We were cruising on the boat from our basecamp to the island of sun, sand, and wooden houses. It was 30 minutes of ocean breeze whipping my ponytail around and cool seawater spraying a fine mist on my face. My palms bead with sweat, not from the 40oC heat and humidity, but from one lingering question: will she remember me?
We’d passed several islands along the way, tufts of lush green sprouting in the middle of a wavy dark blue garden. As our boat chugged along closer to our destination, I scanned the faces of the friends I came with—it was a high school trip with the objective to bring students out of the four walls of our school and serve the community. This particular trip took us a two-hour flight and a couple of boat rides away from our classrooms in Bandung to the Riau Islands. Four of us had been here the year prior, and we were eager to see the friends we’d made. But the question remains: will they remember us?
Our captain guided our boat to a concrete jetty. From afar, it seemed to be swarming with ants, little specks of black silhouetted against the equatorial sun. We heard their shouts before we could even see them. As the boat entered the pier-shaped shade, we started to make out the faces smiling down at us. Some were gap-toothed smiles of youths waiting for new teeth to grow in, while others were older and wiser, with wrinkles framing their lips. As we waited to dock, I searched from one face to the next. My friends already started waving and laughing in relief, as the kids shouted their names in recognition.
Where is she? Did she leave the island?
I pushed my thoughts aside as we grabbed our backpacks and climbed onto the jetty. Immediately, we were swarmed by children as hands started clutching at our fingers and clothes, hugging familiar friends we met the year before. I laughed. We were just high schoolers, but we were being treated like celebrities—truly a warm Indonesian island welcome.
We were halfway down the jetty when I finally saw her. Our eyes locked, and Yopi sprinted straight toward me, parting the sea of villagers in her way. Her 10-year-old hand found mine as if no time had passed. Later, those same hands would shyly press a polaroid of herself into my palm, a token of her world I would carry far beyond the Riau Islands. But in that moment, her simple joy showed me a homecoming I had not known in my own country. She remembered me. And with that, she unknowingly planted a seed that would grow into a desire to give back to the place I had once wanted to leave behind.
*****
Four years later, that same polaroid sits snugly within the pages of my journal, trying to shield it from the effects of constant wear and tear. But even now the white border has started to yellow, and the date I wrote has faded… March 2018.
It’s March 2022, and I’m sitting in the 2-bedroom apartment I share with my college friend in America. With my degree in hand and my student visa expiring, I’m faced with a choice. Stay, find a job, and hope I secure a work visa to build a life here—the land of opportunities. Or go home, back to Indonesia—a country that, historically, had not accepted people who looked like me.
As a Chinese-Indonesian, I had grown up feeling like a stranger in my own birth country. I remember having to fill out forms and asking my parents if I should tick “Chinese” or “Indonesian” as my nationality. I was born and raised in Indonesia, so were my parents, and so were my parents’ parents. We speak some Mandarin, but not fluently, and we never speak it at home. In fact, my parents speak more Sundanese (the Indonesian dialect of West Java) than Mandarin. The relationships between the Chinese and Indonesians are historically and politically far and complex, leaving many Chinese-Indonesians generations later in a sort of limbo. I love Indonesia. I love how rich and beautiful and kind it is. But I’m always hesitant to call Indonesia my country, because I know there was a time when many Indonesians wouldn’t like hearing that kind of sentiment from someone of Chinese descent.
I’d always imagined myself settling down abroad. Anytime anyone would ask where I want to work and live, I’d always respond with indignation: not Indonesia, that’s for sure. I wanted to live somewhere where my identity wouldn’t be shadowed by the complicated history of being Chinese-Indonesian. Somewhere, I could simply be a foreigner, not the kind marked as foreign despite being born and raised there. Not the kind whose family had lived there for four generations, yet was still treated as if they didn’t belong.
But the 9x11cm yellowing polaroid reminded me of a time when my heart yearned to be in Indonesia, immersed in the community and way of life there. That maybe there really is a place for me at home—the one place where belonging should have come easily, but it never did for me.
*****
I didn’t know what to expect from that first visit to the Riau Islands in March 2017. But as the boat slid past stilt houses and children’s laughter spilt across the water, I realised I was stepping into another world—one that would unsettle more than just my muscles or my comfort without running water.
The air smelled of salt, thick with the brine of drying fish along the jetty. Over it all rang laughter, bare feet kicking up sand as children chased a plastic soccer ball from one end to another.
“Lompat! Lompat!” the kids shouted, and I bent my knees to jump—only to watch them sprint off laughing. Lompat means “run” here, not “jump.” All I could do was laugh, forgetting they spoke Melayu here, and chase after their small, fast legs.
