David Fettling's Blog

Its box-office intake would confirm My Stupid Boss as a hit, but I’d suspected as much in the first minute of watching it, when I and three hijab-wearing, popcorn-cradling older ladies beside me laughed simultaneously.

Movie audiences in Jakarta, Indonesia’s megacity of 30 million people, are always diverse – inevitably so, since this is the immigrant-drawing, melting-pot capital of a multiracial, multireligious archipelago nation. Around me sit groups of teenagers, couples of every age bracket, ethnic Chinese Indonesians and visibly-pious Muslims, conspicuous consumers and the working-class, people from profoundly different corners of the city. I – who am Australian – started going to Indonesian cinemas because I was curious to know how Indonesian filmmakers crafted movies for such a staggeringly-wide potential audience. Now, I go simply because I enjoy them: Indonesian films appeal to me, too.

Munching popcorn in Jakarta theatres, I find myself thinking – mainstream, middlebrow cinema has a vital role to play. Movies with broad appeal, featuring stories and characters many different people can relate to, help us see that the citizens of highly-diverse societies, and the inhabitants of a world increasingly riven by international and intercultural tensions, have certain fundamental things in common.

Indonesia makes a lot of romantic dramas. Two people, invariably affluent Jakarta professionals, have their relationship tested by various pressures: endless distractions, choices and obstacles intrude on them as they ride subways, eat out expensively, and chill beside awesome-looking swimming pools. Most recently, Twivortiare told the story of a couple, one banker, one surgeon, who were juggling busy careers and arguing continuously because of it, but kept trying to make their relationship work and thus find sustainable happiness in the big smoke. I’m not a doctor or banker, and don’t own a swimming pool, things I suspect were also true of most others in the theatre with me. Yet the story’s fundamentals, its portrayal of modern life, spoke to me – as it did to those around me, judging from the sniffling.

Then there are comedies. Their dialogue often gets very slangy, many jokes go over my head: but much of the humour, I find, operates beyond language. My Stupid Boss drew laughs just from the boss’s waddling walk and hectoring speech, the way his arrogance was visibly undimmed by repeated, self-created failures, and by the way the film’s heroine was exhausted by him yet never stopped standing up to his absurdities. Such bosses are everywhere, all over Jakarta, all around the world – and seeing them lampooned is apparently a universal pleasure.

One proven hit-maker of recent years is the comedian-turned-filmmaker Ernest Prakasa. His first film, Ngenest, drew heavily on his experience as a racial minority – he is Chinese Indonesian, a group that often faces discrimination. His new film, Imperfect, is likewise preoccupied with questions of inclusivity versus exclusion, fair and unfair treatment to people who are different – this time about a woman mocked for weight and physical appearance. Indonesians like Ernest Prakasa’s films. I like them too. In scenes of schoolyard or workplace bullying and casual stereotyping, and self-criticism and self-doubt, typically poignant and funny simultaneously, we – we – see worlds with certain details that are unfamiliar to us. But we also see worlds not so unknown: stories whose fundamentals are entirely recognisable to Muslim, Chinese and Western viewers all; casts of characters with whom we have no difficulties empathising.

I rarely watch American films in Indonesia. They’re still here, though not to the extent they once were – local movies now account for around half of ticket sales. The superhero franchises are most visible, with a smattering of other action and horror: Terminator, It. I watch their trailers, and see their posters hanging in cinema lobbies. What they show Hollywood as offering – shields, orbs, daggers, helmets, lasers, capes, explosions, and very little else – is a narrow conception indeed of what sort of shared stories can bring together audiences in America and Asia.

Yet during Hollywood’s Golden Age, when American films dominated Asia so comprehensively that they have been dubbed the ‘first global vernacular’, when Asians in Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Batavia (Jakarta’s old name) and Shanghai attended American films in unprecedented droves, superhero franchises weren’t on the billing. When Asians went to Hollywood films in that era, they were watching stories of star-crossed lovers. Or stories about struggles for various types of freedom over various types of authority – one young Indonesian, named Sukarno, was a big fan of American Westerns in the decade before he declared national independence, became Indonesia’s founding President, and led an anti-colonial revolution. Or comedies, featuring humour of a particular, universal type – Charlie Chaplin, drawing his laughs wordlessly, was a huge star in Asia, City Lights and Modern Times giant hits. Hollywood’s current hypothesis that Marvel-esque content is the only area of common ground between Asian and Western audiences is demonstrably historically false.

In the past, what worked in Asia was Bogart and Bacall, white hats vanquishing black hats, comical failures to maintain dignity on the factory-floor or dance-floor. Hollywood films were portraying visions of modernity – salient in Asian port cities whose residents had left old ways of life far behind. But more than that, Hollywood offered stripped-down, simple stories of human struggles and human experience – precisely the sort of stories now drawing me to Indonesian films.

What was the secret of classical Hollywood’s Asian success? The film scholar Miriam Hansen has pointed to America’s multicultural society. In the process of finding common denominators to bind together a deeply-diverse citizenry, pursuing stories which crossed cultural lines to speak to all types of Americans, Hollywood products seamlessly gained a competitive edge beyond America, as well. That Hollywood was so heavily influenced by immigrant filmmakers reinforced this trend. European-born writers and directors, as new Americans, brought to their work a set of perspectives, interests and themes – desire for a freedom or personal happiness that sometimes clashed with tradition or responsibility, quests to fit into new surroundings and master new situations while remaining true to one’s self – that spoke to Thais and Tamils as much as Irish- or Italian-Americans.

A similar phenomenon – deep experience with diversity, embodied in the very biographies of key moviemakers – aids Indonesian cinema’s broad appeal. Like Hollywood, people from ethnic minorities have been disproportionately prominent in Indonesia’s film industry – decades ago it was heavily Chinese Indonesians, now it’s often Indian Indonesians. The country’s most-lauded director, Hanung Bramantyo, has a Chinese mother, and a father and grandfather prominent in Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah. Bramantyo has made films with overtly Islamic subject matter. He has made films lauding Indonesia’s pluralism. Above all he has consistently made popular films.

In Jakarta I often find myself wanting to hear from American voices. America is an immigrant nation, a fusion of different cultures; America has long been in the vanguard of modernity, progress and freedom but is now facing down an unprecedented challenge to those values. In other words, America has in abundance the raw material to produce human stories, intelligent yet accessible, avoiding political polemics but speaking to the core concerns of the age, which would be of acute interest and relevance to people in diverse, aspirational, modernising yet culturally-torn societies everywhere – Indonesia, the rest of Southeast Asia, and yes, mainland China, too. Amid renascent nationalism and nativism, modern Hollywood could play as pivotal a role as classical Hollywood did in revealing just how many commonalities people of different countries and cultures share. What an opportunity to throw away for superhero franchises.

I sit in Jakarta cinemas and I think: Hollywood might seek inspiration from Indonesian cinema. The best Indonesian film of the past year, and another hit, was Dua Garis Biru, about a teenage girl who becomes pregnant. In one scene, main character Dara is walking aimlessly, upset and confused, when she sees an ondel-ondel, which is a costumed figure wearing long robes and a colourful mask that often walks along Jakarta streets. She stares at it, and it appears to stare back, the mask giving it a Delphic expression. What I took from the scene was Dara’s searching, questioning gaze, her seeing in the masked ondel-ondel something of the world’s mysteriousness and lack of clear-cut answers or resolutions. A simple scene, no CGI necessary: an Indonesian schoolgirl on a Jakarta street appraising a highly-localised old custom. And a scene which leaps effortlessly over cultural, national and language divides. Here in Indonesian cinema is a universe more appealing than Marvel’s: ours.

Days after returning to Melbourne from Jakarta, my flashcard app’s collection of Indonesian words seem to have curdled: the ks in place of cs are suddenly jarring; previously neutral-sounding syllables – kan, meng, ter – look inexplicably alien. A modest daily goal, 500 flashcards, once a pleasant exercise before breakfast, becomes a chore. Learning a language requires motivation, but something about my surroundings drains my commitment to Bahasa Indonesia: in Australia, I cannot convince myself of the exercise’s worth.

From Australia, Indonesia looks ugly. Images of it in the media show grubbiness, seediness, smog, chaos; it is not a rapidly transforming and endlessly diverse country, but small, stolid, uniformly nasty. Australian writer and translator Max Lane implored in 1983 for Indonesia to be “[made] alive to Australians”. Thirty-six years later, this hasn’t happened. More than any individual policy failure, the basic inability to see the archipelago in all its complexity remains the most significant obstacle to Australia’s relationship with Asia.

In a morning newspaper, the word “Indonesia” appears above a photograph of a wispy-bearded terrorist. Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual leader of the group responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings, is the best-known Indonesian in Australia. On the evening television news an Australian minister chats, in unselfconscious English, with Joko Widodo. “Jokowi”, as he is known, whose English is imperfect, grins uneasily and gives brief, bland replies. Indonesia’s seventh president, and his troubled implementation of a sprawling reform agenda, fade from view; the voice-over reduces him to a man who wants an Australian university campus in his country.

I open a map of Indonesia, to remind myself of cities, regions and islands that in the Australian consciousness barely exist. In Australia, cosmopolitan port city Surabaya – the cocky, slangy speech of its youth, its reformist female mayor, its hundreds of public parks – shrinks to an image of a bombed church. Sulawesi, parts of which are seeing 15 per cent economic growth, becomes muddy rubble. Sumatra and Borneo appear as conflict zones over palm oil and orangutans – leaving aside the struggles of Indonesian environmentalists and local communities whose older, typically more sustainable ways of using the land are also threatened by corporate agrobusiness. Jakarta, dubbed “The Big Durian” to identify it, with reason, as the New York of South-East Asia, shrivels into a dystopia of slums, bad air and anti-Israel rallies.

A partial fix: I log into Twitter. Here, Indonesian activists and agitators gleefully mock conservative militants and mediocre politicians, demonstrating how many in the nation are thinking bigger things, dreaming bigger dreams, than Indonesian party politics suggests. To a politician’s hypocritical condemnation of corruption, someone writes, “Wow, super-late.” Commenting on a male preacher’s misogyny, a woman says: “Why doesn’t he discuss men?” One Twitter user aspires to “make Indonesia suck less” – demonstrating that Indonesia doesn’t suck at all, only its political class.

Another partial fix: I go to YouTube. Two preachers appear on a popular Indonesian television show, employing Islamic thought to counsel tolerance, humility, wisdom – and the joys of music. Jokowi makes deadpan jokes before a jostling press pack, then addresses a rowdy ballroom of supporters, mocking the conspiracy theories spread by some of the groups opposing him. “Balita PKI … Lucu banget kan,” he says. Toddler communist … what a joke, right? The crowd roars approval. A sense of the passions that drive Indonesian politics, and the stakes, filters through. Bahasa Indonesia comes alive again.

When I’m back in Jakarta, Indonesia’s complexity, and attractiveness, hit as powerfully as the heat. Young men sit at the counters in diner-style eateries with tea, spicy meat and rice. Female professionals call taxis by app beneath giant tropical trees. A congregation streams from a mosque at night like a white-uniformed football crowd. Newcomers arrive continuously from across the archipelago, seeking their fortune, new networks and communities, freedom from rural hierarchies and roles. Jakarta is a melting pot, a hybrid society. “I’m half-Sumatran and half-Javanese,” someone says in a twenty-four-hour café. “My father’s Muslim, my mother Chinese,” I hear in a rendang restaurant.

Posters of xenophobic Islamic militia leader Rizieq Shihab are plastered to highway overpass supports: rising intolerance is coming less from traditionalism than from rapid change. But that intolerance is being resisted. At the annual conference held by Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah, the ulama discuss ways to foster civility. Graffiti artists paint, in public places in the city, murals of different cultures coming together. Foreigners are here, as they have been for centuries, though as visible as Westerners are arrivals from the Global South: African textile merchants, Bollywood producers recruited to Jakarta’s film industry. Here, Bahasa Indonesia is the epitome of cool. “Rapi, dong,” says a late-night television host, calling attention to the awesomeness of his new suit, and winks.

While I am in Jakarta, a presidential debate is televised. Curious about my nation’s coverage of it, I check Australian news websites. The focus is on an explosion heard outside the venue. It was fireworks: nobody was injured, the debate was uninterrupted. But it has become the story. This, in Australian eyes, is Indonesia.

Economic growth is shifting from North-East to South-East and South Asia – from ageing China to still-young ASEAN and India. But the pattern of growth is different. In Indonesia and India, largest of the new “rising” nations, there is no mass industrialisation, fewer good-quality jobs, more unemployment and underemployment. Lacking China’s iron political control, these countries’ reform efforts are more ponderous, habits of protectionism and other state intervention in economies more entrenched – while projected to keep growing steadily, their economic growth is unlikely to reach the 10 per cent China achieved at the height of its rise. They also have surfeits of nationalistic pride, histories of thumbing their noses at Western powers.

China’s forty-year industrialisation has overwhelmingly shaped Australian attitudes and approaches to Asia. It’s been an economic bonanza. But China between Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, “open” to globalisation, prudently “hiding its claws” in foreign relations, and craving iron ore, could constitute Asia’s low-hanging fruit. While Indonesia and India both contain economic opportunities, vastly increased trade with Australia in the near term is unlikely.

Australia might usefully respond to the prospective Indonesian- and Indian-led phase of Asia’s rise by moving beyond the narrow transactionalism that has dominated its Asian responses – so pervasive that Australian schoolchildren want to learn Mandarin but not Indonesian because they associate Mandarin with financial gain. Australia might prioritise fostering a wide curiosity about, knowledge of and engagement with South-East and South Asia: to think of these nations as more than “markets”. Deeper economic relations will depend on cultural knowledge. More importantly, South-East and South Asia have things to offer beyond export flows. If Australia shifts from seeing in Indonesia only jihadism to seeing only a land of middle-class supermarkets selling milk and meat, that too will be a reductive vision.

Governments set the tone for society, and the Australian government’s narratives about Asia have for twenty years been colourless. Speaking about Indonesia, Australian politicians awkwardly mix utilitarianism and sentimentalism, mentioning a limited set of issues – sea lanes, transnational crime, border security – listing trade volumes with near-Trumpian mercantilism and sprinkling in “good neighbour” sops. There’s little reference to how the energies of South-East Asia’s youth are remaking the region, and the broader ways engagement could enrich – little resembling Barack Obama’s description of South-East Asia as “filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people” and plea that “if we [aren’t] here, interacting and learning … [w]e’ll miss an opportunity”.

To secure public support for continued ties with Indonesia, Australian politicians have taken a damaging shortcut. They praise Indonesia as “a democracy” and a purveyor of “tolerant”, “moderate” Islam. Julie Bishop was representative of this trend in 2018 when she said that Indonesian democracy had since 1998 “gone from strength to strength”, and that “Indonesia sets an example for the region, indeed globally [for] its inclusive, multicultural and multi-faith society”. This type of characterisation, given without elaboration, is disingenuous, and breeds cynicism – for Australians know, if only in broad strokes, what this narrative omits: that Indonesia’s democracy is highly flawed, and that it has a severe religious tolerance crisis. Because politicians’ fantastical, simplified version of Indonesia strikes Australians as implausible, pleas for “friendship”, too, land leaden.

Australia has not always imagined Indonesia so reductively. The 1946 documentary Indonesia Calling – shot by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the streets of Sydney, featuring Indonesian exiles and Australian unionists cooperating to support the Indonesian National Revolution against Dutch colonialism – is to modern eyes startling. White, working-class, middle-aged Sydney men cheer the revolutionary speeches of young Indonesians. They work with these men to halt Dutch ships bound for Indonesia.

If there’s no talk of narrow utility, neither is there laboured sentimentalism. It is complementary visions for the future that bring the Indonesians and Australians together. The Indonesians, the voice-over explains, speak “a language workers in every country understand”: frustration with an inequitable status quo, aspirations for something better. In the 1940s, amid disorder, economic depression, subjugation and war, the idea of cooperating across borders to challenge injustices – on the belief that specific inequities were components of a universal struggle, which would be pursued more powerfully together – was widespread. Indonesia Calling was popular when it screened in Sydney initially, and then in other Australian cities, and ultimately in the new Indonesian Republican capital of Yogyakarta, to which it was smuggled.

