“I simply don’t understand it!” my new Canadian friend exclaimed. “Every time I go out walking by myself, Indonesians ask ‘Kok, sendirian?’ (Why are you alone?) Why should they care? It’s really none of their business.”
I could understand her point because I’ve been asked the same thing time and time again, having lived in Central Java for nearly 40 years. “To them it’s unusual,” I explained, “because togetherness is the norm in their culture”.
Indeed most Indonesians I know rarely do anything alone on their own. When our nephew wants to go shopping, he always asks one of us to go with him. When a friend is hospitalized, we go to visit, not individually but always in a group. When someone gets married, we form a committee to organize every detail of the wedding. During a holiday, our neighborhood group organizes a picnic outing together and charters a bus. Before Independence Day we all take part in “kerja bakti” (neighborhood community service) to clean up the neighborhood together. As I wrote in Light for the Journey, the focus is not on our rights as individuals but our responsibilities as members of the group, be it the family, the neighborhood, or the community at large. “We” takes priority over “I”.
Language reflects culture. Listen to Americans or Australians chatting, and you’ll hear “I” more than “we”. Listen to Indonesians, and you’ll hear just the opposite. The Indonesian language even defines “we” more exactly than English does by using two different words. “Kita” refers to everyone, including the person being addressed, but “kami” excludes the person being addressed. “Kita diajak”, then, means that all of us are invited, whereas “Kami diajak” means that we are invited but you are not. Got that?
The adjustment for Asians who move to a culture that stresses individualism is often very difficult. They can feel desperately lonely at first, missing the extended family and in-groups they have left behind. Shifting their identity from the group they had depended upon at home to themselves as self-reliant individuals takes some getting used to.
Neither is it easy for Westerners to adjust to living in a collectivist culture like Indonesia. We have been raised, after all, to be self-reliant and independent, to respect other people’s privacy, and to enjoy doing things by ourselves. In our own culture, a person who can’t do anything on his own would even be regarded as immature. Then too, as foreigners in a place like Indonesia, we are not inherent members of any particular group, family or clan. Unless we are married to an Indonesian, therefore, we don’t automatically fit in. It can be quite lonely unless we know other expats in the community or have Indonesian friends who go out of their way to include us in their own group-related activities.
Needless to say, individualism and collectivism greatly influence our view of the world and our place in it. They affect many aspects of our daily lives as well. My next blog post will take collectivism a step further, discussing how this cultural value plays out in courtship and marriage.
In the meantime, if anybody asks you, “Kok, sendirian?” don’t say, “It’s none of your business!” Just nod and smile.