Although I have a washing machine at home, and do use it for socks and underwear and stuff like jeans and shorts and tank tops and tee shirts, I take my better pants and shirts up the street to the laundry where they can be washed and dried and ironed, and all for a very low price. My expectation for the other clothing is that it will more or less iron itself while it is on me. But drying clothing in the equatorial sun tends to be hard on the fabric, and so I try to save my nicer clothes from such treatment, which seems to me a cost-effective measure.
In any case, when I walked up this morning to drop my clothing at the laundry, a new girl was working up front in the laundry. She had a question about the clothing or the price, so she dashed back to the rear area to ask the regular girl.
"Who is it?" the regular girl asked.
"It's a bule," the new girl answered. In other words, it's a white guy.
Now this seems both perfectly natural and strangely jarring to me--a manifestation of the clash between my well learned western sensibilities (aka, political correctness) and plain common sense. Of course she has instantly identified me as 'the white guy'. What better way to indicate identity in all brown Renon, Bali, Indonesia?
But in America, when faced with the same question, we would be slow to blurt out 'It's a black guy' or 'It's an Asian guy', because we have been told that we are not supposed to identify people according to their color. How, then, do we go about answering a simple question without so bluntly categorizing another person? And why, really, must we in cases where this would quite simply be the simplest, most direct route? In Indonesia, there is nothing that typifies me more immediately than my skin color. Therefore, I am not offended at all. I am, after all, white, while the rest of the neighborhood is not.
We have in some ways, at the extent of our desire to be correct, become quite needlessly less than direct.
In any case, when I walked up this morning to drop my clothing at the laundry, a new girl was working up front in the laundry. She had a question about the clothing or the price, so she dashed back to the rear area to ask the regular girl.
"Who is it?" the regular girl asked.
"It's a bule," the new girl answered. In other words, it's a white guy.
Now this seems both perfectly natural and strangely jarring to me--a manifestation of the clash between my well learned western sensibilities (aka, political correctness) and plain common sense. Of course she has instantly identified me as 'the white guy'. What better way to indicate identity in all brown Renon, Bali, Indonesia?
But in America, when faced with the same question, we would be slow to blurt out 'It's a black guy' or 'It's an Asian guy', because we have been told that we are not supposed to identify people according to their color. How, then, do we go about answering a simple question without so bluntly categorizing another person? And why, really, must we in cases where this would quite simply be the simplest, most direct route? In Indonesia, there is nothing that typifies me more immediately than my skin color. Therefore, I am not offended at all. I am, after all, white, while the rest of the neighborhood is not.
We have in some ways, at the extent of our desire to be correct, become quite needlessly less than direct.
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