Ben Chifley’s cabinet watched Indonesia Calling, and resisted conservative demands to ban the film. The Chifley government subsequently moved to support Indonesia’s revolutionary aspirations. The late 1940s, and the postwar reordering of international affairs that took place, was a singular period in history. Yet Gough Whitlam offered a similar vision of Australia’s engagement with Asia thirty years later when he told South-East Asia that “your hopes, your problems, your future are necessarily and forever part of our own future”.

Australia must see Indonesia more clearly, above all as an endlessly complex country, neither exemplary nor malign, but possessed of demons and better angels, and wrestling both during a time of transformation. Indonesia contains many people within and beyond government who are working to create a better, more just society. That includes not only the socially and politically “progressive”, by Western standards, but also many among conservative, pious sections of Indonesian society – among traditional Islamic schools, within memberships of Muslim organisations such as Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama. Others are being seduced by nastier, reactionary visions. There’s nothing extraordinary in Indonesia’s complex moral landscape, as demonstrated by Australia’s own struggles with intolerance and human-rights violations.

But Australia also needs a new narrative of Australian–Indonesian relations, a new story about the purpose of engagement between our two nations. Reimagining what Australia and Indonesia – as well as the other ASEAN nations and South Asia – can potentially do together is a vital prerequisite to shifting Australian foreign relations from China-centrism and transactionalism.

Australia and Indonesia both face rapidly expanding cities and depopulated rural areas; rising inequality; uneven access to opportunity depending on region, class, age and race; and environmental catastrophes. Nations often respond to such challenges not with international engagement but with its opposite: stereotyping other countries and peoples, or simply walling them off. Brexit, Trump’s wall, US–China trade wars and tension between parts of the Western and Muslim worlds all confirm the temptations of such conceptions of world affairs.

But those Indonesians and Australians of the 1940s show the wiser course. Individuals, organisations and governments who seek to make the world better can reach across national boundaries in ways that are mutually strengthening – ways that provide inspiration or knowledge, new approaches and actions, or new sources of assistance.

Within Indonesia is a universal desire for development and prosperity. Its citizens, particularly its youth, seek education and jobs. Such aspirations clearly mesh with Australia’s economic needs – together with trade and increased investment, Australians might enter more business co-ventures in the archipelago, especially in food production.

Significant numbers of Indonesians, meanwhile, seek things beyond gross domestic product: human rights, environmental protection, an end to xenophobia. Australia might simultaneously develop links with as many of those citizens as possible through boosted engagement with Indonesian civil society.

Australian government attention and resources might focus more on Indonesian NGOs working to bring about a better democracy, a healthier environment and increased rights for minorities. There has, especially in the last decade, been an emphasis on government-to-government ties at the expense of partnership with these actors. Beyond government, Australian and Indonesian civil society activists might come together more often, through workshops, fellowships and other exchanges, and in coordinated campaigns. The natural environment – destruction of our countries’ rainforests, pollution and bleaching of our oceans and reefs, and climate change – particularly suggests itself as an issue on which Australian and Indonesian civil society might work together. Cooperation can strengthen those in both countries who seek progressive change, the better angels of both our national natures.

Religious engagement could stimulate Australians and Indonesians trying to build more tolerant, genuinely multicultural societies. Last decade, the Australian government decided to channel, via AusAID, large-scale assistance to Indonesian pesantrens, a means to improve the quality of religious-based education – $A167 million flowed between 2002 and the mid-2010s, according to Australian National University associate professor Greg Fealy. That might restart. But it is not simply a question of money; intellectual exchange is also crucial. While Indonesian and Australian Muslims could meet in greater numbers, connections might be encouraged across as well as within religious lines. Pesantren students and the ulama could teach Australians much about the Islamic faith in all its diversity, reducing Australian Islamophobia.

Vital to a reimagined relationship will be for Australian cities to be more open to young Indonesians – and Indonesian cities to Australians. This would mean streamlining cumbersome entry requirements for Indonesians visiting Australia. It would also mean policy change to facilitate more Indonesians migrating to Australia as workers, as Sam Roggeveen argued in a recent issue of Australian Foreign Affairs. There is no political will, it will be said. Yet the cultural melting pots of big cities are where people meet and collaborations occur. If Australians and Indonesians – and Indians – are to come together more, large cities will be the setting.

In Indonesia Calling, Indonesians – “fellow townsmen” – ride trams, buy newspapers, hold concerts in Martin Place, walk with Australian and Indian seamen across the Harbour Bridge. In 1940s Sydney, proximity enabled people to perceive common ideas and aspirations – that “their struggle is our struggle”, as an Indian sailor says on the docks. Proximity also facilitated that vital precondition of engagement: substantive knowledge of the other. “Here in Australia,” the film’s voice-over declares with confidence, “we know the Indonesians well.” Seventy years on, a different generation of Australians would be wise to attempt the same.

Originally published by Australian Foreign Affairs.

Days after returning to Melbourne from Jakarta, my flashcard app’s collection of Indonesian words seem to have curdled: the ks in place of cs are suddenly jarring; previously neutral-sounding syllables – kan, meng, ter – look inexplicably alien. A modest daily goal, 500 flashcards, once a pleasant exercise before breakfast, becomes a chore. Learning a language requires motivation, but something about my surroundings drains my commitment to Bahasa Indonesia: in Australia, I cannot convince myself of the exercise’s worth.

From Australia, Indonesia looks ugly. Images of it in the media show grubbiness, seediness, smog, chaos; it is not a rapidly transforming and endlessly diverse country, but small, stolid, uniformly nasty. Australian writer and translator Max Lane implored in 1983 for Indonesia to be “[made] alive to Australians”. Thirty-six years later, this hasn’t happened. More than any individual policy failure, the basic inability to see the archipelago in all its complexity remains the most significant obstacle to Australia’s relationship with Asia.

In a morning newspaper, the word “Indonesia” appears above a photograph of a wispy-bearded terrorist. Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual leader of the group responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings, is the best-known Indonesian in Australia. On the evening television news an Australian minister chats, in unselfconscious English, with Joko Widodo. “Jokowi”, as he is known, whose English is imperfect, grins uneasily and gives brief, bland replies. Indonesia’s seventh president, and his troubled implementation of a sprawling reform agenda, fade from view; the voice-over reduces him to a man who wants an Australian university campus in his country.

I open a map of Indonesia, remind myself of cities, regions and islands that in the Australian consciousness barely exist. In Australia, cosmopolitan port city Surabaya – the cocky, slangy speech of its youth, its reformist female mayor, its hundreds of public parks – shrinks to an image of a bombed church. Sulawesi, parts of which are seeing 15 per cent economic growth, becomes muddy rubble. Sumatra and Borneo appear as conflict zones over palm oil and orangutans – leaving aside the struggles of Indonesian environmentalists and local communities whose older, typically more sustainable ways of using the land are also threatened by corporate agrobusiness. Jakarta, dubbed “The Big Durian” to identify it, with reason, as the New York of South-East Asia, shrivels into a dystopia of slums, bad air and anti-Israel rallies.

A partial fix: I log into Twitter. Here, Indonesian activists and agitators gleefully mock conservative militants and mediocre politicians, demonstrating how many in the nation are thinking bigger things, dreaming bigger dreams, than Indonesian party politics suggests. To a politician’s hypocritical condemnation of corruption, someone writes, “Wow, super-late.” Commenting on a male preacher’s misogyny, a woman says: “Why doesn’t he discuss men?” One Twitter user aspires to “make Indonesia suck less” – demonstrating that Indonesia doesn’t suck at all, only its political class.

Another partial fix: I go to YouTube. Two preachers appear on a popular Indonesian television show, employing Islamic thought to counsel tolerance, humility, wisdom – and the joys of music. Jokowi makes deadpan jokes before a jostling press pack, then addresses a rowdy ballroom of supporters, mocking the conspiracy theories spread by some of the groups opposing him. “Balita PKI … Lucu banget kan,” he says. Toddler communist … what a joke, right? The crowd roars approval. A sense of the passions that drive Indonesian politics, and the stakes, filters through. Bahasa Indonesia comes alive again.

When I’m back in Jakarta, Indonesia’s complexity, and attractiveness, hit as powerfully as the heat. Young men sit at counters in diner-style eateries with tea, spicy meat and rice. Female professionals call taxis by app beneath giant tropical trees. A congregation streams from a mosque at night like a white-uniformed football crowd. Newcomers arrive continuously from across the archipelago, seeking their fortune, new networks and communities, freedom from rural hierarchies and roles. Jakarta is a melting pot, a hybrid society. “I’m half-Sumatran and half-Javanese,” someone says in a twenty-four-hour café. “My father’s Muslim, my mother Chinese,” I hear in a rendang restaurant.

Posters of xenophobic Islamic militia leader Rizieq Shihab are plastered to highway overpass supports: rising intolerance is coming less from traditionalism than from rapid change. But that intolerance is being resisted. At the annual conference held by Islamic organisation Muhammadiyah, ulama discuss ways to foster civility. Graffiti artists paint, in public places in the city, murals of different cultures coming together. Foreigners are here, as they have been for centuries, though as visible as Westerners are arrivals from the Global South: African textile merchants, Bollywood producers recruited to Jakarta’s film industry. Here, Bahasa Indonesia is the epitome of cool. “Rapi, dong,” says a late-night television host, calling attention to the awesomeness of his new suit, and winks.

While I am in Jakarta, a presidential debate is televised. Curious about my nation’s coverage of it, I check Australian news websites. The focus is on an explosion heard outside the venue. It was fireworks: nobody was injured, the debate was uninterrupted. But it has become the story. This, in Australian eyes, is Indonesia.

*

Economic growth is shifting from North-East to South-East and South Asia – from ageing China to still-young ASEAN and India. But the pattern of growth is different. In Indonesia and India, largest of the new “rising” nations, there is no mass industrialisation, fewer good-quality jobs, more unemployment and underemployment. Lacking China’s iron political control, these countries’ reform efforts are more ponderous, habits of protectionism and other state intervention in economies more entrenched – while projected to keep growing steadily, their economic growth is unlikely to reach the 10 per cent China achieved at the height of its rise. They also have surfeits of nationalistic pride, histories of thumbing their noses at Western powers.

China’s forty-year industrialisation has overwhelmingly shaped Australian attitudes and approaches to Asia. It’s been an economic bonanza. But China between Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping, “open” to globalisation, prudently “hiding its claws” in foreign relations, and craving iron ore, could constitute Asia’s low-hanging fruit. While Indonesia and India both contain economic opportunities, vastly increased trade with Australia in the near term is unlikely.

Australia might usefully respond to the prospective Indonesian- and Indian-led phase of Asia’s rise by moving beyond the narrow transactionalism that has dominated its Asian responses – so pervasive that Australian schoolchildren want to learn Mandarin but not Indonesian because they associate Mandarin with financial gain. Australia might prioritise fostering a wide curiosity about, knowledge of and engagement with South-East and South Asia: to think of these nations as more than “markets”. Deeper economic relations will depend on cultural knowledge. More importantly, South-East and South Asia have things to offer beyond export flows. If Australia shifts from seeing in Indonesia only jihadism to seeing only a land of middle-class supermarkets selling milk and meat, that too will be a reductive vision.

Governments set the tone for society, and the Australian government’s narratives about Asia have for twenty years been colourless. Speaking about Indonesia, Australian politicians awkwardly mix utilitarianism and sentimentalism, mentioning a limited set of issues – sea lanes, transnational crime, border security – listing trade volumes with near-Trumpian mercantilism and sprinkling in “good neighbour” sops. There’s little reference to how the energies of South-East Asia’s youth are remaking the region, and the broader ways engagement could enrich – little resembling Barack Obama’s description of South-East Asia as “filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people” and plea that “if we [aren’t] here, interacting and learning … [w]e’ll miss an opportunity”.

To secure public support for continued ties with Indonesia, Australian politicians have taken a damaging shortcut. They praise Indonesia as “a democracy” and a purveyor of “tolerant”, “moderate” Islam. Julie Bishop was representative of this trend in 2018 when she said that Indonesian democracy had since 1998 “gone from strength to strength”, and that “Indonesia sets an example for the region, indeed globally [for] its inclusive, multicultural and multi-faith society”. This type of characterisation, given without elaboration, is disingenuous, and breeds cynicism – for Australians know, if only in broad strokes, what this narrative omits: that Indonesia’s democracy is highly flawed, and that it has a severe religious tolerance crisis. Because politicians’ fantastical, simplified version of Indonesia strikes Australians as implausible, pleas for “friendship”, too, land leaden.

Australia has not always imagined Indonesia so reductively. The 1946 documentary Indonesia Calling – shot by Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the streets of Sydney, featuring Indonesian exiles and Australian unionists cooperating to support the Indonesian National Revolution against Dutch colonialism – is to modern eyes startling. White, working-class, middle-aged Sydney men cheer the revolutionary speeches of young Indonesians. They work with these men to halt Dutch ships bound for Indonesia.

If there’s no talk of narrow utility, neither is there laboured sentimentalism. It is complementary visions for the future that bring the Indonesians and Australians together. The Indonesians, the voice-over explains, speak “a language workers in every country understand”: frustration with an inequitable status quo, aspirations for something better. In the 1940s, amid disorder, economic depression, subjugation and war, the idea of cooperating across borders to challenge injustices – on the belief that specific inequities were components of a universal struggle, which would be pursued more powerfully together – was widespread. Indonesia Calling was popular when it screened in Sydney initially, and then in other Australian cities, and ultimately in the new Indonesian Republican capital of Yogyakarta, to which it was smuggled.

Ben Chifley’s cabinet watched Indonesia Calling, and resisted conservative demands to ban the film. The Chifley government subsequently moved to support Indonesia’s revolutionary aspirations. The late 1940s, and the postwar reordering of international affairs that took place, was a singular period in history. Yet Gough Whitlam offered a similar vision of Australia’s engagement with Asia thirty years later when he told South-East Asia that “your hopes, your problems, your future are necessarily and forever part of our own future”.

*

Australia must see Indonesia more clearly, above all as an endlessly complex country, neither exemplary nor malign, but possessed of demons and better angels, and wrestling both during a time of transformation. Indonesia contains many people within and beyond government who are working to create a better, more just society. That includes not only the socially and politically “progressive”, by Western standards, but also many among conservative, pious sections of Indonesian society – among traditional Islamic schools, within memberships of Muslim organisations such as Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama. Others are being seduced by nastier, reactionary visions. There’s nothing extraordinary in Indonesia’s complex moral landscape, as demonstrated by Australia’s own struggles with intolerance and human-rights violations.

But Australia also needs a new narrative of Australian–Indonesian relations, a new story about the purpose of engagement between our two nations. Reimagining what Australia and Indonesia – as well as the other ASEAN nations and South Asia – can potentially do together is a vital prerequisite to shifting Australian foreign relations from China-centrism and transactionalism.

Australia and Indonesia both face rapidly expanding cities and depopulated rural areas; rising inequality; uneven access to opportunity depending on region, class, age and race; and environmental catastrophes. Nations often respond to such challenges not with international engagement but with its opposite: stereotyping other countries and peoples, or simply walling them off. Brexit, Trump’s wall, US–China trade wars and tension between parts of the Western and Muslim worlds all confirm the temptations of such conceptions of world affairs.

But those Indonesians and Australians of the 1940s show the wiser course. Individuals, organisations and governments who seek to make the world better can reach across national boundaries in ways that are mutually strengthening – ways that provide inspiration or knowledge, new approaches and actions, or new sources of assistance.

Within Indonesia is a universal desire for development and prosperity. Its citizens, particularly its youth, seek education and jobs. Such aspirations clearly mesh with Australia’s economic needs – together with trade and increased investment, Australians might enter more business co-ventures in the archipelago, especially in food production.

Significant numbers of Indonesians, meanwhile, seek things beyond gross domestic product: human rights, environmental protection, an end to xenophobia. Australia might simultaneously develop links with as many of those citizens as possible through boosted engagement with Indonesian civil society.

Australian government attention and resources might focus more on Indonesian NGOs working to bring about a better democracy, a healthier environment and increased rights for minorities. There has, especially in the last decade, been an emphasis on government-to-government ties at the expense of partnership with these actors. Beyond government, Australian and Indonesian civil society activists might come together more often, through workshops, fellowships and other exchanges, and in coordinated campaigns. The natural environment – destruction of our countries’ rainforests, pollution and bleaching of our oceans and reefs, and climate change – particularly suggests itself as an issue on which Australian and Indonesian civil society might work together. Cooperation can strengthen those in both countries who seek progressive change, the better angels of both our national natures.

