re the crazy one, not me.

People can gloss over food and handshakes, but try sex, gender roles, religion, race and politics and things start to go pear shaped.

So far, for Owl, American means a certain amount of confidence, a firm handshake, a fierce desire for equality and attention; a belief that she deserves to get whatever she wants, and that she’s going to get it.

In Malaysia the handshakes are limp, and actually you aren’t supposed to shake hands with the opposite gender. Everything is divided alphabetically by gender. The boys are slathered with attention. They are served first, they get the best, and the most. There is a certain amount of racial profiling, people fall neatly into categories that define who they are, and the more Owl interacts with Malaysians the more she understands that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is not that much of a task to change your handshake, but to live in a different belief system, to take a back seat to boys when you have never had to do that before, all of that is a shock.

Owl’s familiarity with Malaysia is surface, as surface as the earth’s crust.

Owl isn’t home. Not really.

Malaysians on the street go up to Owl, they see her brown skin, black hair, and if she keeps her mouth shut, and all of them, the Indian-Malaysians, Chinese-Malaysians, and Malay-Malaysians, and they speak to her in Bahasa, they say oh, you are one of us. There is nothing in Owl’s appearance to warn them otherwise.

And Owl, Owl who has been told she looks like and Indian except there’s something terribly off about her, Owl who is never identified as Chinese, and Owl who always wants to fit in, who has never been claimed as the child of one country or another, Owl clenches her fists because a slow desperate scream is rising inside of her that grows louder each day:

I am an American. An American.

Owl is oh-so American