It was in this sea of village children that I met Yopi. She was quiet, with her hair always pulled into a tight ponytail—never a flyaway in sight. She often avoided the games under the hot sun, preferring to sit with me in the shade, tracing shapes in the sand. That first day, she quietly slipped her hand into mine, deciding I was hers for the rest of the trip. But the truth is, I needed her just as much. Her 10-year-old hands offered me belonging in a place where I felt like an outsider, and in return, I think she found someone who saw her quietness not as shyness to be fixed, but as something familiar, something I understood.
When the kids were in school, we set off to work: laying a safe path to the well, the village’s only source of fresh water. The men hauled rocks and buckets of water, while the women and children passed sand along the relay line. Sweat mixed with dirt and cement as we worked under the equatorial sun. It wasn’t just our team of twelve; the whole village was there. We came here to help them, but they ended up teaching us: how to mix cement, how to haul rocks, sand and water, how to move in rhythm with the line. We weren’t the ones leading the work, simply joining theirs. And they seemed glad we had travelled across the ocean to put our hands to something that mattered to them. It was a true Indonesian gotong royong in motion, carrying each other’s burdens, both tangible and intangible.
Each day, we’d come back to the families who so kindly opened their homes to us with sunburnt faces and sore muscles. Although island living is slow (with naps highly encouraged), we never seemed to stop moving; whether that’s to mix cement and move them down the relay line, or playing with the kids, saying yes to every game they wanted to play—do mi ka do, duck duck goose, sepak takraw, even volleyball.
Meals were their own kind of celebration. Breakfast and lunch were filled with roti prata kari and ikan bilis (anchovies), which the villagers dried themselves. But dinner was always a seafood feast: boiled gonggong (sea snails) pried out with toothpicks and squid cooked in its own ink, making our tongues and teeth black as we laughed around the circle. Tambah lagi, tambah lagi—add more—they urged, even when our bellies ached. We ate with our hands, right hands only because giving and receiving with the left hand is considered rude in Indonesian culture. Rice with soup missed my mouth entirely, until they laughed and showed me how to cup my fingers into the curve of a spoon. Each meal wasn’t just an invitation to replenish our hunger, but to be an even deeper part of their culture and lifestyle.
In their laughter at our struggle was warmth, the kind that said we were worth feeding, worth welcoming. They didn’t need us to fix anything—though we were happy to—they simply wanted us to sit on the floor with them, eat with our hands, play with their children, share our stories from our very different worlds, and simply, be a part of their lives for a while.
That sense of shared life carried into everything, even in moments we normally keep private… like bath times. That first day, the women taught us how to wrap our batik sarong around our bodies so that they won’t slip, then shooed us with buckets towards the well. We shyly made the walk across the village to the well, praying we wouldn’t pass the boys from our team.
The stone structure felt impossibly simple, the water far down below. My friends and I hesitated, suddenly unsure what to do, where to stand, where even to rest our eyes. We weren’t supposed to see each other like this—teachers and classmates I usually passed fully clothed now stood with only thin sarongs, damp and exposed. I stared at the ground, anywhere but at a body.
Our leaders laughed, practised from years of bringing students here, and showed us how to toss the bucket, let it tilt sideways by the rope, then pull slowly so the water didn’t spill.
“So, who’s first?” our leaders asked.
With only two buckets, we had no choice but to take turns. I awkwardly let the cool water spill against my skin while my peers stood nearby. By the second day, our hesitation faded into a comfortable rhythm, handing each other buckets and rinsing soap from each other’s hair and backs. Showering—something meant to be private—became its own kind of gotong royong, a practice in patience, humility, and skill. By the end of our three nights, I was convinced there was no better way to shower: fresh well water under the open sky, friends beside me, labour and laughter mingling like the suds we washed away.
Those simple acts of playing, eating, working, and showering showed me what life here was built on: give and take, patience and trust. We gave them a road, some English lessons, and three days of games and stories. But they gave me something I couldn’t quite yet name—a new appreciation for the Indonesian way of life and an unexpected belonging.
That’s what made leaving so hard. Packing up meant saying goodbye, not just to Yopi and our host families, but to a village that had let me in and let me belong in their world, if only for a while. We were twelve high-schoolers who brought our presence, our time, our hands for the work they needed; they selflessly gave us their trust, their joy, and a warm kind of welcome you’d only expect from family. As the motor sputtered and the jetty blurred into the horizon, I realised I didn’t expect this place to stay with me after I left. But it did—longer than my tan.
*****
A year later, I was back on that same jetty, the wood still warm underfoot, the air thick with salt and sun. Not much had changed—except the kids, a little taller now, their lopsided smiles and shouts of welcome as bright as before. Slipping into the old rhythm felt natural: wake, eat, work, play, shower, rest. The village embraced us with open arms—warmer, perhaps, because some of us had returned.