Religious engagement could stimulate Australians and Indonesians trying to build more tolerant, genuinely multicultural societies. Last decade, the Australian government decided to channel, via AusAID, large-scale assistance to Indonesian pesantrens, a means to improve the quality of religious-based education – $A167 million flowed between 2002 and the mid-2010s, according to Australian National University associate professor Greg Fealy. That might restart. But it is not simply a question of money; intellectual exchange is also crucial. While Indonesian and Australian Muslims could meet in greater numbers, connections might be encouraged across as well as within religious lines. Pesantren students and the ulama could teach Australians much about the Islamic faith in all its diversity, reducing Australian Islamophobia.

Vital to a reimagined relationship will be for Australian cities to be more open to young Indonesians – and Indonesian cities to Australians. This would mean streamlining cumbersome entry requirements for Indonesians visiting Australia. It would also mean policy change to facilitate more Indonesians migrating to Australia as workers, as Sam Roggeveen argued in a recent issue of Australian Foreign Affairs. There is no political will, it will be said. Yet the cultural melting pots of big cities are where people meet and collaborations occur. If Australians and Indonesians – and Indians – are to come together more, large cities will be the setting.

In Indonesia Calling, Indonesians – “fellow townsmen” – ride trams, buy newspapers, hold concerts in Martin Place, walk with Australian and Indian seamen across the Harbour Bridge. In 1940s Sydney, proximity enabled people to perceive common ideas and aspirations – that “their struggle is our struggle”, as an Indian sailor says on the docks. Proximity also facilitated that vital precondition of engagement: substantive knowledge of the other. “Here in Australia,” the film’s voice-over declares with confidence, “we know the Indonesians well.” Seventy years on, a different generation of Australians would be wise to attempt the same.

First published in Australian Foreign Affairs.

Jogjakarta’s tourist enclave has the same Westernised food devoid of spices and sauces, the same signs in Disneyish font advertising tours to waterfalls, and the same ubiquitous bottles of Bintang beer as Kuta Beach. On offer from the Lonely Planet tourism-industrial-complex is the same narrow frame for viewing Indonesia.

But here, at dusk, as the Islamic call to prayer begins and the sky turns pink and fills with small bats, groups of Indonesians emerge from narrow kampung streets, speak quietly and seriously among themselves, then, abruptly, enter the tourist cafés.

Several 10-year olds fire questions at tourists. How long are you here? What have you seen? What do you know about Indonesia? A kid in a blue school-blazer asks if I’ve tried gudeg, jackfruit stew. There’s a rustle in nearby foliage and his teacher appears, after surreptitiously watching his assigned task in operation. ‘I told them to ask questions spontaneously, not read memorized ones’, he says – ‘did they do it?’ The kid looks at me imploringly; I assure the teacher he did.

A clipboard-carrying university student enters, doing research on – wait for it – travellers’ diarrhoea. He’s studying causes, effects – the works. His choice of fieldwork site is astute: I’ve a trove of data for him. As he takes notes I take a satisfied swig of Bintang, glad to have contributed to scientific knowledge, surprised to have done it here. In Jogjakarta, even in a mass-tourism barnacle encrusted on the city’s edge, it’s possible to glimpse a very different Indonesia.

Most Australian tourists to Indonesia go to Bali. Impressions we collect on travels abroad shape our broader ideas about and attitudes toward foreign societies. Those impressions depend heavily on where in a country we go. Indonesia in many Australian eyes thus consists disproportionately of surf and sand, and is politely accommodating to foreign tastes – though there is a simultaneous inkling of something distinct, unknown, and likely threatening existing beyond Denpasar’s Burger King and Nando’s subsidiaries.

Now Indonesia’s government wants to create ‘10 New Bali’s’, ten new international tourist destinations elsewhere in the archipelago. Visitors to those places will potentially see other sides of Indonesia. One proposed destination is Borobudur temple: for that, most visitors will stay in Jogjakarta, or ‘Jogja’.

Jogja is a kota pelajar, student city – a centre of universities, colleges, and quality schools that draws young people from across Indonesia. Two schoolkids sit in a warung, a canvas-roofed cheap restaurant, stir noodles, gaze at calculus problems. A young woman buys Indonesian-language Dostoyevsky and Orwell from Togamas bookshop. A public library has an outside pot-plant-studded garden with banks of workstations – vacant seats are rare. Students and staff jog Universitas Gadjah Madah’s running track at dusk; leaflets plastered to buildings’ sides advertise public lectures. At Institute Seni Indonesia, a renowned arts college, I hear drums several floors up in a building, see a young man practising cello in an empty quadrangle.

Jogja is a young city in a young nation – half Indonesia’s population is under 30. Indonesian millennials are dreaming big, shunning the agricultural work that employed a majority of former generations, enrolling in higher education, planning lives of sharply-upward mobility. They are already driving cultural changes. Hiking and camping at volcanoes is popular with Indonesian millennials: inside Jogja’s many outdoor stores young people stand amid boots and tents, try backpacks on for size. Coffee has exploded in popularity; inside one café, on Jogja’s outskirts, young people tap on laptops, plugs in ears. The cafe sits amongst rice-fields: out the windows, mostly-elderly farmers in long sleeves and wide hats wade through green. Go-Jek – like Uber, but with motorbikes – speeds young people between Jogja’s campuses, cafes and kos’s, student boarding-houses. Selling speed, efficiency and mobility, Go-Jek captures the generational zeitgeist.

With youth comes activism. There have recently been environmental marches, people dressed as orangutans gathering in the city centre; women’s marches, one sign reading ‘Lelaki Berkualitas Tak Takut Ekualitas’ (Men of Quality Aren’t Scared of Equality); and protests against a university’s banning the cadar, full-face veil.

In Jogja the youthfulness, energies and ambitions of Indonesia’s youth are obvious. Lonely Planet Indonesia’s pages on Jogja highlight traditional culture – shadow puppet theatre, etc. Lonely Planet emphasizes rural over urban, traditional over modern. Jogja is a good place to discard Lonely Planet. When I asked my language teacher if I should see a traditional dance performance, as Lonely Planet recommends, she said: ‘It’s very slow. Three hours? I mean, who has the time? Most young Indonesians would say go to Jalan Malioboro and listen to hip-hop there instead’.

Xenophobic conservatism is growing across Indonesia – including in Jogja. Following the jailing for ‘blasphemy’ of Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaha Purnama, or Ahok, intolerance of racial, religious and sexual minorities has risen. Prabowo Subianto, a former general with authoritarian tendencies, seeks Indonesia’s Presidency leading a political coalition that regularly panders to such sentiments. Incumbent President Joko Widodo, or ‘Jokowi’, meanwhile, has selected a bigot as his running mate.

The longevity of this trend will ultimately be decided by Indonesia’s youth. There’s nothing inherently incompatible between such conservatism and urban, modern, aspirational lives: indeed, some studies suggest intolerance is actually higher among middle-class, more-educated Indonesians. Still, many observers are hoping Indonesian youth will arrest the slide.

How does a person get to know, beyond superficialities, a foreign society? In Jogja I go to language class; I read Kompas, Indonesia’s best daily newspaper, slowly, dictionary beside me. My deficiencies embarrass me unceasingly: I’m often ignorant of names of apparently-prominent politicians and intellectuals, assertions and assumptions I venture tend to be swiftly revealed as dubious. I often make unpersuasive analogies between Indonesian politics and the Western politics with which I’m more familiar  – comparing, falsely, Obama’s and Jokowi’s electoral coalitions, for example. Sitting at a warung selling bubur ayam, hot rice porridge with shredded chicken, while doing language flashcards on an app on my phone, saying only please and thankyou to the gruff vendor wearing the white cap of the Islamic pious, my efforts can feel almost comically inadequate.

Living in Jogja is for me a novel experience, full of charms. But it’s surprisingly easy, while enjoying the city, to begin seeing it more rather than less narrowly, forgetting its many complexities and tensions – I’m continuously catching myself doing this and wrenching myself back. Taking Go-Jeks and meeting students who drive part-time, between classes, I hear their expansive dreams for the future. It’s easy to pay less attention to older drivers, 30, 40 years old, who say they attended university years ago and now drive full-time – evidence of Indonesia’s continued shortage of good jobs. Because people come to Jogja universities from across Indonesia and bring their own islands’ food, Jogja’s restaurants and street-stalls are highly-varied: there’s soto banjar, Kalimantan noodle soup, pempek, Sumatran fishcakes, and Acehnese cooking, all fire and spice. As with food cultures in other multicultural cities it’s tempting to simply laud the ‘diversity’ and ignore or deny evidence of frictions between newer migrants and the already-established – or between descendants of migrants and those who consider themselves pribumi, indigenous. Prejudice against Papuans in Jogja is high. A Suharto-era ban on ethnically-Chinese Indonesians owning property remains in place. Yet if I find that a curry-house has cooked rendang, if a Go-Jek driver takes a more scenic route through rice-fields on some sunny pre-monsoonal morning, such things can fall from my consciousness rapidly – I easily start seeing around me only what I wish to see. ‘Kuta Beach’ is a state of mind as much as a physical place, and we’re all tempted to go there at times.

Indeed, sometimes the temptation’s overwhelming to scurry back into an entirely Western bubble. In that, I am definitely not alone. Back in Jogja’s tourist enclave two Americans listen to several high-school girls nervously request an interview, then – impeccably politely, unselfconsciously cheerily – refuse them, and resume discussing tomorrow’s temple schedule. An Australian man’s conversation segues between thumbnail sketches of Melbourne suburbs and scene-by-scene descriptions of Netflix shows. I want to scoff – declare there’s a problem in America deeper than Trump, recall Michael Wesley’s description of Australians as ‘insular internationalists.’ But I’ve come to the very same place, have fled to this Western-style bar after a day of frustratingly fractured attempts at speaking Indonesian, telling myself I don’t appreciate – willing myself not to appreciate – the incessant playing of decade-old Coldplay singles. In the Age of Trump, tourist enclaves strike me as a phenomenon of significance, powerful evidence for people’s, all people’s, fundamental need for the familiar, the ‘known’.

For all these limitations, being in a city like Jogja – exposed to its rhythms and routines, communicating if imperfectly with its residents – means glimmers of insight come more frequently.

In Jogja I’m reminded of Indonesian patriotism’s continued pull. Murals or photos of Indonesia’s first President and independence hero Sukarno are common – sometimes a beaming, swaggering Sukarno, sometimes a clenched-fisted, fiery Sukarno. Before Independence Day, red-and-white flags are strung through Jogja neighbourhoods. On the day itself, I’m eating nasi padang, West Sumatran curries, in a restaurant while the staff watch on TV a flag-raising ceremony from Jakarta. One man turns to me, smiling, and asks casually what year Australia became merdeka, independent – stumping me totally. Many Australians associate the phrase ‘Indonesian nationalism’ with diplomatic obstinance or human rights violations. Jogja reminds me that it is, foremost, a frame for 270,000,000 Indonesians’ disparate dreams for justice, prosperity, and respect.

And I’m reminded of the speed and strength of Indonesia’s economic rise. On Jalan Kaliurang at night, everything spot-lit, pavements clogged with parked motorbikes, I see dozens of upmarket new cafes and restaurants, all polished wood furniture and manicured tropical gardens. A gelato shop, fridge of multi-coloured ice-creams visible from the street, is always standing-room only, women in hijabs perched on tall stools. There are old-style warungs, too – but many of their customers park and click-lock gleaming SUVs. There’s a lot of money here – and this is a mere provincial city, not a metropolis.

On a Go-Jek bike I ask my driver about construction of a large new mosque across a street – a mosque-building boom is underway in Indonesia which many interpret as being, in itself, evidence of rising conservatism. But the driver’s response makes me think: he says that while Jogja recently saw rampant development of malls and hotels, now there is a focus on more beneficial, meaningful development, like mosques. Looking at the mosque again I see it differently, noticing the beauty of the just-completed glass windows and dome. Then he, unprompted, condemns the growth of intolerance and insists it can be turned around – he extols NU, the Muslim mass organisation whose members, among other activities, guard churches at Christmas.

‘I support Prabowo’, I hear on another Go-Jek. Because he’s kuat, strong, my driver says – like Putin. I ask questions. The guy is young, still a student, unmarried, new to Jogja. He says he joined Go-Jek in part because he likes meeting and chatting to different types of people. He asks me what I think of both Putin and Israel-Palestine; I see him listening to my opinions, as I listen to his. He asks to exchange WhatsApp numbers. The conversation feels important, a ballast against temptations to demonize those who support ‘strongmen’ or populists. I don’t know if Indonesia’s new conservativism will wither or entrench. But Jogja is a good place to think about the question – and the question’s importance.

Laneways at dusk, green trees, kids kicking balls, mobile food carts pushed along dinging bells. A bright morning in a world of rice-fields and canals shockingly-close to Jogja’s centre, several Papuans rapping in a just-harvested plot. A lit-up church at night, singing inside – and outside, a motorbike revving its engine repeatedly, the young driver’s expression surly, suggesting conscious disruption. A young girl flashing past on a motorbike’s back, helmet on, one hand carrying school homework, the other gripping the seat. In such moments Kuta feels far away.

Wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops the woman stands in her roadside stall in a quiet kampung in Yogyakarta, chopping tomatoes, beans, spinach, plus one red chilli. Mixing everything in a peanut sauces she hands the result to customers who putter up on motorbikes and wait on blue plastic stools. She’s curious about me, full of questions, and the feeling’s mutual. It was to chat to people like her that I moved here and enrolled in intensive language study. Yet after hundreds of hours of classes, I can’t understand her.

Everything she says sounds to me like it has half a syllable. I do make out familiar words, but painfully rarely. I wonder what her life is like in this city, how she feels about escalating political and cultural tension in what is a young democracy and the world’s most-populous Muslim-majority nation. But I’m not to know.

She hands me my meal wrapped in newspaper –the text of which I can understand. Bahasa Indonesia baku, I think to myself, of the wrapping – the standard, textbook form of Indonesian. My teachers had mentioned the phrase in class as qualification, emphasising that it was this version of Indonesian we were learning. Initially, the addendum hadn’t struck me as overly important. It should have.

Bahasa Indonesia’s antecedent, Malay, evolved and spread because of the need in maritime Southeast Asia – across the modern nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore – for a lingua franca for trade and other exchanges. Malay as it spread in Southeast Asian marketplaces was grammatically-simple, non-hierarchical, easier to learn than other regional languages. It was the mother-tongue of few, but as people travelled in the region it became their accepted means to communicate. Indeed, the language’s reputation for being both simple and widely-spoken through such a vast area was what compelled me to study it.

Then in the early 20th century, Indonesian nationalists, plotting independence from Dutch colonial rule, agreed that Malay, reformed and renamed Bahasa Indonesia, should become the official language of an independent nation. Malay, according to the Indonesian scholar Benedict Anderson, was “simple and flexible enough to be rapidly developed into a modern political language”.

Meanwhile,Bahasa Indonesia would facilitate inclusion. Hundreds of languages were spoken in Indonesia – though about 40% of the archipelago’s inhabitants spoke Javanese, a highly-complex, hierarchy-infused language. Because no major ethnic group, including the Javanese, would have its mother-tongue as official language, inequality would not be created or reinforced. Bahasa Indonesia would help draw unity out of diversity.

Yet in reality, things aren’t so simple. For standard Bahasa Indonesia is rarely spoken in casual conversations. People think it’s too kaku, meaning rigid and stiff, my language teacher Andini tells me after I admit my difficulties at the roadside stall. Moreover, people sometimes find Bahasa Indonesia inadequate to express what they want. Andini confessed she sometimes shares this frustration, wanting to use words and expressions from a dialect spoken in her home province of East Java.

Part of the problem lies in the language itself. Bahasa Indonesia has fewer words than most languages – Endy Bayuni of the Jakarta Post has written that foreign translations of Indonesian novels tend to read better, while Indonesian translations of foreign novels sound ‘verbose and repetitive’. But there’s also a political dimension.

Because Indonesians learn Bahasa Indonesia in school, then hear it as adults primarily in earnest, dry speeches of politicians, they associate it with homogeneity. This is exacerbated because Indonesian was heavily-promoted during the dictatorship that ruled until 1998, stifling many forms of individual andcultural expression.

