On Homecoming (and Leaving), Jakarta to New York

Scenario 1

I land in Jakarta just in time for Chinese New Year.

I can smell the cigarette smoke and rain before the plane even touches the tarmac; my body retrieves memories faster than my mind can process them. I move through Arrivals in an easy forward motion: smile as the immigration officer says Welcome home; flag down a baggage courier, tip him a green bill; rub off the chalk from the randomized Customs check. Relish the anxious fanfare of Arrivals, absorbing all that anticipation behind the railing as if it’s just for me.

It does feel directed at me, this honeyed reception. Everything is so familiar. The low-ceilinged terminal, the warm red beams. It’s like I’ve stepped into the grand, warm house of a wealthy relative, where noises and syllables click automatically into place. In America, I once heard a woman and her daughter speaking Bahasa in a museum bathroom and was filled with excitement, inexplicably magnetized to these strangers; by the time I’d pulled my pants up and exited the stall, they were gone, like hallucinations. Here, in the airport of my home country, Bahasa floods my ears. Its hard consonants rush through the grooves in my brain, bringing relief. It’s been ten years since I last lived here, and the city is as alive and legible as when I left.

I want them to witness the sheen of a prodigal niece radiant with success.

I’ve arrived on 年夜饭, and tonight there’s a reunion dinner on the top floor of a fancy South Jakarta mall. I’ve put on a red silk cheongsam top and Mary Jane heels, straightened my hair; I embody the adulthood I could only mimic when I last saw my father’s extended family. I’ve avoided their annual reunion for so many years.

No more. Now I’m a woman, and my bra fits just fine, and I’m not afraid of anyone. I want them to witness the sheen of a prodigal niece radiant with success.

I orbit the round tables and kiss my various uncles and aunts on the cheek, alternating between kiong hee huat chai and gong xi fa cai to demonstrate my command of Hokkien and Mandarin. Oldest Uncle, Second Oldest Uncle, Second Youngest Uncle’s Second Wife, Older Aunt’s Husband, hi, how are you, apa kabar, kiong hee, yes, it’s been so long! Yes, of course I speak Chinese, just like your sons and daughters. Of course I still remember my Bahasa. How could you claim me if I didn’t. I spent so many summers with these people. I sat on these laps, waved goodbye to these silhouettes out the car window until we were well down the street and out of sight. Princess Diana–style, my mother would call it, as infatuated with the British monarchy as any Southeast Asian woman her age. Youngest Aunt wraps my hair around her fingers, wonders aloud how I get it so thick and smooth, maybe that good American water. When Middle Oldest Uncle sees me, he pinches the bridge of my nose so it will grow tall and Caucasian, the way he did when I was little. I smile and take it how he means it, less as an indication of my deficits and more as nostalgic affection.

How silly I was to think that leaving home had fragmented my existence.

My cousins’ kids are no longer the unwieldy toddlers who spilled orange juice on my shoes and threw chopsticks at my head while their poor teenaged nannies chased after them. I’ve seen them come of age on Instagram, where my cousins regularly post them in their soccer jerseys or school-play regalia, and now here they are, with their multilingual conversation skills and their adolescent bashfulness. One of the younger cousins tells me about her gamelan lessons. I wonder how they see me—if they see my brand-name shoes and U.S. dollar–purchased confidence and desire my life the way I want theirs, the life I could have had if we’d never left.

At least at this dinner table I can pretend we never did leave, and what a successful job I do of it: I keep the chrysanthemum tea flowing; I spin the sea cucumber on the lazy Susan with one perfect push. I bask in the familial recognition. We don’t need to say anything profound; these people who share my natural underbite, my scoliosis, my inherited neuroses, will always understand me. How silly I was to think that leaving home had fragmented my existence.

Scenario 2

I land in Jakarta just in time for Chinese New Year.

I’ve been curled up in 34B on QR776 for the past 8 hours 55 minutes after a 4-hour layover in Doha and a 12-hour 25-minute flight from JFK. I knuckle out the stiffness in my neck, shake off the weird angles that my legs have contorted into. Soekarno-Hatta has the universal airport scent of disinfectant and air conditioning.

I weave through the terminal as I have so many times before, conscious of my lint-coated leggings, the zip-up that keeps slipping off my bare shoulder, the sleep lining my mouth. Only an American lets themself look this disheveled after an international flight. The Qataris glide past with their Rimowa carry-ons and flowing Dior hijabs; the Indonesians languidly adjust the time on their silver analog watches, text their drivers to pick them up at Arrivals.