When their faces lit up in recognition, voices calling my name as if no time had passed, it caught me off guard. Their eyes sparkled with the kind of joy that asks nothing in return, and it moved something in me I hadn’t known I was longing for. Like Yopi slipping her hand into mine after a year apart, it was a sense of welcome I had never truly felt in my own country.
That day, Yopi, with a crowd of kids at our heels, pulled at my hand and led me to the path we built for the village last year. She pointed down, lihat lihat! (look look!), and there, slightly worn with time, was my name etched in cement. Our group wrote our names there the year before, as a sort of keepsake, hoping the community would remember our time together—the gotong royong that took place over a course of three nights. But my heart warmed to think that our names also meant something else to these kids. That an odd bunch of foreigners would come to their island and immerse themselves in their way of life.
And the next day, as if to make sure I wouldn’t forget, Yopi pressed a polaroid into my hand with a grin that stretched from cheek to cheek. Her face—captured in a frozen 9x11cm frame of time—was both playful and shyly insistent: Don’t forget me. I slipped it into my pocket, treasuring it as a keepsake of the friend I made on this trip, but later I realised it became much more than that: a tether, pulling me back toward a country I once wanted to escape. In her smile, I saw a reminder that belonging wasn’t about being accepted by the whole nation, but about the quieter bonds I’ve created with communities I’ve found within the country. The island communities we visited the last couple of years showed me the kindness and acceptance that was possible, if we just showed up and met them where they were.
For Yopi, though, I’d like to imagine our exchange meant something different. She longed to step beyond her island, to chase the wider world that I had already seen. In giving me her photo, she was sending herself outward—her face crossing the waters she might never cross… But I truly hope she did.
Our longings mirrored each other: I yearned to root myself more deeply in the soil of home, and she yearned to lift herself out of it. That little piece of glossy paper held both dreams at once, folded together in its white frame.
The day we said goodbye, tears flowed from my face uncontrollably. I was a senior in high school, and the four of us who were here for the second time knew that this was probably our last visit. Yopi’s grip on my hand was as tight as mine on hers; the tears in her eyes mirroring my own. It wasn’t a see-you-again type of goodbye… it was forever. I could only hug the kids tight, squeeze Yopi’s hand one last time, and hope the village knew how much their kindness and welcome meant to me—how it would change the course of my heart and dreams.
*****
I went to bed crying that night—the night I decided my time in America was over. Tears streamed down my face, wetting my pillow, while a guy played saxophone in the quiet Downtown Crossing below. Each time I thought my tears were spent, old dreams rose again: New York offices, white picket fences, an American life.
But then, as if my soul knew I needed a reminder, a memory from high school graduation came vibrantly to my mind:
What do you want to do for work in the future? It seemed like everyone was asking me that, even though I haven’t even started university yet…
And although I didn’t know how or what it would look like exactly, at that time, I responded: It would be nice if I could do for others what the Riau Islands trip did for me. To serve the needs of my home country. Reach out to the small, almost forgotten, communities and help them in whatever way possible.
I’d forgotten that, after my second trip to the Riau Islands, it was once my dream to serve Indonesia. It seemed that four years of university in a foreign country diluted that passion, in the same way that it wore away the colours of the polaroid Yopi gifted me years before.
*****
I leave my room and take the one-minute walk to my office, pausing shortly to admire the shimmering aqua blue of the ocean. I’ve been here two years, and the view still takes my breath away. Raja Ampat is often called the World’s Last Paradise, and it truly is my paradise—a dream come true. A job that allows me to get creative, use my degree, and mesh it with my other passions: photography, nature, and conservation. And most importantly, I’m home.
I had feared how the Papuans here would receive me, a Chinese-Indonesian. But like the Riau Islands, I was welcomed—with wide smiles, loud jokes, and quiet acts of kindness. Different dialects, new comedic misunderstandings—but never rejection.
I fell in love with Indonesia in the Riau Islands, where, in its remotest corners, I experienced the truest form of community. And I continue to see it here in Raja Ampat: community meals, random outbursts of song and dance, and ties so deep you can count on a whole village standing behind you. And the kids are no different: endless energy and capacity to grow. I had the honour of watching 10 young students graduate from elementary school this past year, a school the company I work for helped to build. That was the seed Yopi planted in me, and it’s come to fruition here: the chance to be a part of—no matter how small—serving the future generation of young Indonesians who call this place home.
I owe it all to Yopi and her pure love and kindness, which, for the first time, made me feel truly welcomed in my country… and want to come back.
The polaroid still sits in my journal, reminding me where and how all this started. I don’t know if Yopi still remembers me… but I know I’ll never forget her. Her 10-year-old hand slipped into mine on a sunlit jetty in March—and in that simple act, she gave me back a home I never thought I’d claim.