Nelly Martin-Anatias of ICDC, Auckland University of Technology, who has researched Bahasa Indonesia use, tells me that standard Indonesian’s association with ‘formal occasions’, like ‘school classrooms’, creates a perception of ‘distance’ or ‘authority’ between speakers.Those who speak it risk looking ‘theatrical’, ‘bookish’,or ‘pompous’.

So a means to linguistically unite the Indonesian nation slowly became rigid, and instead created momentum for linguistic diversity.

People dissatisfied with standard Indonesian have plenty of options. There are hundreds of regional languages and dialects, sometimes spoken intact, sometimes blended with Bahasa Indonesia. Here in Yogyakarta, a city in the centre of Java and the traditional heartland of Javanese culture, Javanese is commonly spoken. That choice often reflects cultural pride. A food vendor who walks along my street every morning pushing his wooden cart and dinging a bell for soto ayam, spicy chicken soup, I also struggle to understand, and it’s because he often breaks into Javanese. He recently asked me something three times before I understood. The question, when I got it, seemed a revealing one: had I yet seen a wayang shadow puppet play, the quintessentially Javanese cultural performance?

Then there’s different types of informal or colloquialized Indonesian. Naturally, Indonesia’s youth trailblaze their own, cooler variants, gleefully made difficult for older ears. Nowadays the internet is colloquial Indonesian’s new frontier. The country has close to the freest speech in Asia, and young Indonesians are fanatical fans of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, using the platforms to evolve their own language. As Andini and I scroll through Indonesian Twitter feeds during class one day, road-bumps of slang bring me to abrupt and frequent halts.

The impulses of these Twitter users perhaps aren’t so different to my continued impulses, in conversations, to reach for English expressions. English native-speakers frequently use unusual metaphors and colloquialisms, uncomprehending of the difficulties these cause non-native speakers. Yet how tempting it is to let loose from your tongue an expression that articulates perfectly your thought. As Andini tells me more about how Indonesians pepper their speech with regional or youth-specific phrases, I have a terrific urge to say “if the shoe fits”. Reluctantly, I grope around for an Indonesian alternative – and my thought arrives leaden.

While my frustrations come less from Bahasa Indonesia’s inherent limitations than from my incomplete learning of it, many Indonesians – especially middle-class Indonesians, because they tend to learn English extensively during their educations – also leaven their Bahasa with English. On a news show recently, a panellist describing the megacity of Jakarta as it wrestled with populism and racial intolerance used the term ‘melting-pot’.

Indonesia’s communication conundrum is an extreme example of a worldwide linguistic trend. We all enjoy speaking in ways that are as precise, elaborate, witty or beautiful as possible. But using those more complex types of speech, intended to convey nuance, limits the number of people who can understand us. Throughout our intermixed world people juggle inclusive and exclusive communication styles, shifting between the pleasures of close-knit conversations and the desire to reach out to as many people as possible. In the Indonesian archipelago, a mix of different peoples and cultures, one official language was adopted to break down communication barriers; yet different Indonesian regions, generations and social classes frequently feel a need to break from it and employ their own particularised speech, tailored to their specific cultures.

Nelly Martin-Anatias tells me that Indonesia’s different informal and regional speeches allow people to “establish intimacy and identity” when conversing. Among the multiplicity of non-standard language alternatives, with “phonological and lexical differences”, Indonesians can “choose [a] variety depending on the situation and the interlocutors”, thus attaining a speech fully reflective of the complexity of their social worlds.

I tell Andini I want to expand beyond standard Bahasa Indonesia, to start learning some youth speech and key Javanese words, so I can talk more fluently to more people. Andini’s my gold standard for this. Before our class, she was texting people using that east Javanese dialect –while she studied Chinese. Now she pauses her overview of Jakarta slang to ask me about the colloquialism ‘prole’ in an Australian YouTube video.

Yet standard Indonesian – workmanline, textbook Bahasa Indonesia–remains the best way I have to communicate here. What’s a simple way to make people laugh – an alternative to my English colloquialisms? “Waktu harimau datang, saya pergi” (“when a tiger comes, I go”) I tried recently – and got a laugh. Offering condolences, too, is often basic vocabulary – yet how vital the sentiment conveyed. As I operate in standard Bahasa Indonesia, I’m pleased to find plenty of people happy to meet me there. When someone Indonesian speaks to me in a way I easily understand I read significance into it, knowing they’re likely tailoring it for me, adapting themselves, breaking things down as a conscious act of inclusion.

This happens when I take a motorbike taxi home from class –I understand my young driver near-perfectly. His questions are simply phrased:“In your country what season is it now?”, “In your country is there online transport?” My own questions he answers in a way designed to ensure clarity. I awkwardly say some just-memorised slang, and he offers a thumbs-up.

Knowing when to scale up speech styles and when to scale them back, when to prioritise inclusion and when to prioritise precision, and how to successfully balance differing impulses to unity and diversity – that is this language and this country’s challenge, and promise.

A version of this article originally appeared in BBC Travel .

In the YouTube video the young man browses Chinese-language books in a library, practices Chinese calligraphy with careful brushstrokes, introduces himself in Mandarin. He is 20 years old, from southern Sumatra, Indonesia, enrolled at Wuxi Institute of Technology, outside Shanghai. He admits learning Mandarin is difficult, but points out it’s now the world’s most-used language, with English relegated to second place.

Other Indonesians studying in China, in other YouTube videos, likewise demonstrate a cultural attraction to the country, emphasising the richness of China’s past, its fast-modernizing present, and its hyperpower future. One Indonesian student remarks how much traditional Chinese architecture remains in Chinese cities: China’s culture is still ‘murni’, pure, she says. Another remarks bluntly that China is now ‘lebih maju’, more developed, than Europe, a leader in ‘teknologi’. Study here, another claims, and you and your country can ‘bangkit’, awaken, as China has.

Chinese culture, Indonesians note, treats education with great seriousness. One student translates a Chinese expression for ‘early to sleep, early to rise’ into Indonesian, ‘tidur cepat, bangun cepat’– then adds to it ‘belajar cepat’, quick to study. Others remark on the ‘semangat’, spirit, of learning on Chinese campuses, remarking how university libraries are filled with students even on weekends.

Australia has much invested in its ability to attract large numbers of young Asians for tertiary study. The income they bring is increasingly how Australia’s university sector is financed. Australian institutions want to start drawing more young people from other rising Asian nations, especially India and the ASEAN states: populous, demographically-young, and with rapidly expanding middle-classes, they constitute tantalizing 21st century markets. Yet there is increasingly-sharp regional competition for where those students choose to study – from China.

Southeast Asians and Indians are enrolling in Chinese universities in rapidly-increasing numbers. Roughly 80,000 Southeast Asians were studying at Chinese universities in 2016, up 15% from two years before. That includes 14,000 Indonesians (20,000 are in Australia). 18,000 Indians are now at Chinese institutions, more than are in Britain. China will likely host 500,000 international students before 2020.

One reason for China’s attractiveness is a lower cost of tuition and living – Beijing offers many scholarships, too. But deeper cultural factors are also at work.

For centuries people across Asia have been intellectually drawn to China and sought to learn from Chinese practices. China’s 19th century weakness switched emphasis to the West and Japan. But the old pattern was starting to echo again by the mid-20th century when post-colonial Asian nations saw in the newly-proclaimed People’s Republic of China a potential model for their own development. Indonesian nationalists of that era widely admired the PRC as pioneering a new form of Asian modernity.

That may be a harbinger of what’s starting – or re-starting – now. Indonesian students in China enthuse about China’s uber-modernity in e-commerce and fast subways; say studying in China will help them better launch businesses and reduce unemployment back home; voice happiness with the structure and content of their Chinese study programmes. The idea of China as simultaneously great civilisation, fast-modernizing power, and culture conducive to scholarship is attractive to large numbers of young Asians.

International student numbers at Australian universities are currently breaking records. It’s easy to conclude Australia’s position as regional higher education powerhouse is impregnable, that Asian middle-classes will always seek their international educations mostly from Western nations. Such assumptions could soon look as short-sighted as previous ideas of mineral booms lasting forever.

Asian international students in Australia have been voicing increasing dissatisfaction with their educations. Many regret their social isolation: most international students live in a ‘parallel society’ from Australia and Australians, often segregated on campuses in international-only dormitories. Meanwhile many Chinese institutions, after initially housing international students in separate accommodation, are now moving toward integration of housing and other campus facilities.

Asian international students are also increasingly dissatisfied with what they see as Australian universities’ declining quality. Australian universities have endured four decades of budget cuts with no end in sight, with implications that have not escaped notice on WeChat. Meanwhile universities in China have increasingly impressive libraries and laboratories – Indonesians praise Chinese facilities on campuses – and professors with increasingly impressive academic credentials.

Yet Australia has significant comparative advantages in attracting Asia’s best and brightest. Australia is a liberal democracy in a region that is mostly not: its universities should be naturally superior places for young people who hope to think, write and speak freely, to freely inquire. A revealing point of irritation among Indonesians experiencing China after their own mostly-free press is China’s internet censorship. One Indonesian student in China reacted to that aspect of the People’s Republic this way: ‘Oh my God: seriously?’ Students in China hoping to research ‘sensitive’ topics are often rejected. China might be seen as more developed because of things like e-commerce, but its e-Stalinism can speedily cancel out the impression.

And Australia’s stated project of an open, multicultural society, a society that offers international students a chance to fully participate in its workings, either temporarily or permanently as citizens, should have sustained attractiveness – and offer a sustained contrast with more rigid notions in East Asia of who ‘belongs’ and who is an outsider.

Rather than reinforcing those advantages – by revitalising financially-straitened Australian universities, by consolidating its multicultural model – Australia is eroding both.

For years Australia has ignored evidence that its rhetoric of multicultural inclusiveness does not, in practice, extend adequately to Asian international students, many of whom, according to Melbourne University’s Fran Martin, come ‘full of hopes to learn about and participate in Australian society’ yet who often cannot name a single Australian friend when they graduate. Increased questioning of multiculturalism by government ministers, and tightening of residency and citizenship requirements, is undermining Australia’s cultural attractiveness.

And the persistent downgrading of the place of the university in Australian society – the budget cuts themselves, the commodification and trivialisation of the very concept of university education – inevitably erodes the image of Australia as a place of open, free inquiry, an astute choice of place for people to develop their minds. Australia has turned its universities into degree factories. Should it be any surprise that China, ‘the factory of the world’, proposes to do that better?

First published by ABC.

Now what I remember most about him is what he said about the Rohingya: that they were troublemakers, not really citizens of his country, undeserving of sympathy, that he hated them. He had said it standing under a banyan tree, and I had noticed, again, his dress: he was wearing a longyi, a Burmese sarong, and with it, new-looking, Western hiking boots. His longyi’s knot was tied impeccably. His boots appeared to me to not quite fit him.

But I spent three days and walked 50 kilometers with him before he said this. Through a trekking agency I’d arranged to meet him in Kalaw, in hill-country in central Myanmar, and took an overnight bus there from Yangon. The bus was ultra-modern, air-conditioned, and near-empty. Arriving at dawn, I disembarked into cold air and a fog that obscured the tops of pine trees. I found the café where we were to meet, ordered a tea. Every few minutes a man sidled up to me and asked if I needed a guide. When I said I had one already they looked not merely disappointed but resentful; slinking away, I saw them lingering on the café’s margins.

This was a year ago, so Myanmar was still in-vogue: after decades of oppressive military government and isolation internationally, it had begun to ‘open’ and appeared to be moving toward democratization. A perception of the country as a dramatic ‘good-news story’ — a newly-liberated populace, pursuing long-denied opportunities — was drawing increasing international interest. I badly wanted to see Myanmar and Kalaw through this lens; but those sullen, hands-in-pockets-would-be-guides kept straying into my field of vision.

He arrived fifteen minutes late. He looked extremely young: early twenties, I guessed. He introduced himself as Thomas — I blinked, asked him to repeat it. Thomas was at once exuberantly friendly and palpably nervous: as he met me he profusely apologized. “I’m sorry, sir” — I never got him to stop calling me sir — “I am running late. I still have to get some things from the supermarket. I am running late, I am sorry. I think maybe you will write this on TripAdvisor.” I told him it was no problem, and we walked two streets over, not to a supermarket but to a small, dowdy grocery store. Thomas disappeared; I waited outside. Next-door was an internet café. Young men played computer games, their faces near-expressionless. The fog was clearing to a powder-blue sky, yet I felt a sense of anti-climax: this, apparently, was Myanmar’s transformation in actuality. Thomas reappeared; walking quickly, he continued to apologize. “I am sorry about this,” he said, into the chilly blue morning. “I am sorry about this.”

We walked toward the hills. Rapidly the streets became less busy. Small houses sat amid ferns. Then, the trekkers’ worst nightmare: I felt something awry in my bowels.

The crisis was immediate. I told Thomas, who spoke Burmese to an elderly couple sitting on their porch. I was led to a wooden shed behind their house: there, the apocalypse duly took place. Back outside, I found a bowl of water and bottle of soap. I soaped my hands, washed them in the bowl; then, gazing at the soapsuds unmoving in the water, I knew I’d done the wrong thing. There was no drainage mechanism: clearly you were supposed to wash your hands some other way. I had defiled the water. Thomas had accepted a tea, and the three of them were sitting without speaking, the couple calm in this disruption to what looked like a familiar, well-honed daily routine. I said nothing about the suds. We walked on.

My mood had changed. That gleaming, empty bus, those furtive loitering would-be guides, the expressionless cybercafé teens, my guide’s inexplicable anxiety, my own failing bowels, the floating soapsuds — everything seemed to go together, somehow; there was something not quite right about the entire morning, something fundamentally off-kilter. Thomas and I resumed walking. “I’m sorry,” Thomas said, again. “I’m sorry.”

* * *

Thomas turned onto a dirt track. We walked through a glade of pine trees, then into a more open country of tawny-yellow grass. Soon we were climbing, following a ridgeline; green valleys appeared below us.

Thomas talked compulsively. He probably had instructions — making conversation was a way of making happy guests. Yet I had a sense he also genuinely wanted to make a connection with me. There was something in his tone when he questioned me that suggested he acutely wanted to hear the answers, and something in the way he told me things that suggested he wanted me to hear what he had to say. I wanted to chat, too, but my bowels had made me less talkative than normal.

“This is your first trip to Myanmar?”

“It is.”

“Oh: great.” That turned out to be a recurring expression of his, at permanent odds with his nervousness.

Thomas had a smartphone, a Samsung, and he often flicked and swiped on it as he spoke. I looked again at his longyi-and-hiking-boot combination. I noticed that, young as Thomas appeared, he had several white hairs.

“I’ve been a guide for one year.”

“It must be exciting living in Myanmar now,” I said, trying to return to my preferred way of thinking about the country. “Democracy, reform — many new opportunities for people, right?” Thomas nodded, but I saw him frowning just slightly. I asked, “What did you do before you were a guide?”

“I worked in Mandalay, in a factory that mixed cement bricks.”

“And you want to be a guide for a while, or move onto something else?”

“Actually, I am studying law. But I haven’t been able to pass yet.” He didn’t elaborate. I knew entire universities had been shut down for long periods under military rule. I told him to keep studying, then wondered if that was helpful or even applicable advice.

“I want to get married,” Thomas said — he had a girlfriend — “but, she told me, “not enough money.” So he was trying to get as much guiding work, as many treks, as possible. I wondered if this explained his anxiety: a fretful determination to ace every trip, the success of which he was measuring constantly. I asked how he and his girlfriend met. “In our village,” he replied, with a tone that suggested this was rather a dumb question, that it was self-evident people would meet in their own village. Below in the valley, an old man slowly walked across a rice-field. “Not enough money,” Thomas repeated, “not enough money.” I said everything would work out, then pondered again whether that was a useful thing to say.

“Yes,” Thomas said. “But so much time will have passed. We will be old. We will not be young. I think it’s better to be married when you’re young.” Tall clumps of bamboo lined our path; on one leaf, a butterfly opened and closed its yellow and red wings. I told him that in the West, people typically got married when they were much older than he was. But he only nodded, as if that fact, while interesting, had no relevance to him.

For perhaps 40 seconds, we didn’t speak. “It’s so quiet,” Thomas said, and laughed nervously. I saw him searching for a topic. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” Before answering I looked at him, tried to read his expression. “Three?” he said. “Oh: great” — and he did look like he thought it was great. “I have two. But, I never see them. They are still in my village. I have not been back.” Now he was the one who let the silence resume. I wondered if this meant he hadn’t seen his girlfriend in that time.