It’s 年夜饭, reunion-dinner night, and my mother, who arrived in Jakarta a week earlier, picks me up from my hotel. I trail behind her into Plaza Senayan, and because I forgot to pack anything red, I’m wearing one of her cheongsam tops, which gapes around my armpits. We are late, having been caught in the trademark rainy-season traffic. It’s common in this city to be damp with sweat and rainwater at the same time. You look unironed, my mother tells me in the car, and she isn’t referring to the shirt.

We’re both nervous. My mother moved to my sister’s in Virginia after I left this city, so it’s been a while since either of us spent time with my father’s family. I’m jet-lagged across time zones and seasons, my internal weather entirely jolted. It’s breakfast time on the East Coast, and here, the sky has just started to darken.

They’re not bad people, your dad’s family, she reminds me in the elevator. Just selfish. They don’t know what it’s like to lack anything, to lose someone the way we have.

Picturing them over the years felt like painting my own face without looking in the mirror.

Rain is still thrumming on the roof. There are no windows in the private banquet room, we can only hear it fall. My eye loops around the two fourteen-seat tables that hold our party. I strain to calibrate faces with names. To further throw me off, there are new additions: sons-in-law and distant cousins I wholly forgot about. I know I am in fact their distant forgotten cousin, the one with bleached hair and soft American consonants and the ill-fitting shirt. Oldest Uncle, Second Oldest Uncle, Second Youngest Uncle’s Second Wife, Older Aunt’s Husband—my mother whispers each title in my ear, so I remember what to call them; their hands receive mine, limply.

Picturing them over the years felt like painting my own face without looking in the mirror. The eyes just slightly misshapen. The most memorable features made larger, almost comical. In my mind they were all so formidable. Now they are shrunken, their features sunken and weathered, a sad Indonesian Rushmore.

My mother goes to a corner to chitchat with Second Oldest Uncle’s Wife, the relative closest in age to her and the person she was closest to when we were kids. I feel a small flash of panic when she leaves me, like a child left in the grocery store. Wide-eyed Youngest Uncle’s Wife to my right keeps saying, Ten years, wow, ten years since you’ve been back. I parrot her: Yeah, it’s been a while, ten years, ten years, as charismatic as marooned kelp, forgetting how to express an original thought in this language I’ve turned away from. The faux shark-fin soups at our seats have coagulated; I push the jelly around with my spoon, jet lag still coating my stomach.

We’ve lost you to America, Middle-Oldest Uncle says, to my left. You can’t order bakmi there, or nasi padang. He looks genuinely appalled at this prospect, then pats his chest. Me, I’d starve.

No wonder you are skinny, says Youngest Uncle’s Wife, twisting the pearls on her fingers. What can you even eat there? Dry sandwiches. Ham and cheese, she says in English. Ham and cheese.

But it is better there, more advanced, Middle-Oldest Uncle says.

But so is Jakarta! says Youngest Uncle’s Wife, the conversation quickening over my head. We have an MRT, we have multiple LV stores.

Senayan looks like Orchard Street now.

So why send your boys to Australia then?

This is not an innocent question—it’s a jab at Youngest Uncle’s Wife’s spending tendencies, the closest to confrontational I’ve ever heard him. Sending kids abroad for school was frivolous, done for status. My parents left Indonesia during the May ’98 Jakarta Riots.

But they haven’t known how to look me in the eye since my father died. And once I moved away for good, there was no need for them to learn.

We lived in the Virginia suburbs for twelve years, and I’m sure my uncles thought that move was a gross extravagance too. It was unnecessary; they all left, but returned to Indonesia within the year. They were fine, they were safe; did my father think he was better than them, that his family deserved more?

At least, this is how my mother tells the story. Nobody else in this room has discussed the riots directly for as long as I’ve known them.

At most they’ll mutter before ’98 or after ’98 when comparing the cost of living or tariffs on foreign imports. They’ve metabolized the past in their bodies, tucked their emotions into neat boxes in their subconscious. I study all four uncles, ten years of gravity weighing their faces.

I see in them my father, genetic variations on a theme. In the underbite that pushes their jawlines forward. The pattern of their eye creases which become more defined with age. My uncles are the closest approximation I have to watching my father age. None of us mention him. My face also carries his features, reminds the others of things they’d rather not remember. The only tether I have to these people is the thing we pretend away.

