Smile and the whole world steps on you

I’m in Indonesia right now, and Westerners out here love the locals. This place has been battered by disaster after disaster: the tsunami, an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, another tsunami, another earthquake, and now a massive unstoppable flow of stinking toxic geothermal mud accidentally unleashed by a negligent gas-mining company with ties to the government, swamping East Java. “And look, they’re still smiling” say the tourists and travellers. One tourist says “they’re so friendly. They sure can put up with a lot – it’s like some kind of spiritual acceptance or something.”

Well yeah, of course people smile at visitors. In this vein, I think the image of the simple ‘spiritual’ Southeast Asians acquiescing to their fate is coloured by the tourist experience. In the most infantilising example of these kinds of projections, at a quake-stricken village I visited, one Western rubble-clearing volunteer repeatedly referred to the grateful local (adult) villagers living in tents next to their destroyed houses as “so cute!” I didn’t know what to say, but managed not to throw up.

Yes, many traditional Southeast Asian cultures are non-confrontational, caring, and – like so many other cultures – warmly welcoming to strangers, even if their world has just been destroyed. But among themselves, and outside the pidgin childlike communication that characterises a lot of the tourists’ interaction with rural populations, they, like people anywhere, are bitching and laughing savagely about their stupid government and how it’s screwing them.

Certainly, the obstacles preventing ordinary people from attaining justice and protection from the state seem so vast, that many people in Indonesia categorise the venality and corruption within their government as just another natural disaster, a force of nature, sent as a test or a punishment that can only be endured and not changed. However, I don’t find this attitude as charming and picturesque and upliftingly ‘spiritual’ as so many tourists and even aid workers seem to. There’s far more grim satisfaction to be had in reports of East Javanese locals rising up and attacking mining company equipment to protest the miserable official response to the mudflow catastrophe; or in ‘smiling villagers’ near Yogyakarta frowning in disgust at the government as they tell me of their plans to go the city and agitate for the earthquake reconstruction funds they were promised; or the political discontent in Bangkok’s anti-Thaksin demonstrations. Indonesia and Thailand are hard-won recently transitional democracies; people know they can call out the liars and the cheats now. We don’t know how successful they will be, but they certainly know that smiling in acceptance is no longer compulsory.

To be fair, the presence of a few foreign volunteers in a village like the one I visited did give local people something to be positive about and someone to trust in, helped reinvigorate community life, offered a window on the outside world and even on the rest of their own country. In return, band-aid tourist-volunteers would experience their moment of cuddly community zen then move on, having learnt lessons about forbearance in the face of disaster and about abiding community spirit. Many Westerners attain a remarkable sense of peace spending time with ‘simple’ people like this, or people who they perceive to be like this, because the ethos of such an existence seems devoid of petty complaints.

And certainly, New Zealand travellers and residents in the developing world always come back to New Zealand, scan the headlines, and think ‘what are you people complaining about?’ My Singaporean-born New Zealand-raised Chinese expat friend in Bangkok, asked exactly that question, as we talked about corruption in Thailand (world leader in corruption) and New Zealand (world leader in lack of corruption). Dwelling on the nepotism and bribery in the Thai government turns him pale and tight-lipped and leads him to talk of moving back to New Zealand, but the thought of the epic public outrage over Tuku Morgan’s $95 underpants ten years ago still has him laughing in disbelief over the fuss, never mind the Tilegate or Motorcade sagas.

But we concluded that being outraged at the drop of a hat is the way that countries like New Zealand safeguard their institutional standard of fairness and hold the powerful to account. Yes, our culture of niggle and complaint over nonsense, or the outright political unrest that bubbles up across the Asia-Pacific in response to huge catastrophes – so different from the idealised image of the longsuffering yet smiling third world village community – may be annoying and not ‘spiritual’ or peaceful, but they’re good signs. They’re the kinds of behaviours that, unlike smiling, may actually help prevent huge catastrophes to start with.

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