The silence extended; again, he looked mortified. Then he said, in what appeared to be an analysis of causation, “I think my English is not good.” I assured him it was. He looked at the ground: unthinkingly following his gaze, I saw the precision of his footwork on the rock-strewn path. He said, “My father died when I was small. He spoke very good English. So after that, for many years, I couldn’t practice my English.” Sadness suddenly emanated from him like a heat.

All morning we walked along the ridge. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that advertised itself as Nepalese. I said I would eat only a little because of my bowels and Thomas looked startled, as if I had discarded some carefully-prepared script, and he feared for the consequences. He reached for his phone. I glanced at his screen, saw him playing a Tetris-like game: by stabbing at the screen he was smashing colored blocks, attempting to clear a straight path for himself. He collapsed that game, then I saw squiggles of Burmese text on the familiar blue-and-white of Facebook.com. “Are all these messages from friends of yours?” I asked. He pursed his lips, as if thinking about the question. He scrolled and scrolled, as if searching for some piece of information that was eluding him. He talked of TripAdvisor and Booking.com, about travelers posting critical comments; he mentioned, with an embarrassed grin, the benefits of me leaving a five-star review. His expression, staring into the phone, was tight-lipped, pensive.

As the Nepalese staff served curries and breads, I noticed that Thomas’s features looked more than slightly Indian. Certainly he was physically distinct from the typical Bamar, Myanmar’s dominant ethnic group. Interested in the presence of South Asians in the country, I asked about his ethnic background. Thomas looked at me with surprise. “I am Burmese,” he said. So much else was fluid, undergoing transformation: but this assertion landed in our conversation solid as a rock.

Now we walked downhill, into the valley. We began following a train-line. Thick, dry undergrowth was on one side of the tracks, rice-fields on the other. Inevitably I thought about the laying of the rail-lines by the British Empire, about that well-worn trope of trains as symbols of modernity. “What if a train comes?” I asked. But Thomas knew the times: he said the next one was not due for five hours. The track gauge was strikingly-narrow. The wooden planks were beginning to rot. A small train-station, with a village wrapped around it, appeared on our left. A man sat on a bench on the platform. I wondered if he could be waiting for the distant evening train. Perhaps he was waiting for something else. Perhaps he was not waiting for anything.

Fog was now back around the treetops. I saw two bulbuls in a tree. We arrived at the outskirts of the village where we would spend the night. The houses, basic two-story constructions, all had electric paint-jobs. One had purple doors and green walls, another green doors and blue walls. The colors stood out in the foggy dusk. Thomas turned left, into our homestay. A Burmese family greeted me with the wordless wide grins by which people with no common language communicate. I sat exhausted on the front step.

There, abruptly, I remembered other news and analysis I’d read about Myanmar, things I had chosen to ignore since my arrival, preferring airbrushed accounts. That still-unmet expectations were causing rising frustration. That people’s predominant feelings were not merely or even mostly of dramatically-opened possibilities, but of a scramble for resources and opportunities which they saw as palpably finite. That change, displacing traditions and disrupting communities, was causing anxiety and disorientation — and prompting searches for reassuringly simple racial-religious-nationalist ideas of identity.

I found myself watching Thomas as he unlaced his hiking-boots and put on flip-flops. I saw his feet. They were wrinkled, calloused feet, the feet of someone who’d grown up walking without shoes. He’d been tied into village life enough to want to marry from there. But the old rural patterns had been disrupted — not only had Thomas himself moved, to Mandalay for factory-work, then Kalaw, but back in his village, his prospective wife was demanding more money. Thomas was attempting, through the tourist industry, to plug into a nascent Myanmar of greater economic opportunity. Yet his constant talking to me, tending me like an over-watered plant, suggested an entrenched notion that foreign travelers were a scarce and precious resource. On his phone Thomas always had anxiety on his face, as if he believed Mark Zuckerberg’s “connected world” could bring as many disasters as windfalls, as if one bad TripAdvisor review could sink all his dreams, as if all that he’d built for himself remained fundamentally insecure. His hiking boots now sat on the balcony, socks scrunched into them, juxtaposed against the rural dusk. I remembered his words inside the Nepalese restaurant: I am Burmese. The only truly confident declaration he’d made.

Night came. In the house three low-wattage light bulbs flickered on. Each illuminated perhaps four feet. In the kitchen, Thomas and the homestay family chopped vegetables I didn’t recognize. He spoke to the family familiarly in Burmese. I offered to help; he switched back to English to tell me it wasn’t necessary, resumed talking Burmese. His face looked washed of the concern I’d seen earlier. I heard water trickling in an irrigation channel of a neighboring rice-paddy: I wondered how many generations had tended it. A puttering sound: a motorbike came up the driveway. Its sole headlight glowed, far stronger than any light in the house. The driver parked; chatted briefly in the kitchen; left again. I watched the headlight’s glow become smaller, then disappear.

* * *

Through the small porthole of a window beyond my bed’s mosquito netting, I could see only fog. I stepped outside. Although fog enveloped the multi-colored houses, in the rice-field I could make out the long green stalks, heavy rice-grains at their tops. Next door a young girl was on a swing made from rope and a hessian bag. I felt better this morning, in this house, amid this countryside. The girl swung with an unchanging, entirely predictable rhythm. Thomas put away his flip-flops, wrenched on and laced up his hiking-boots. We started walking.

Bright yellow squares appeared on the hillsides. Thomas said they were sesame fields. Old women were spreading chilies on blankets on the road, to dry in the sun. Thomas told me about that, and other crops, and harvesting methods. In his pocket his phone beeped. “Over there they are growing potatoes.” His phone beeped again. “And that is corn.” His phone beeped again.

Then, a pivot: after speaking about Myanmar’s countryside, he wanted, amid the sesame-checkered hillsides, to know about my country.

“Is there rice in Australia?”

“Only a little.”

“Is the weather warm in Australia?”

“It depends. In the south it gets cold in winter.”

“I like winter-time the best,” said Thomas. In Kalaw, he told me, it became quite chilly in December. I told him that in the Australian city where I used to live there was often frost on the ground in the early mornings, and it looked almost like snow.

“Oh: great,” Thomas said. Then he said, “I like this about my job. I meet people from everywhere. France, the Netherlands, America. And they tell me things.” He paused. “I have not seen snow.” A plane was flying overhead, and he said,: “Actually, I have not been on a plane.” He laughed, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again. Another rice-field. Thomas told me that in this area, farmers got two harvests per year. Then he said he had a cousin working in Malaysia, in construction, and maybe one day he would visit him. I watched his hiking boots scuff the ground, left, right, left, right, as our conversation shifted between inwardness and outwardness, between old and new worlds.

We began climbing again, into another set of hills. Blue-black clouds appeared on the horizon.

“Are there earthquakes in Australia?” Thomas asked.

“Not many.”

“Oh: great.” Thomas said. “Here in Myanmar we just had an earthquake in Bagan” — the ancient city, comparable to Angkor, filled with archaeological monuments. “Two hundred buildings were damaged,” he said. “It is terrible. It is terrible, because it is like our heritage is disappearing. We are in mourning.” He said the word “mourning” very carefully.

I said, “We’re certainly getting more extreme weather in Australia. Fires, floods, rain at strange times of the year, things like that.”

“Same in Myanmar!” said Thomas, and I noticed his excitement at finding a point of commonality. “Like now. There shouldn’t be rain like this, in November. This is not normal.”

As if on cue, we saw, below us, a rice-field that had been flattened, the rice-stalks horizontal against the ground — it was like a movie-scene of a UFO landing. “This is from heavy rain last week,” Thomas said. “It is damaging because it is coming at a different time in the rice-cycle. It has destroyed a lot of crops.” He paused. “I think the world is changing very fast.”

I said, “In Australia farmers can buy insurance against poor crops or bad weather. Sometimes they get help from the government, as well. Is there any talk of that, yet, in Myanmar?”

Thomas asked me for clarification. Then, he said, “No.”

“It started in Australia in the Great Depression,” I said. “After the economy collapsed, a lot of farms had big difficulties, a lot of people had it very tough.” Then, listening to myself, I stopped speaking.

The clouds were closer to us. We put on raincoats. It began to bucket. Brown water poured down our path; the earth turned to sludge. Thomas calmly found footfalls in the muck; I stepped where he stepped. A large monastery appeared. Thomas gestured for us to enter. We walked into the courtyard, then stood under a sloping red roof at the main entrance. Rain poured off the roof. Monks in yellow robes walked slowly up the steps.

Thomas said, “Are you religious?”

“I’m not, no.”

“You have no religion at all,” he said, declaratively. “A lot of my clients from the West are like that.” I had a feeling he’d been about to instinctively say “oh: great,” but had pulled back just in time. I noticed his use of “client.” He looked at the rain, adjusted his jacket. Then he said, “But you know, in Myanmar, that would be very difficult — to have no religion at all.

“Villages around here are all losing the old religion,” Thomas continued. “Here people practice a Buddhism, but an old-fashioned Buddhism, with animism and other traditions mixed in. Now the old still believe that, but the young don’t.”

“Why do you think the young don’t follow the old style?”

“It takes a lot of time,” Thomas said. “Young people now, they don’t have time.” Back on the path, two locals were attempting to walk in the rain. They squinted, held up their hands to shield their faces, disoriented.

“So you’re more of a conventional Buddhist, Thomas?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am a Buddhist.” A second confident assertion from him, and it seemed to me again, given all his other freely-expressed doubts, jarringly-so.

The rain lightened; we left the monastery. Our boots squelched in the earth. Visibility was still poor, so it took awhile for me to see a large poster stuck on a house. I opened my jacket, wiped my glasses on my shirt, then saw pictures of a man I didn’t recognize, and Aung San Suu Kyi.

“Who’s the guy on the left?”

“That’s the new President.”

“What do you think of the new government, then?”

“For a long time things were terrible. Now everything is better. We are very happy.” From his tone, he made it sound like the well-worn verse of a school song — he sang it dully, as if by rote. Whether he did so for my benefit or his own, I didn’t know.

The rain stopped, and the valley and next range of hills became visible again. Now I could see a startlingly conical-shaped hill among the range, and Thomas said, “A hermit lives there.”

“Really?”

“He went there and became a monk. He lives up there and works on his religion.”

I looked. On the hill’s summit was a small hut, surrounded by maybe a half-dozen pine trees. For a second I thought I could make out a figure, but of course I couldn’t.

“He gave up everything,” Thomas repeated, “and became a monk.”

On some impulse I said, “You ever feel like doing that?”

He said, “Do you?”

“Sure, some days.” But I said it with a dumb grin on my face. When he replied, “yes, sometimes,” he looked contemplative, and grave.

We arrived in the village where we would stay the night. One shop on its outskirts had several outside tables and was selling beer to tourists. At one of the tables was a group of newly-bronzed northern Europeans, and one of them said, “Hey, Thomas!”

He had escorted them to Inle Lake several days ago. They had stayed there, and were now heading back to Kalaw by another route. There was a shouted recollection of some mid-trail embarrassment which left ambiguous who was being mocked; they invited Thomas to have a beer with them. We walked quickly to the homestay so he could drop off his things before heading back. He asked if I wanted to come; I declined.

At the homestay I went to the outside shower, poured cold water from a bucket over myself, put on my last clean clothes, went to the house’s second-floor, and opened my book. Night came. I had a sudden appreciation for simplicity. Old routines in an old house, I thought to myself. Thomas still wasn’t back. On my arrival the old man at this homestay had nodded to me only slightly. As I read he sat on the floor on the opposite side of the room, underneath framed pictures of presumably-deceased relatives. But my presence in this house likely complicated any practice of household routines for him. At around 9 o’clock, a confused rooster began to crow.

* * *

When I woke up and went outside, I found Thomas already on the verandah packing his bag. We walked on, in more fog. He hadn’t shaved: it made him look older. On the village’s outskirts was a field of corn, dead. After two hours of walking Thomas realized he had left behind his rain-jacket.

Now we were passing through different country again, an open grassy valley with scattered banyan trees and rocky limestone cliffs to our left and right. Inle Lake, grey, calm, was visible ahead. A thin trail of Western tourists was moving through this valley from various tributary paths in the hills. I saw once again the country’s potential — this could indeed be a major tourist attraction.

Then, I felt again the dreaded sensation in my bowels. Why now? I told Thomas through a self-deprecating joke, then went broodingly quiet. Yet Thomas still insisted on speaking, asking one question after another. Preoccupied with Richter scale rumblings in my intestines, my responses became terser until I was answering in monosyllables. I looked at him, saw his now-familiar anxiety. Eventually he said, simply, “We are silent.” I looked at him. He was desperately unhappy.

In an attempt to reset the situation, I said, ‘But people can be silent, sometimes, Thomas. There’s such a thing as a comfortable silence.”

It had no effect at all: his face was the same. I thought: but he isn’t “comfortable.” He is in no position to be comfortable. And I found myself asking again — what was it, precisely, about silence which Thomas couldn’t tolerate? Was it the importance he ascribed to each trekking trip, elevated by an idea of the scarcity of trekkers in Kalaw? For the tourists around us in this valley were still few in number, given this was peak tourist season. I thought again of those would-be guides loitering by the café, desperate for business. Or was he genuinely searching for a human connection? He had moved only recently to Kalaw, I reasoned; he would be spending a lot of his life on trekking trips with strangers. Amid his disrupted, dislocated life, far from family and other anchors, did he, quite simply, want to talk?

I asked to sit. We entered a banyan tree’s shade, rested our backs against its roots. I shut my eyes. Thomas sat pensively. I could feel his concern that I’d stopped speaking, knew he was interpreting it, again, as a setback. A cool breeze came from the lake. I could see he was thinking of a new topic. But it seemed to me that all his anxieties conditioned the one he now chose.

“Today in Myanmar,” he said, “we have a problem with the Rohingya.”

I looked around: at grey rock, yellow grass, the banyan tree’s fat trunk and leaves, the distant lake. I felt another quake in my bowels.

“Burmese people don’t like them because they are so violent,” Thomas said. “They carry out many terrorist attacks. They live inside Myanmar but they are not fromMyanmar. They are from Bangladesh.”

The banyan tree’s enormous roots, knee-high, curled in all directions; to me, now, they resembled a tentacled monster rising from the earth. He asked — and I recognized the same sentence structure from our conversation yesterday — “Is it like that with Muslims in Australia?” Searching for a new point of connection between us, he’d settled on this. So many differences separated us. But he knew — from previous trekkers? — that our societies had this tension in common. He was looking at me expectantly, hopeful this would solve the problem of the silence between us.

I did no calibrating, no soft-pedaling; I did the opposite of what people do who want to make a connection with someone else: lobbed my own differing perspectives and values straight at him, unvarnished. “In my country,” I said, “it’s similar in that too many people believe ugly things about Muslims.” A butterfly floated past. “It’s unfair, because of course, all but a handful are as peaceful as you or me. But people like to have somebody to blame.” As I said it, I watched hurt spread across his face. He had suggested a commonality between us; I had pointedly denied it.

He clenched his lip. He said, “They have too many children. They will take everything. This country should be for real Myanmar people.”

I looked again at his Western-style hiking boots; I looked at his face, his South Asian-looking face. Three foreign backpackers, small in the distance, walked through the valley. Like the rest of Myanmar, he had been waiting a long time, with increasing impatience, and had sacrificed much — moving to Mandalay to mix bricks, leaving family and girlfriend behind. Now, guiding tourists to Inle Lake, he presumably felt himself achingly close to his goals. But could he already see, I wondered, that his goals were not quite being realized — and likely would not be? All this dislocation — and for what? I remembered his comment yesterday: I think the world is changing very fast. Alone in the hills with a tourist who’d gone mysteriously quiet, an event boding ill for his professional success, he had reached for another assertion that, like I am Burmese, like I am Buddhist, had a solidity to it. We have a problem with the Rohingya. In his pocket, his phone bipped. Perhaps a TripAdvisor notification. An ancient-looking farmer walked past us, carrying a full basket on her back. His phone bipped again. “It’s about defending the Myanmar culture,” he said. At this, I was entirely silent. One more uncomfortable silence. I could almost hear him say it: we are silent. But he didn’t say anything. His face was stony.