I meander over to my younger cousins and ask in English about their school production of Annie. The cousins go to international school together; the boy teases the girl about being cast as Orphan #2, and she fires back that he was in Ensemble, he wasn’t exactly Daddy Warbucks. They bicker about who has the better English accent, then trade notes on the chorus of “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” while one of the aunties piles steamed fish on their plates.

Across the room, my mother is still chatting with Second Oldest Uncle’s Wife. They take turns smiling demurely at their food as the other speaks. This Uncle’s Wife, my mother has often complained to me, grew distant after my father’s death. They all grew distant, but Uncle’s Wife’s distance hurt her the most, likely because of the diverging trajectories of their lives. After three decades of being married in this family and raising kids at the same time, these were their respective fates: my parents sold our family home because we needed the money, and my uncle and his wife built a marble-floored home with an elevator in Senayan, one of Jakarta’s most elite neighborhoods. They lived with their kids and grandkids under a single roof. It was picturesque, the Chinese-Indonesian Dream, while my sisters and I were off chasing amorphous American ones. The moment my sister was accepted into her first-choice graduate program, she went to my aunt and uncle for a loan. Girls don’t need graduate school, Second Oldest Uncle said.

There was no malice in his voice, just regressive pragmatism. Maybe he was thinking about how much it would cost to send his grandkids to international school, or about the atrium they still needed to complete out back. All that school. What for?

Nobody in this room has wronged me personally. I am still invited to the table, where we make small talk about ham-and-cheese sandwiches. We do our best with the words we share, gingerly translating for one another in the ways we know how. But they haven’t known how to look me in the eye since my father died. And once I moved away for good, there was no need for them to learn.

I took their distance to be a personal failure; I needed to better my Chinese, to stop being so awkward. I thought they’d be impressed by my linguistic skills and my progress since puberty. I had fantasized about merging the timelines that splintered when my family left, but none of my personal improvements have accomplished much, not here. The Prosperity Salad comes and we each partake in the tossing ritual with our long chopsticks, mixing the joy and the abundance and the fortune, making a big auspicious mess on the table the way the waiter instructs us to.

Scenario 3

I land in Jakarta just in time for Chinese New Year.

My mind has shrouded the city in so many layers of nostalgia and speculation that I’ve forgotten the real thing. Instead I’ve woven warped memories to reconstruct Jakarta in my mind: an out-of-focus homeland, safely contained in a malleable past or an imagined future. Returning will mean puncturing the veil to see the city for what it really is.

Now the city lies directly below my seat. The plane cuts through the smog, lands on the tarmac. I trail my boyfriend, G., into the terminal.

This is not the airport of my childhood. The ceilings are high, everything is glass, and the corridors are expansive, hospital blue, heavily air-conditioned. When I approach Border Control I’m met with a gleaming row of automated stalls at which a vaguely Caucasian virtual officer curls his fingers, beckoning me to offer up my biometrics. At baggage claim there are no couriers, no chalk, just kiosks promoting rideshare apps, surrounded by LED images of cheetahs and elephants. The border officer and the cheetah and elephant belong to the same cinematic universe, somewhere in Uncanny Valley: government-sanctioned illustrations of a welcoming, light-skinned, tropical city. A hired guy waits at the railing with my boyfriend’s name on an iPad.

A free stay for both of us in my home city—the chance to show him where I come from would be important and meaningful for us both. Right?

It’s 年夜饭, reunion-dinner night. But I’m not here for that. I’ve come following G., a cinematographer who has a shoot in Jakarta for the week. My mother sold our house and moved in with my sister in Virginia years ago. My high school friends have also left Jakarta.

The irony that my white American boyfriend has more of a purpose here than I do isn’t lost on me. We both laughed when he got the hold on his calendar; how funny, the idea of us going to Jakarta, the place I was always telling him about, how cute that would be, until he actually booked the job and turned to me with an expectant eagerness. A free stay for both of us in my home city—the chance to show him where I come from would be important and meaningful for us both. Right?

Instead, I countered with excuses like It’s rainy season. And It feels kinda weird. And Honestly, Bali in June would be more fun. None of these points sufficiently convincing, I followed him to Jakarta. I didn’t inform my father’s family. We drive through the polished streets of Senayan, past malls with 年夜饭 dinner promotions plastered outside in red and gold.

