Bandung, Where I Live
I didn't choose it, it chose me
Every day, I feel like I'm waking up and living in purgatory. It’s just a subjective feeling since objectively, I live in one of the most beautiful cities in Indonesia, Bandung. I feel that way because I always feel I deserve to wake up in an Australian town, as an Australian citizen, and have breakfast with my Australian family before going through my Australian workday. To this second, I always feel that’s the proper reality, and this post is an illusion.
The city is not known internationally unless you are a part of a select group. If you’re a Singaporean, you know the name from bandung, a rose milk drink that isn’t a specialty of Bandung, but either comes from the Malay word for pairs or a British inventor who chuckled at the mention of the city (“ban dung?”) in a newspaper.
Students of postcolonial studies, meanwhile, know the Bandung Conference of 1955, uniting colonized and decolonized Asians and Africans. I’ll touch on this conference and its interpretations below.
Part of the Napoleonic Great Post Road to defend Java from a British invasion (the British made good use of the road), Bandung became a pooling hub for Dutch plantations. The Chinese arrived along the railway after 1880. To this day, the area surrounding the central station remains Chinese, and Bandung became a municipality by 1906.
After the Great War (which didn’t affect the Netherlands but changed the way Europe saw the world), the Dutch East Indies government planned to move the colonial capital from Batavia, now Jakarta, to Bandung. At this point Bandung had become a weekend destination for Batavians, a pattern repeated a century later. Braga Street became Asia’s premier nightlife street, centered around Art Deco hotels and clubs.
The Great Depression halted this new capital project, although the parties went on like elsewhere. The Nazi invasion of the Netherlands cut the cordial ties between Dutch and Germans in the colonies, and it all ended when Japan entered Java in March 1942.
After the war, the city was divided between the north populated by the Europeans and affluent Asians, and the south populated by the native Sundanese and Chinese merchants catering to them. Indonesian patriots burned down the southern part of the city in their retreat in March 1946, and again to this day, the city is still economically divided between north and south.
Founding father of Indonesia Sukarno picked the city, where he was educated and worked as an architect, as the host city to the 1955 Bandung Conference, known in Indonesia as the Asia-Africa Conference, and deliberately converted the Concordia Society building into Gedung Merdeka, the Independence Building. The delegates, including Nehru and Zhou Enlai, stayed at the two luxurious hotels near the building, Savoy Homann and Preanger.
My parents moved to Bandung from Jakarta in the sixties, and my father experienced a severe anti-Chinese riot in 1963 as Indonesia was contested by Islamists, anti-communist nationalists, and communists. The city gave no quarter to communism after 1966 although the prestigious ITB, Bandung Institute of Technology, remains a center of student activism to this day.
By the time I studied the Asia Africa Conference in the early 1990s, it retained its anti-colonial identity but not its anti-white, China-led spirit. The successive anniversaries from 1995 to 2015 (another one must be on the card next year) were all about international cooperation and being a good host rather than about Left internationalism, the original purpose of the conference.
What prompted me to write about my city is the existence of a “From Bandung to Gaza” petition (reaching its 1000 signatures target by mere dozens), which is as effective as From Brooklyn or From Naarm. It’s given that most Muslim population of Bandung supports Gaza, but their idea of the Global South doesn’t translate to hate against white people and effective BDS actions the way the activists want.
Like many other Indonesian, maybe Asian cities, Bandung is both creative and conservative. It’s not a city where you’re looking for a big payout from white-collar careers, and even as a tourist hub, it’s still limited to domestic tourism. The pandemic closed international flights from Singapore and Malaysia, and the new international airport is so remote and unconnected people prefer to take a train or van to Jakarta’s international airport. All the established musicians, writers, and professionals eventually must leave for Jakarta or overseas to make it, something that still eludes me. It’s a low-key big city to a fault.
On one hand, I was ashamed that I was not in Jakarta or Bali, just in an unknown city, like a Malaysian not living in Kuala Lumpur or a Thai not living in Bangkok (obviously it feels different to a Japanese living in Fukuoka or an Australian living in Wollongong). On the other hand, an X mutual said recently that she lived in Bandung for some months in the 1990s during the southern summer holiday. We could have crossed paths in a mall or supermarket. I was proud to tell her that Bandung remains the most beautiful city in Indonesia.
Because Jakarta is eternally hopeless, and expats who love Jakarta, calling it the Big Durian, love it for its chaos and emotion (and affordable luxury), not stability and clean air. Bali is an island and the capital city, Denpasar, is not where the actions are. Surabaya, the second largest city, has a clean downtown but is more socially segregated, and with a big apology to my Surabayan friends, I’m glad I don’t have the accent.
This leaves me with Bandung as the best option to live. A good internet connection, water supply, electricity, some decent savings, and some English skills enable me to keep up with the rest of the world. My current plan is to sell all my excess possessions (easier said than done) and then move to Bali, where the white women are. Maybe the trick to being in purgatory is how willing you are to break out of it.