We walked towards a rocky hillside — the last ridge. Now Thomas did something drastic. He took out his phone and put on music. It was, of all things, the pop song “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz. Thomas clearly knew the lyrics, the ridiculously Californian lyrics. They rang out in central Myanmar. I fell right through the cracks/ And now I’m trying to get back. In this moment of stress, it was American pop he had turned towards.

We were approaching an enormous construction site. A luxury resort was being built. I saw my chance to use a bathroom. We entered a world of wooden scaffolding, pouring concrete, gaping muddy holes in earth. The scaffolding looked precarious. I found a beautiful modern toilet — which was not yet working. A sign warned against use. Another wooden shed it was. Sitting there, I had an impulse to take my own advice: I attempted a silence. I found myself listening to small birds, tiny rustlings, a wind. Then, those sounds were extinguished by a cement-mixer’s guttural chug. Then, I heard, faintly, Jason Mraz: Nothing’s gonna’ stop me but divine intervention/ I reckon it’s again my turn.

The final ridge. Another blue-black cloud. Another rainstorm approaching. I zipped up my jacket, but Thomas’s was still hanging at the silent old man’s homestay: he had nothing to protect himself. I looked at him. His face was now without anxiety, it was the face of a stoic, settling in for protracted discomfort, protracted disappointment. He got out a plastic bag, carefully wrapped his phone up in it. The last thing we heard before he turned off his pop song was: well open up your mind and see like me.

Originally published by Longreads.

IN A LONDON hotel, two prime ministers sit down to breakfast. One is tall, lean, white-haired and speaks in a raspy, unmistakably working-class Australian accent. In public and private he smokes a pipe near constantly. The other is a protégé of Mahatma Gandhi who has spent over ten years detained in British colonial prisons in India, whose charisma and erudition have made him world famous; his preferred dress is an achkan, a knee-length coat. On this morning in April 1949, it’s fair to say, they appear to passers-by quite the odd couple.

The two men discuss a dispute that has brought newly independent India to the verge of leaving the Commonwealth. India seeks assurances that the postwar Commonwealth is a genuine association of free and equal members, not ‘led’ by a still-imperial Britain. In the words of the Indian leader who sits here at breakfast, India needs to know that the Commonwealth cannot ‘bind [India]…in any way’; that there will be no inference of subordination to Britain; that India ‘has nothing to do with England constitutionally or legally’. India will not continue to place itself under the British Crown, given Britain colonised India in that Crown’s name. In sum, India is trying to ascertain whether remnants of the Empire shadow the postwar Commonwealth.

Australia’s government has been an obstacle to these Indian aspirations. But the Australian prime minster sitting opposite here at breakfast has just overruled his foreign minister and quietly conceded to India’s ambition to remain a Commonwealth member while becoming a republic.

Australia’s leader will subsequently call his Indian counterpart one of the great men of the world, while India’s leader will later say the Australian is an ‘outstanding personality’ who was ‘very helpful’ in London – indeed, he will soon ask the Australian leader to mediate in the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

Such a meeting not only bodes well for the effort to preserve and reform the Commonwealth, which demands adroit, measured diplomacy – it suggests, despite much evidence to the contrary in these early Cold War years, that means exist to prevent a global slide into acrimonious nationalisms and heightened global tension. It’s the first time they’ve met, but for both JB ‘Ben’ Chifley and Jawaharlal Nehru it’s a productive morning.

Later, at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference they are in London to attend, Chifley and Nehru agree on other issues. Asia is currently in turmoil, with various wars and insurgencies ongoing in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaya, Burma, China and India itself. When the conference discusses this situation, Chifley says he is ‘at one’ with Nehru that ‘social conditions and living standards’ in the developing world should be ‘the primary object’ of Commonwealth policy. Such an approach, Chifley and Nehru agree, is also the most effective method of reducing communism’s growing appeal in Asia. Chifley, again echoing Nehru, adds that he thinks military solutions against communism are counterproductive. This view will be unwelcome to his British hosts, currently at war with a communist insurrection in Malaya.

It’s not all agreement. At another point in the conference, Chifley says: ‘We stand with Britain, right or wrong.’ Nehru leans forward to reply, ‘Right or wrong, Mr Chifley?’

Chifley’s comment is surprising, because he has differentiated Australian policy from Britain’s on several issues, notably the Indonesian crisis in which, against Whitehall’s advice, he supports the Indonesian nationalist uprising against Dutch colonial rule. Is this platitude a reflex action – a sentiment Australian prime ministers typically express at these forums?

Nehru’s response is revelatory, showing what a different meeting of the Commonwealth this has already become, and to what Chifley, in accommodating India, is agreeing. Previously, the Commonwealth organisation was a forum for white men from British settler societies to co-ordinate the British Empire. It is now evolving into something fundamentally different: an organisation divorced from that empire, where the Asian nations that have become independent of British colonialism have membership and equal status, and voice their own attitudes and aspirations.

In the years that followed the Second World War, global politics were remade. Across the globe, from world leaders to ordinary citizens, a conviction took hold that after thirty years of horrors – a world war, a Great Depression, another world war – profound changes were needed, that the times required boldness, creativity, new directions and far-reaching reforms. Similar opinions are beginning to be heard today, and a remade Commonwealth, with deepened engagement between African, Asian and Western members, could effect positive change. Chifley and Nehru’s responses to the Commonwealth seventy years ago offer lessons for our own time.

EUROPEAN COLONIALISM BEGAN to unravel in the 1940s. It happened first in Asia: in 1945 there were revolutions in Indonesia against the Netherlands and in Vietnam against France. India, the site of Gandhi’s long nonviolent resistance campaign, became an independent nation in 1947 when Britain, bankrupted and exhausted from World War II, agreed to dissolve its Raj, the British Empire’s ‘jewel in the crown’. On becoming prime minister, Nehru gave voice to a prevailing sense of ambition when he declared, ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’

Europeans, used to running Asia for their own interests, had to adjust to this new reality. One organisation that plainly needed comprehensive reform was the Commonwealth.

In the late nineteenth century, ‘Commonwealth’ began to be used to describe the relationship between Britain and those colonies – Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand – which had been granted self-government within the British Empire while continuing to share with it defence, foreign and international economic policies. In the early twentieth century, the Commonwealth found institutional form when Britain and those states – called ‘dominions’ – met at imperial conferences to co-ordinate their actions. That all the colonies granted self-government and Commonwealth membership were white, and that India was notgranted such status, did not escape notice; the pre-war Commonwealth reflected the racial hierarchies at the core of European imperialism.

After the Second World War, Britain invited the new nations of South Asia – India, Pakistan and Ceylon – to join the Commonwealth. It also linked membership to economic aid and investment, trading privileges and military assistance. Because these were fully independent countries, not dominions, it appeared that a postwar Commonwealth’s decision-making would be less prescriptive than pre-war – but, on this issue and others, the British were deliberately vague. Use of paternalistic language to describe Asian nations’ entry into the Commonwealth clouded matters further. Denialism was rife; Britain and the dominions retained much of imperialism’s cultural baggage. According to Nicholas Mansergh, historian of the Commonwealth, ‘ideas did not keep pace with actualities; the imperial past bore in oppressively upon the Commonwealth present; attitudes appropriate to Empire were carried over into Commonwealth’.

Many in Britain and the dominions held onto a vision of the subcontinent that was not much different from the India of Empire – an idea, conscious or subconscious, that Indian independence had been a relatively superficial change. Sometimes, British and dominion governments pointed to their mutual interests with India in stabilising Asia; sometimes they continued to think of India – as during the Raj – as simply a provider of an ‘army for hire’, to be recruited as desired. That Nehru had ruled out India’s joining any formal Western defence alliance and was pursuing close ties with other decolonising Asian nations – a strategy soon to be known as non-alignment – was something Britain and the dominions often downplayed or ignored. While some officials talked about trade opportunities provided by Indian economic development, when others spoke of Indian trade, they mostly invoked the need to maintain preferential access deals developed under the Raj. At a time when Nehru was crafting expansive industrial development plans – his inspections of hydroelectric dams became staple news footage – it was a startlingly narrow idea of the new Asia’s economic potential. It was common to pledge support for Asian decolonisation, but less common to look hard at exactly what the new Asia was, and what it sought.

In Asia, Commonwealth membership raised suspicions. Was the organisation a bid to retain Britain’s global ‘spheres of influence’, despite Britain’s decline? Or was it more of an international vanity project, a means to safeguard British pride by prolonging an illusion of British centrality at the expense of nationalist pride in the new Asian nations?

Nehru approached the Commonwealth with a blend of nationalist and internationalist inclinations characteristic of both him and the postwar age. Nehru was imprisoned by the British, but he was also educated at Cambridge. In prison he had written histories of India which portrayed the country as open to the world and to diverse cultural influences: he admired the ethnic and religious tolerance of former Indian emperors and emphasised India’s historic trade and scientific links with China, Persia and Arabia. Nehru described, without self-consciousness, his emerging foreign policy as the pursuit of peace. His appeal crossed continents; he was beloved by Western left-liberals, and drew crowds in other Asian capitals. Nehru embodied the dream of a ‘new’ Asia, and the dream of a new, equitable relationship between Asia and the West.

Initially, Nehru had assumed India would leave the Commonwealth: his own party and Indian public opinion were in favour. But he had begun to rethink. If pragmatism – the material benefits of membership which Britain had promised – was driving him, so was a deeper idea of international co-operation. ‘[A] nation,’ he told Indians in 1949, ‘cannot live in isolation.’

Nehru’s decision that India would join the Commonwealth as a republic with no link to the British Crown flummoxed many in Britain and the dominions, including HV ‘Doc’ Evatt, Australia’s external affairs minister. He began to actively oppose the idea.

In Evatt’s mind, the issue of ‘the Crown’, and whether all Commonwealth members recognised it, was a far from trivial matter. Evatt had been the first Australian foreign minister to forge an Australian foreign policy truly independent of London. At the same time he had, like most Australians in the late 1940s, a strong British identity: he was a patriot of what was still referred to as the ‘British race’. Evatt had grown up with ‘the Empire’. He had spent years in global diplomacy, meeting and working with the officials of that Empire. It was the world he knew – imagining a different one did not come easily. Evatt’s policy independence from Britain was unquestionably bold. But it also made him fall back on symbolic, sentimental cultural tropes as common denominators binding together that ‘British world’ to which he still felt connected and which he badly wanted to view, against growing evidence, as a constant in an otherwise shifting geopolitical landscape. In the months before the London conference, Evatt’s attitude loomed as a significant impediment to the project of reforming the Commonwealth to allow India to stay.

Then, Prime Minister Ben Chifley decided he, not Evatt, would attend the London conference at which India’s Commonwealth membership would be decided.

CHIFLEY WAS KEENLY interested in Asia. He had been closely following events in India – so much so that when Australia’s High Commissioner in Delhi briefed Chifley, he was startled when ‘for two hours he told me’ about events there. Now in London in 1949, Australia’s prime minister, sitting in the chair Evatt would otherwise have occupied, acceded to India’s staying in the Commonwealth as a republic.

Chifley had often spoken about the extent of human suffering in Asia. He told parliament that, in Asia, too many ‘have not enough to eat…cannot look to the future for improved conditions’. He told his officials about the terrible poverty he had seen when travelling in Asia in 1933, and also said he considered European rule responsible. Chifley’s advisor HC Coombs remembered his boss saying, ‘when I think of the wealth [that has] flowed out of [India] to Europe it makes my blood boil’.

Chifley’s focus on unsatisfactory living conditions in Asia and his conviction that such conditions were intolerable were based on hard analysis of what had gone wrong in the world during his lifetime, and what now, in the late 1940s, he thought needed to be corrected. For Chifley, the paramount political lesson of the years since 1914 was that underlying conditions in societies – widespread misery, unmet aspirations, unsatisfied grievances – risked profound destabilisation within countries and in the international system. Chifley had seen mass unemployment and inflation in Europe steadily increase the appeal of fascism and other radical ideologies. He had watched Japan, cut off from food supplies and markets, turn to militarism. A better world, more accommodating of human needs, was not merely desirable, but acutely necessary to help stabilise the international order.

Such thinking was widely held in these years, especially on the political left, and led to far-sighted policies of reconstruction in Europe and Japan. Chifley, inclined to think first of Australia’s own region, was unusual in his systematic attention to decolonising Asia. The region was in chaos, experiencing war and unrest, because people were desperate for change. Chifley viewed Asia the way he saw politics generally: what was needed was broad-based opportunity, inclusion and justice. This meant supporting Asian movements that were pressing for and embodying positive change.

Chifley also envisaged wide economic benefits from a future Asia. But the benefits he saw were not limited to individual export markets and preservation of imperial access. In the Great Depression, Chifley had seen how poverty and weak economic demand created a vicious circle: because people in poverty could not spend, businesses had little demand for their products, so economies were perpetually stalled. Along with Coombs, Chifley thought Indian and other Asian economic development, industrialisation and rising living standards would help stabilise and boost the economy in Australia and the world more generally, because hundreds of millions of Asian consumers would power economic demand. Such stimulus would help prevent both another depression and forms of extreme politics feeding on poverty and distress.

But the star of the London conference was Nehru. When South Africa’s prime minister, Daniel Malan, said, ‘The Crown was indivisible…the King could not be king of this, head of that, perhaps emperor of something else,’ Nehru replied, ‘Have you perhaps heard of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost?’ When New Zealand’s prime minister Peter Fraser asked if India was committed to mutual defence, as the pre-war Commonwealth had been, Nehru said he disagreed with Britain on many policies and would accept no such obligation. His statement – and other members’ grudging tolerance of it – conveyed beyond doubt that the pre-war Commonwealth was dead and this new Commonwealth meant non-binding consultation among independent states. But Nehru, too, compromised; while the King would not be India’s head of state, he would remain head of the Commonwealth.

In the relatively unassuming position Chifley adopted lies the significance of his contribution. His own preference was, like Evatt, for India to recognise the Crown. But Chifley thought Nehru’s India to be an important country; he wanted it in the Commonwealth. Its position had to be respected – and so, he accommodated. According to John Burton, then head of Australia’s Department of External Affairs, Chifley was ‘obviously upset’ after Nehru’s ‘right or wrong’ challenge, pondering the exchange and what it meant. Such reflectiveness is a valuable trait in international diplomacy.

Chifley’s primary motivation was not to advance the economic and other interests of the ‘British family’; he was never nostalgic for the glories of the Empire; he didn’t see Asian engagement as simply a means to secure a future for the Commonwealth. Rather, Chifley saw a new Commonwealth as a means to enhance East–West co-operation. That hope was bolstered by his encounter with Nehru.

There is talk nowadays of Commonwealth ‘values’, much of it vague. Chifley and Nehru, though very different men, shared real values. Both were social democrats determined to use state power to reduce economic inequities and human suffering. Both were influenced by Fabian socialist ideas that had originated in the UK – a reminder that progressive as well as reactionary ideas can travel along imperial networks. They also shared a fear of war. Chifley told his parliament that ‘every public man has a duty’ to do everything possible to avoid another world war. Nehru, according to biographer Judith Brown, was similarly ‘haunted’ that another war would ‘wip[e] out any semblance of civilisation’. Sobered by their experience of the world’s thirty-year crisis, Nehru and Chifley shared a seriousness of purpose; both sought solutions to intractable problems and durable bases for interstate co-operation.

TODAY, THE RELATIVE rise of the East and decline of the West is accelerating. India and other Asian and African nations have fast-growing economies. Nationalist sentiment, and a renewed focus on the colonial past, are also growing.

Given this context, British Prime Minister Theresa May’s 2016 trip to India was remarkable. May, like in-denial British and dominion officials in the late 1940s, acted as if modern India is not much-changed from the Raj. Despite Indian demands for a reckoning with British imperial atrocities, no apology or even sober reflection was offered. May spoke narrowly of bilateral trade prospects, with her vision of this decidedly one-way: she only briefly mentioned Indian companies and investment into Britain, and dwelled mostly on British companies entering India. Most obviously, May failed to heed the aspirations of those with whom she wished to partner. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was clear about what India sought in any future relationship: ‘greater mobility …of [Indian] young people’, he said, will ‘define our engagement’. Committed to cutting British migration, May offered nothing on that issue. She left India with little of substance.

