Art Saves Lives: In Spite of Perfection by Cynthia Dewi Oka

For most of my life, I could not bear my own face. Though I would recognize what I saw in the mirror as familiar, I did not feel it was mine. What I did feel was that it was wrong.

I was raised like a prisoner on an island that most consider a paradise. My parents were survivors of a genocide that targeted, among others, Chinese Indonesians like themselves, and that led to the rise of a brutal dictatorship lasting more than thirty years, both with the backing of the United States and other Western countries.

The air we breathed was salt and fear. Fear of neighbors we could see, and demons we could not. Fear of being taken, fear of being invaded. It stuck to our skin. Being heard saying the wrong thing could get you disappeared, so we formed no opinions. Instead, we memorized the Psalms and sang to God every Sunday until our voices broke. I was not allowed to learn to ride a bike, or to leave the house without my parents accompanying me. Even after my father erected a towering white gate around the front yard, I was not allowed to play there out of his fear that passersby could catch a glimpse of his daughter through its gaps.

The friends I did have were mostly from church. We were only allowed to play together during church activities, the occasional birthday party, and the rare joint family vacations. It was important that we never got “too” close because they were, above all, my rivals. For my parents, my job was to best everyone at everything.

I understand now that my parents wished for me to be perfect because they thought perfection would protect me where they could not.

The one time I was not ranked first in my class, my father looked at me with so much contempt and disgust that I begged God to take my life. I was six. And because God did not answer my prayer in the affirmative, I never failed to rank first after that. I was my father’s vengeance on a society that made him feel small, helpless, and weak; I learned to see myself through his eyes, which meant, to hunt for flaws. To destroy them.

The only time I was off-duty was when I read. I read myself into other countries, other bodies, other lives. Because censorship was a central element of the New Order regime, most of my books were translations of Japanese, British, or American literature. I could tell you everything about the lives of girls in a boarding school in Cornwall and nothing about (another) genocide the Indonesian military was committing in East Timor, a 2-hour flight away.

In 1995, two years before the Asian financial crisis and the fall of the New Order, we migrated to Canada. Perfection became complicated, as my parents’ definition of it, which mirrored the New Order’s, was pretty much the opposite of what Western society wanted. I had to be obedient and original. I had to keep quiet and express myself. I had to believe only what my parents believed and think for myself. On the walk from home to school, I had to transform from a chaste daughter to an object of racial-sexual fetish, harassment, and eventually as I went through puberty, violence.

I understand these things now because I wrote them. And because I wrote them, I can face them. And because I faced them, I can face myself.

While I tried, and failed, to reconcile these demands, I witnessed my parents diminished and humiliated on a daily basis as their interpreter and conduit to Canadian society.

I heard the tremor in my father’s voice when he asked for directions from the bus driver, who kept asking him to repeat himself even after my father showed him on a map exactly where he was trying to go. I saw him smile and nod too hard during conferences with my teachers, who spoke extra loud and extra slow to him, like he was an idiot.

I saw myself, irritated with my mother for asking me, again, to help her change her phone plan, or dispute a credit card charge, or fill out her annual evaluation form for the factory job that kept us fed with a roof over our heads. Not long ago, I found an iPad she had been given several years earlier still unwrapped in her room. She had been too ashamed to ask for help to set it up.

I understand now that my parents wished for me to be perfect because they thought perfection would protect me where they could not.

And that where they could not protect me was everywhere.

And that they are not responsible for the conditions that made our lives so precarious.

I was my father’s vengeance on a society that made him feel small, helpless, and weak; I learned to see myself through his eyes, which meant, to hunt for flaws. To destroy them.

That what my father wanted to give me was faith, which is to say, the unshakeable knowledge that there is a place for us beyond the pain of being an unwanted people, but he spent all his faith crossing the ocean and after, all he had left was rage.

I understand now that there were times my mother looked away because she knows, more than anyone I have ever met, how to survive, to do what must be done today for tomorrow to be imaginable.

I understand these things now because I wrote them. And because I wrote them, I can face them. And because I faced them, I can face myself.

Look, there I am, just beyond a book’s shadow on the wall.