If the Commonwealth were now to be reformed again, this time to address the changing conditions of the twenty-first century, it could be an invaluable organisation. The Commonwealth’s imperial beginnings – providing it with a membership of both formerly colonised and coloniser nations – give it particular promise as a forum to discuss and resolve contemporary East–West tensions. European imperialism’s legacies still shape the world. There are Western biases in international bodies; double standards in trade, migration and environmental accords; exploitative actions by Western multinational corporations. Given growth rates in non-Western nations and the political power shifts set to follow, the twenty-first century’s political foundations will be unstable without a new set of East–West compacts, more favourable to the East – compacts making international power-relations more equal, genuinely mutually beneficial. The Commonwealth could lead the way on such a process of reform, becoming a laboratory for new arrangements to tackle outstanding East–West issues: on climate change, large-scale migration, access to education and employment, regulation of transnational capitalism, reform of international institutions, eliminating barriers to agricultural and other developing-world exports.

In developing such a reinvigorated Commonwealth, Chifley and Nehru are useful sources of inspiration. Today’s world is beginning to resemble those years of crisis – economic misery, political extremism, antagonism risking war – that Chifley and Nehru’s generation was attempting to halt, and which they indeed did halt. Around the world, the political left is debating whether to advocate returns to pre-1980s approaches to issues such as state intervention in markets and assertive redistribution of wealth. Awareness is growing that, post-World War II, the left championed astute policies, the jettisoning of which have contributed to many of our current problems. That re-evaluation should include international relations. It should include advocacy for a return to Chifley and Nehru’s unapologetic internationalism, their emphasis on underlying socio-economic conditions and human needs in the hard interests of global stability, and their willingness to make diplomatic concessions and compromises.

As British ministers have pursued a ‘new’ Commonwealth, however, they have instead indicated a nostalgia for the old Empire. Trade Secretary Liam Fox has used the phrase ‘Empire 2.0’. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has demeaned several races in ways reminiscent of colonial stereotypes and suggested India was better for the Raj. Britain’s refusal to apologise for its colonial past epitomises not only denial about past inequities, but disregard for the sentiments of the societies demanding such apologies. Seventy years ago, Chifley was clear-eyed about the excesses of British imperialism; he also knew any attempt to resurrect the old British Empire in Asia was doomed to failure. Those insights equipped him to productively contribute to revising the Commonwealth. A similar clarity – realism about what a Commonwealth can achieve, avoiding nostalgia for a world that is gone forever – is needed now.

What is also needed is a rediscovered sense of sobriety, a sense of the stakes at play. Contrasts with Nehru and Chifley offer themselves here too. Janan Ganesh recently argued in the Financial Times  that along with Empire nostalgia there is, within the British Conservative Party, a ‘frivolity’, ‘breeziness’ and ‘complacency’ caused by fading memories of true global crisis.

But modern Britain’s capacity to lead any process of Commonwealth re-engagement and reform is increasingly dubious. The risk that it will bring self-defeating attitudes to remaking the organisation is indicated, ironically, by the very impetus for the sudden attention to it: the decision to leave the EU, indicative of chauvinistic over-co-operative approaches to diplomacy, zero-sum rather than mutual-gain attitudes to world affairs. Going forward, Commonwealth countries other than Britain might usefully take the initiative.

In 1949, Nehru was facing his own decision on whether to leave what he considered a frequently irritating but still visibly useful international body. In deciding to remain, and work to improve the Commonwealth instead, he said: ‘In the world today…where there are so many disruptive forces at work…where we are often at the verge of war…it is better to keep a co-operative association going…than break it.’

Originally published in Griffith Review 59: Commonwealth Now.

THE DAY AFTER the news filled with Hilary Clinton’s pneumonia diagnosis, I found the Al-Salaam restaurant closed. I looked up and down my local stretch of Changi Road, wondering where else I could get some breakfast roti, and quickly gathered this wasn’t a normal Singapore weekday. A large crowd – Malays, Indians, Arabs, others – was leaving the local mosque. A hawker centre was dense with patrons eating noodles with conspicuous unhurriedness. Families strolled along a canal leading down to the beach.

By some intangible but unmistakeable change in the air, I sensed that today in Singapore was a public holiday. I briefly contemplated my ignorance and its implications: look at me, passing through foreign countries, engaging superficially, talking a cosmopolitan talk yet (evidently) utterly removed from everyday fundamentals of life. Still, I was simultaneously struck by how much Changi Road’s collective vibe this morning – happy, languid – seeped into me, a mere visitor, by some process of neighbourhood osmosis, changing my mood. People lifted spoonfuls of coral-orange laksa to their mouths while reading newspapers. A very old man, the top buttons of his shirt undone, sat on a bench near the canal: a kingfisher flashed in front of him. Men in blue robes and white taqiyah caps and women in multi-coloured hijabs talked with wide, white smiles on the mosque’s grassy lawn. I now felt a sudden urge to not hurry off to the subway and instead get some laksa, stroll the canal, chat on the grass. The threads that link us all these days are increasingly thin, but I’ve been noticing, here, the way my emotions, my attitudes, even my actions are subtly connected to those of people living around me in this neighbourhood; small but meaningful encounters, often wordless, typically unspectacular, prompt me to incorporate, to assimilate, to adjust, to comprehend, building up a tentative but tangible civility between myself and disparate others who live here.

Travellers often call Singapore lifeless and antiseptic. That’s certainly true in swathes of its downtown: all bank headquarters, expo halls and enormous malls. But this neighbourhood brims with colour and life. There’s a park down the street; last night, Chinese families gathered there with firecrackers and painted paper lanterns. The canal in the evenings takes on the air of a Mediterranean promenade. International influences are palpable. Seng Kee is a Cantonese restaurant with servers from various parts of mainland China; they say xie-xie when I’m done. Recent arrivals from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka often work in curry houses. Maladies have also crossed borders to be here: posters warn of both dengue and Zika.

Travellers often call Singapore boring. I find it far from boring. Here a history of war, social trauma and acute racial tension, notably race riots in the 1960s, has been overlaid by an economic growth that has achieved a preciously held stability. But community tensions and political dysfunctions have remained – indeed, are arguably growing. I find Singapore fascinating as a place to think about what the world has achieved; whether what has been achieved is enough; how much of what has been achieved is precarious, and if that might yet go into reverse.

I decided on a walk. A man and his young daughter crossed the street. The daughter carried a Cirque du Soleil carry bag that featured a cartoon of a starry night and silhouettes of magical beings; halfway across the street she broke, without warning, into an exuberant skip. A couple swam and splashed in a condo pool, pink-blossomed bushes on its sides, the water a rich aquamarine blue pockmarked with white bubbles like phosphorescence. A bespectacled Chinese man walked past wearing a John Lennon ‘Imagine’ T-shirt. This island endured a brutal Japanese occupation, decades of radicalism and unrest prompted by the shadows of imperialism and communism. Someone else walked by wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and holding a laptop carry bag. Violent insurrection reduced to garb, worn while commuting to some co-working space. Rather than boring, I find it mesmerising to observe the life of a place that is, after an extended era of turmoil, living with the space and the scope afforded by peace and prosperity.

I GOT MY roti from a hawker centre in Little India. Bollywood music boomed from a stereo and I found myself tapping my foot to it – another small example of osmosis, another modest, barely conscious act of assimilation to my milieu and to the people I had placed myself among. I now ace the pronunciation of teh tarik, Indian milk tea, the simple consequence of hearing it said here so often. These vendors know me. I like this fact, although our conversations never get beyond pleasantries.

‘How are you my friend?’ He is Tamil – thick moustache, bushy hair, black sandals on brown feet.

‘Pretty well, and you?’

‘Yes, fine.’

Indians are treated badly in Singapore, often discriminated against. I finished my roti and paid the man. He gave me a brief nod, then we both turned our backs, and went back to our own business.

Everywhere, shopping: Little India brims with clothes, electronics, miscellaneous kitsch. So many bargains, testaments to what globalisation can do, good and ill. People exult in sixty-cent bottles of water and two-dollar adapter plugs. The costs are not so obvious. The other day a friend was passing through and I visited him in his Little India hostel. His dorm was full of single South-Asian men; at 8 pm, they were all in their bunks and on their phones, the phones plugged into the wall via adapters, the room full of the sound of them chatting to faint voices in Bangalore, Tamil Nadu, Kerala. Were they talking to their families, or to business colleagues? I saw a rucksack filled with computer games. Two pairs of shoes, one black, one brown, sat under a bunk; singlets and dress shirts hung from coathangers on the bunk’s railing, forming a thin, incomplete curtain of semi-privacy. The cheap labour of this caste of lonely transients gives us our cheap goods. On leaving, I had looked back at the badly signposted hostel and saw that it was, from the street, barely noticeable.

Walking on from the hawker centre, I saw a preschool on the ground floor of a gleaming condo. Its adverts promised ‘mathematics’, ‘English’, ‘science’ and even ‘Latin dance’, but also ‘calligraphy’, ‘Chinese painting’ and ‘tea appreciation’. Tradition and modernity wrestled on the same set of posters: the excitement of a new world – one poster showed a young Chinese girl before a blackboard filled with dense chalk equations – was juxtaposed against the pull of an old, vanishing one, a nostalgia the power of which we have been consistently underestimating.

A young man strode past wearing army fatigues and enormous black boots: Singapore still has compulsory military service. He looked thoroughly blasé, though, as if the army was just another commuting destination. I caught a cab. Soon I looked out its window and saw dozens of goods-laden ships moored off the coast. Indonesia is close by out there, in the form of small islands. I asked the driver what he thought of the recent fracas over a resort on one of those islands having been accidentally shaded the same colour as Singapore, and not Indonesia, on an internet map – an action that prompted Indonesia’s president to send the military to plant a flag on the place. ‘They did what?’ he said. He hadn’t heard – and when I told him about it, he shrugged. In the 1960s, Singapore frenziedly launched its economic development amid relations with its neighbours – populous, majority-Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia – that were considerably more tense. My cabbie seemed to veritably exult in the fact that he hadn’t known and didn’t care, that Indonesian army movements were no longer cause for concern. His window was down, and a warm breeze fluttered the longish grey hair on the sides of his head. He changed the subject to recipes for Hainanese chicken rice.

But how much scar tissue remains? How limited and fragile are the reconciliations that have taken place between Singapore and neighbouring countries, and among Singapore’s own ethnic groups? Fighter jets often train along the island’s east coast, making sharp turns high in the sky; The Straits Times reported the other day overwhelming majorities of Singaporeans telling pollsters they have personally encountered racism.

I arrived at the library, sat at a large communal table. Two teenage girls in hijabs procrastinated by doodling notes in Malay to each other and laughing, their Arabic textbooks unread in front of them. A young man studied law. A middle-aged Chinese woman sat with a stack of Lonely Planet guides. Here war has ended, chaos has ended, and so large numbers of people can visit a library, sit down and think: what now? The library displayed prominently on a shelf a photographic history of the city. I briefly got up and flicked through it, saw skyscrapers rising from slums, literally: it left no doubt as to the scale of achievement. Simultaneously at the table, I saw an existence of tribe and a transcending of tribe. A woman was reading a Chinese-language newspaper and taking notes in English. A man was reading a Tamil-language newspaper, absorbed in an article about Barack and Michelle Obama. A teenager sat down next to me, opened his computer: his desktop wallpaper was this planet, seen from space. A young woman – a student teacher? – typed what looked like a lesson plan for a psychology class, which included ‘Give a brief account of the eugenics movement’. A small child took from a shelf a picture book on Jesse Owens.

Yet conflicts simmer. There aren’t enough power points at this library. As more people arrived, resentment built. New arrivals noted green lights indicating full charge on MacBooks, and saw no reason their owners couldn’t share power. Those who’d got here early, often specifically because of this issue, thought otherwise. A guy sat opposite me with a laptop out of juice. Seeing my plug in place, he gave me, and me alone, the closest thing to a death stare that one can perform while one is inside a public library and flanked by a bookshelf of Terry Pratchett titles. My laptop cord had an obvious white adapter, starkly confirming my foreignness. I felt him questioning my belonging, my entitlement to resources. Singapore has a large immigrant population of Westerners who take high-paying jobs, something that is increasingly resented. But I disputed his premise, and didn’t budge.

CHICKEN TIKKA FOR lunch, skin ochre-red and charcoal-stained but the meat white, still succulent. A passing man, Indian, visibly appraised my meal, spoke in Tamil to the vendor, then sat down; a minute later he was eating the same thing. Two Chinese people sat down and also ordered the same. Another small act of osmosis, this time other people seeing me, assimilating to and incorporating elements of my template today. I enjoyed the thought of chicken tikka’s deliciousness being a fundamental thing that swathes of the world have in common, hard evidence that people are not so different. Then, the Indian guy wanted to talk. I was Australian? What did I think of the cricket? But I don’t follow cricket. I wracked my brain for something to say pertaining to cricket post-Steve Waugh, drew a total blank. I brainstormed what other topics the two of us might talk about, couldn’t think of a single one. Our dialogue stalled into silence; our thin connection snapped.

A movie I wanted to see was playing downtown. It was a documentary about a group of Singaporeans whom the Singapore government detained without trial and brutally interrogated in 1987. Somebody in the audience kept laughing. Whether it actually indicated maliciousness and lack of empathy, or whether it was a laugh to muffle a sense of sadness or anger, I didn’t know; but it discombobulated me, nonetheless. One victim, interviewed, said he once went to the toilet and even his guard had been shocked by the amount of blood – and laughter rang out jarringly. Another man described the Orwellian illogic the security police had used to establish guilt. The laughter rang out again, seemingly in total contradiction of every value I not so long ago had assumed the twenty-first century would be about. One of the former detainees attended the screening, and when the film finished he was feted by a crowd of mostly young Singaporeans, men with glistening black hair and women in cocktail dresses and pretty shoes, everybody holding glasses of champagne or craft beer. In the scene I saw a quandary that is especially stark in affluent-but-undemocratic Singapore, but that also has a wider relevance. Here we were, surrounded by art-house-theatre chic, enjoying a deeply imperfect but almost unimaginably hard-won stability, able to eat, able to work and study, able to go to movies in the afternoons, and we were chatting, with sympathy, to somebody who had been tortured by people who went unpunished, as did their political masters. Questions bubbled in my mind like the bubbles in the champagne. How much should we sacrifice, and when? In this steadily crystallising new age, where is the line between tolerable and intolerable?

BACK TO MY neighbourhood. Al-Salaam was now open. I sat down, ordered a teh tarik, opened a book. It was by William Finnegan, about teaching at a ‘coloured’ school in apartheid South Africa. I was just reflecting on it when I heard, ‘Sir! Sir! How are you crossing the line, sir?’ I blinked. It was an old man, face deeply crevassed, wearing a striped shirt, beefy sandals and very thick black-rimmed glasses.

‘Sir, your book! Your book! Crossing the line! So how do you cross the line, sir? What line do you cross?’

Then I got it. Finnegan’s book was called Crossing The Line, referring to the apartheid line.

‘Oh…right.’

‘A-ha ha ha!’ He was all but dancing in front of me. His enthusiasm to talk and to engage was overflowing; I wondered about its source. He started to babble. ‘I am seventy-six, sir. I worked for sixty years! Now my daughters look after me’. He asked me my age, job, marriage status, then he said, randomly, ‘My first job interview, sir, they asked me: “Do you speak Chinese?” Because I am Malay. Because I am Malay.’ It wasn’t clear whether he’d got the job or not, whether he was exulting in his cross-cultural prowess or lamenting an ethnic insularity that had stalled his career. It could easily have been either.

By way of parting, he said: ‘Crossing the line, crossing the line. All we can hope for is peace, sir. All we can hope for is peace.’

And what line, or lines, were we about to cross? I’d taken an outside table at Al-Salaam, so I was watching the sun disappear from Changi Road. I reached for my teh tarik. I’m becoming obsessed with teh tarik. The sunset meant it was definitely beer o’clock by Anglo-Saxon Time, but Al-Salaam doesn’t have it and in any case, I’ve actually given beer up in Singapore. Admittedly, I’ve done so partly because alcohol’s so bloody expensive in this city. But I’ve also done it because, sitting at Al-Salaam one evening, I realised I now genuinely preferred to have tea here. I’d realised the pleasure of drinking something hot rather than cold at this time of day. I’d also realised that I simply enjoyed the atmosphere of Al-Salaam. I liked that, while it’s typically filled with lively conversations, it’s never loud. Tonight, a young Indian couple spoke softly to each other. An ancient, spectacled mufti arrived and greeted the staff with a nod. I liked that while food and drink here give me great pleasure – I soon ate an immaculate mutton curry – I never feel I’ve consumed to excess like I sometimes feel at Western bar-and-burger-type places. Al-Salaam’s staff and patrons I found respectful, modest, refined – by more osmosis, assimilation, incorporation, I felt myself imbibing a little of those traits by the act of immersing myself here.

Tables were now filling up. Some people were walking over from the mosque next-door, after prayers; others were coming from elsewhere. Malays, Indians, Arabs and some Chinese, too, sat eating nasi goreng or curries. But I noticed, tonight, that though everybody was under the same roof, they were, without exception, sitting among their own ethnicity. I sipped my teh tarik. Two tables over the mufti did too, slowly, to savour it, and turned the pages of his newspaper. I saw a brief flash of garish orange – the world news section, coverage of the US presidential race. Abruptly, I was conscious of my skin; abruptly, I was self-conscious about sitting here. I vaguely wanted to say something to the mufti. But what? I didn’t know. I chose to be silent. So he and I simply sat, and gazed out at the street – in the same basic direction but inescapably separately, observing, through different eyes, a sudden, somehow unexpected twilight.

Originally published in Griffith Review 57: Perils of Populism.

IN THE BUILDING opposite mine here in Ho Chi Minh City, still commonly called Saigon, an old man in the top-floor apartment tends his rooftop garden. He climbs there via a ladder every morning, shirtless and holding a plastic watering can, and spends a half hour amid green potted plants. I watch him shamelessly, a 31-year-old Australian Jimmy Stewart in a Vietnamese Rear Window. How old would he be? Old enough to have been in the war. He moves slowly, and pays no attention to me or anything else beyond his tended patch of green – in fact, he appears to be encouraging a wall of creepers to all but block out his view of the street.

But where he turns away, I want to look outward, to the street and the city. We’re close to a bus stop, and when I look away from him and down I can see, besides street stalls, motorbikes and general bustle, a steady trickle of well-dressed young people walking along dragging wheelie suitcases. If they’re heading towards the bus stop they’re typically diddling on their phones, and I imagine them calling up their confirmation itineraries. If they’re heading away from the bus stop, into the warren of narrow Saigonese alleyways, I can usually see airline baggage ties fluttering on their luggage. Where are they going, or where have they been? Study? Work? Tourism? They walk briskly, exuding a sense of purpose.

Minh and Bao, both in their twenties, live in the four-storey house that I’m staying in. They rent its upper rooms through Airbnb; the ground floor Bao uses for his start-up. Whenever I go outside I pass a dozen undergraduate-age Vietnamese sitting in a nest of laptops and power cords beside whiteboards full of squiggles. Outside I have to run a gauntlet of parked motorbikes; the space immediately before the front door is blanketed with shoes. When I pass through the kitchen Minh is making coffee: Vietnamese beans put into an Italian-style coffee-maker. ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ he says. These and other colloquial grafts onto his speech hint at his US education. He dresses well, in slacks and buttoned pastel-coloured shirts. Minh has an idea, he tells me. He works at the Saigon offices of a foreign bank. Vietnam has just liberalised restrictions on foreigners buying property. Everybody is still wary, though: banks of getting involved with foreigners, foreigners of Vietnamese law. But Minh knows the law, knows banking, knows foreigners, and wants to wade in. He’s building contacts, hoping to start consulting on such deals.

In Café Nguyen, which looks onto a canal flowing towards the Saigon River and where I go for cà phê sữa đá (coffee with milk and ice), a young man sits and streams the European Champions League on his laptop. Young professional types jog past with iPod plugs in their ears, headed for an asphalt path that runs along the canal – briefly, I hear a faint, tinny Katy Perry. I hold up my smartphone to wordlessly ask for the café’s Wi-Fi password, and the teenager who works the early morning shift grins, nods, punches it in. I have breakfast at a stall hawking bún thịt nướng – grilled pork and vermicelli noodles with cucumber, lettuce, peanuts and chilli sauce. I’m a regular: the vendor is a fiftysomething man who, when he sees me sit on a plastic chair at one of his plastic tables, now says, ‘Ah’, and simply prepares me a bowl. His wife is next to him, snipping pork into pieces using a pair of scissors. Fiftysomething – so, children during the war. They speak no English. It’s the young customers who start conversations with me. They ask me where I’m from. But when I say Australia, their typical reaction is not to dwell on distance or difference – that one-word summation, ‘kangaroos!’, that I’ve heard so many times in so many places – but to point out connections between Australia and Vietnam, mostly those of migrants and students. A young man tells me that his sister lives in Perth. He visited her last year: Vietnamese food in Perth is good, he reckons, though not as good as in Saigon. Another young man in crisp military uniform – red stripes on his shoulders, black shoes shiny and meticulously laced – pulls up on his motorbike, sits down next to me and starts telling me about his cousin, enrolled in a business course in Sydney.

When I left Melbourne for Vietnam a month ago, I sat in Tullamarine Airport and, as a means of using up as much of my Vodafone data as possible, trawled on my phone through mostly Western news stories from Western news websites. They had focused, almost without exception, on rising nativism and nationalism, desires for walls and ‘strong borders’, distrust of foreigners and foreign influences, fears of the different or new. But here in Saigon I find myself surrounded by young people who are unabashedly optimistic about the idea of a future that is mobile, fast-changing, and connected – people who are inclined to see opportunity rather than peril in a globalised world.

IN THE MORNINGS I work on my laptop from Minh and Bao’s top-floor terrace; today, Bao appears to take the air. Many young Vietnamese are trying to launch start-ups, he tells me: there’s a push to turn Saigon into a regional start-up hub. But the Vietnamese government, while not against start-ups per se, doesn’t quite understand what sort of ecosystem is needed. Bao strums his fingers restlessly on the wooden table as he speaks. To really get a start-up culture, he muses, Vietnam’s education system has to be reformed: local schools and universities will need to adopt different education models and curriculums. ‘Right now everyone wants to go to university in America. Or Britain or Australia. But mostly America. I would like to go to America, then come back – bring back the skills.’

Vietnam’s government, he adds, also has to get more comfortable with free expression, creativity, non-conformity, an open flow of ideas. A few months ago, during street protests, they shut down Facebook and Twitter – and this, Bao says, is the sort of thing that can’t be allowed to stand. A single orchid, purple, sits in a pot on the terrace, and Bao looks at it as he talks. The start-up entrepreneurs are young and the top politicians are old: that’s the gist of it, Bao tells me.

An hour later, Minh’s girlfriend Lien appears. She works as a French translator and an English and French tutor. One year when Lien was in school, French volunteers arrived and taught French language classes. Their emphasis on French culture sparked her interest. Lien often brings a bag of croissants to the house. Every time I see her she seems to have a book, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, sometimes in Vietnamese. She tells me about Vietnamese literature, and I jot down titles. Lien enthuses to me about languages – about verbs, structure, vocabulary, memorisation tricks. Mastering them has been her ticket to the world, literally: she spent two months teaching English in a village in Thailand, her first international trip, then went to France on exchange. She’s just started to learn Korean – she pores over a textbook when she’s not preparing for evening classes. It’s a popular language to learn here, she says, because so many Vietnamese love Korean pop culture.

Lien has another idea. She wants to go to Paris to study perfume. There isn’t much Vietnamese perfume yet, she tells me – she gets hers through a friend studying at Duke University, who brings it back once a year in her suitcase. So Lien wants to try making some here, using the scents of local fruits.

It occurs to me that maybe all the cà phê sữa đá has gone to my head, and that I’m simply projecting onto these young Saigonese my desire to find an outward-looking, open-to-the-world inversion of Brexit Britain and Trump’s America. So I’m heartened to find a YouGov/Economist poll, published in The Economist magazine of 19 November 2016, which asked people in several nations this question:

Globalisation is the word used to describe the increasing movement of products, ideas, money, jobs and people around the world. Overall, do you think globalisation is a force for good or bad for the world?

Of the survey’s Vietnamese respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four, 92 per cent called globalisation a force for good. While majorities of young people in other countries were also positive, more positive than their older fellow citizens, Vietnamese millennials’ voice of approval was the most dramatic. By comparison, in the same age bracket, nearly two-thirds of French, half the Americans, Australians and Britons thought globalisation a force for good.

I GO FOR a walk, heading towards the downtown core of District One. Hundreds of kids in white uniforms head loudly into blocky, yellow-coloured, French-era school buildings. Saigon is dotted with co-working spaces: inside, young people pore over books, small groups huddle and peer at screens. Not only is Saigon booming, Saigon feels ‘open’ in the widest sense of that term. Everywhere I go, five- to ten-year-olds say ‘Hello!’, sometimes adding an extra couple of sentences learned from their English classes. A commonplace thing here, Vietnamese children greeting foreigners – but now, I pause and reflect on the behaviour’s significance. These kids see me and gasp, run up to me with outright eagerness: they’re not only keen to practise what they’ve learnt at school, they also seem keen, even in a city significantly overfull with Western tourists, to create a brief but real moment of intercultural connection. I feel energised just to be in this milieu, and as Vietnam imbibes foreign influences, I begin, modestly, to imbibe some Vietnamese influences. I start reading a history of Vietnam. I start listening to some Vietnamese music. The sight of all this frenetic Saigonese activity has prompted me to work harder: I’ve started getting up at five, the same time as much of the rest of the city. Small steps only, but I can discern, tangibly, the possibilities that come with immersion in a new and different place.

Around me in Saigon are French restaurants, Chinese factories, Japanese cars – and a few months ago, the then-incumbent US President was around the corner. Minh recently told me: ‘When Obama came…it was like a festival! Everybody was on the streets trying to see him. Everybody!’ I asked him why, and he said because Saigon has always been open to the world. ‘In the north, in Hanoi, they look more to China, they think mostly about China,’ but here, according to Minh, people also look south, east, west. The two countries Minh most wants to visit are India and the US, the first to see religious sites (he’s a Buddhist), the second to see the world’s leading power in science and technology. ‘I’d like to visit Silicon Valley,’ he says, his glowing laptop screen illuminating his face. ‘See where they did it.’

So many young Saigonese adore Obama. Is it merely because Obama is a giant celebrity? Or is it because Obama appears as the supreme embodiment of cosmopolitanism, tolerance and diversity, things of which they vehemently approve? ‘We love Obama!’ one of Bao’s start-up colleagues tells me on the terrace after I get back to the house. ‘We loved it when he visited Vietnam. We love his speeches, we love his wife and his family. We love his respect for the world.’ Recently Minh was driving me on his motorbike, and we’d zipped past a huge picture of Obama outside a temple that he’d visited. Minh pointed to the entrance gate of the temple and said: ‘You should go there. Obama went there!’ It’s good to be in a place where such a figure still personifies a possible and even probable future, rather than a suddenly distant-seeming past.

JUST AFTER LUNCH, Bao asks me: ‘How is the economy doing in Australia?’ I tell him it’s in a bit of trouble because demand from China is slowing down.

‘That’s a problem for Vietnam, too. Because of the commodities.’

‘Yeah – all these commodities. China’s kept Australia’s economy going for ages, but now we’re thinking, what happens if it stops suddenly?’

‘I think the answer is to diversify,’ Bao says. I look again at this ground-floor room: at the whiteboard, at a French textbook for beginners on the bench, at a calendar with upcoming Airbnb bookings on the wall. ‘Vietnam needs to do what China did, we need to put a lot of money into innovation, R and D. But we still have to build our infrastructure up. China’s already done that, mostly. You know we’re about to start building a subway system here in Saigon?’

‘Australia should be putting more effort into all that, too,’ I say. ‘We should be trying to plug into that new economy, but we’re slow to change.’

‘But Australia already has a high level of development?’ Bao enunciates the phrase ‘high level of development’ as if it has religious connotations.

‘But we don’t encourage that stuff as much as we should. Ten years ago China was buying huge amounts of coal and iron ore from us, and we should have used it for nation-building, but we wasted it on tax cuts.’ I’m feeling verbose because the whole conversation is inspiring me: all this talk of education, infrastructure, innovation, R and D, retooling. Such a relief from reading The Guardian on my phone, which is all about stonewalling climate regulations and bigotry from ministers of the Crown.

‘I went to China last year,’ Bao says. ‘To Tianjin. I hadn’t even heard of it, it doesn’t look that big a place on the map, but the skyline was amazing. The infrastructure was amazing.’

‘Yeah, China’s incredible nowadays. Those train stations look like airports. Those airports look like space stations. You go there and you think, “surely all this activity will lift us all”.’ It occurs to me that neither of us has yet mentioned conventional national interests, or the old tropes of ‘civilisational’ difference and divergences. Our talk is all economic connections and complementarities, foreign methods we could import, networks that we could strengthen and be strengthened by.

Bao says, ‘It’s the future.’

IN THE LATE afternoon a thunderstorm appears on the horizon, and swallows fly back and forth in panicky loops. I’ve begun taking motorbike taxis around Saigon. When waiting for customers the drivers sit on their bikes with their feet up, as if relaxing in a hammock. I hail one, hold onto the seat under me and we zip through a laneway lined with lit-up fruit stalls, bump across the pavement in front of a small white church, fly across a bridge spanning the Saigon River. I signal to stop at Dien Bien Phu Street, get off and start to walk. Night falls. Abruptly, I see a brightly illuminated billboard beside a high-walled building that turns out to be Indonesia’s consulate. The billboard shows a set of photographs of an Indonesia–Vietnam trade summit, information about an Indonesia–Vietnam student exchange program. Streaming ABC iView yesterday I’d seen Malcolm Turnbull calling for a bilateral free trade agreement with Great Britain to be fast-tracked; now, I contemplate the extraordinary barrenness of imagination this suggested. With his blue suits, large silver head and booming voice regurgitating bland sound bites about negative gearing, the Prime Minister, as he’s filtered to me here in Vietnam, reminds me of some vacuous, drab-coloured parrot, his policy substance being steadily eroded by some Tory-only form of intestinal worm. And I think, in this Saigon night, surely we can be more ambitious – surely our generation

will be more ambitious.

Phở for dinner. A twentysomething guy next to me politely corrects my pronunciation. He lives in California, but is back for a short visit to see family and friends. He has questions about Australia. What sort of foreign trade does Australia have? How easy is foreign investment? How seriously is Australia committed to multiculturalism? How big is its Vietnamese diaspora? And how’s the internet speed in Australia – fast? Nope, I tell him, the internet is better here. A problem, the guy says, that’s how people make connections. As he eats his phở he smiles widely and often; here, if not elsewhere, he seems to me to be saying via his proffered advice and lines of questioning, he thinks of multiple identities not as a weakness, not a sign to others of potential non-belonging, but as enriching, rewarding, his diaspora membership and different passports plugging him into rich and promising worlds.

I squeeze lemon over my phở, ladle in chilli, use my chopsticks to stir. Across the road is an electronics store filled with smartphones and laptops. Inside, I see a young woman hold up a power cord, look at a shop assistant with an inquiring expression. It starts to rain. The rain is torrential, and our view turns into a watery blur. The restaurant’s lights flicker uncertainly. Several motorbikes veer off the street and hurriedly park. Their drivers get off, throw a tarp over their bikes, sit down in dripping ponchos, pour themselves tea, order, settle down to wait out the storm. The twentysomething guy asks if I’ve seen the footage of Obama and Anthony Bourdain eating bún chả in Hanoi. Our bowls of noodles steam. The street begins to flood. Someone wades out with a broom handle and jabs a spot, presumably a drain, and the water begins to recede. Traffic washes past. Opposite, the young woman leaves the electronics store with a purchase in a bag. Someone else looking to make connections.

THERE’S MUCH TALK these days of the momentum achieved by those who want their respective nations to turn inward. Saigon shows me how much momentum exists in the opposite direction: the depth of the desire, at least among the young, and especially in Asia, for globalism. And it suggests the potential of that basic orientation – of welcome rather then rejection of outsiders and outside forces – to be a positive force. Back on the terrace at Minh and Bao’s, now surrounded by darkness, Lien tells me that in Paris last year, ‘I saw a family of Syrian refugees. They were just sleeping, on the street. It gets so cold in France at night. I gave them five euros.’ She shrugs. ‘I think they just want what we want – to get the most they can from the world.’

Originally published in Griffith Review 56: Millennials Strike Back