In the hotel, the staff works to figure out whether I’m a local. My cropped tank and stray bra straps read as foreign, and when some of them speak to me in heavily accented English, asking if I’ve tried the local cuisine, I play along, nodding and smiling and saying I love it so far. This locks us into a funny English-speaking dance. For the rest of the week I try to maintain character consistency, keeping track of who I’ve spoken with and in which language. That night, probably while my aunts and uncles are crooning Kiong Hee and spooning slabs of abalone onto each other’s plates, we order takeout from Café Betawi and slurp sweet-and-sour noodles from plastic containers while huddled over our room’s marble coffee table, a forgettable TV show playing on his laptop.

I’ve hovered over my cousins’ kids’ soccer matches and birthdays on Instagram for years, a virtual ghoul. Sometimes I like the posts.

Sometimes I even swipe up and send a little confetti emoji into the ether—a tribute to the ancestors, like when we lit incense at the temple to mourn our grandmother, only festive. I can’t bring myself to meet with my father’s family, can’t save face when my face might betray my emotions.

It rains every day, a familiar tropical comfort, but the skyline is altered, the stores have changed, there are no longer panhandlers at the stoplights. Coming back here is like returning to your apartment to find the furniture rearranged, a weird smell in the kitchen, receipts and wrappers scattered on the dining table. Detritus that feels gross only because it’s not your detritus.

G. has the first few days off. We spend them circling our fancy South Jakarta hotel, through a walkable neighborhood laid with cobblestones and lined with food carts. I point to signs and tell him what they mean, trying to make myself useful, trying to establish my cultural authority. But the first shop we walk into won’t take my credit card; the clerk asks for my QR code instead. I don’t have a bank account that can be linked to one.

Baru pulang dari luar negeri, I say: Just came home from abroad. It’s the least awkward phrasing, to my clumsy ear. Pulang means to come home. Why did I say home? I strain against the words even as I say them. The clerk doesn’t notice or care about these hang-ups; she chirpily instructs me where to withdraw cash.

G. asks me to show him my home city. I say, Okay, then take him to fancy restaurants where appetizers are served inside flower-adorned coconuts. I take him to shopping centers that feel like the insides of a snow globe, to foreigner-friendly, air-conditioned pockets of the city that would’ve taken an hour to get to from where I grew up in North Jakarta. I don’t take him to our old neighborhood, Kayu Putih, or to the swimming pool where I learned breaststroke.

I don’t take him to Glodok, the Chinatown my father grew up in, where storefronts are still boarded and sealed, dripping with telephone wires and memories of the riots. Instinctively I’ve sanitized our experience, removed any sentiment, ignored any part of the city that’s personal. We hop from bubble to bubble, two foreigners in a city of Laneige lip balm billboards and MRT overpasses and green-jacketed rideshare motorcyclists.

I wonder how many of these memories are real, and how much I’ve unwittingly fabricated.

G. begins to leave for work at sunrise each day. I wake up late and lie around the hotel room. When I tire of that, I take a motorcycle taxi to one of the snow-globe malls we visited a few days ago. The mall is lined with red lanterns and photo stations for Chinese New Year. I think I see Oldest Uncle’s Wife tottering out of the hair salon, but it’s just another lady with a tumbleweed blowout.

That night in the hotel room, G. shows me a few raw clips he shot today. He’s working on an ad for a major Indonesian conglomerate whose name I’d seen all over billboards as a kid, but whose purpose and products were always left vague. The ad, too, is vague, though inspirational: a guitarist works his way up from busking to rock stardom, as he leaps onto a concert stage for a final epic solo.

I scroll back to the busking scene, an extended aerial timelapse of Jakarta pedestrians ignoring the guitarist. I’m trying to discern which street they’re on—it looks like the street outside my old middle school. The median stretches for the same length, the storefront looks similar to the convenience store near there. But the street is cleaner, the stripes on the road are freshly painted. Golden hour falls on the pavement at an unfamiliar angle, unusually exquisite. G. shakes his head. It’s a set. He shows me a behind-the-scenes shot of massive cranes shooting light onto a fake street. They’ve constructed an entire segment of city, one so convincing I’d believed it to be real. How else could we get that warm afternoon light? It’s been raining all day.

In the shower I think of childhood summers spent pouring Dettol disinfectant over my body, the smell of hospital clinging to my skin as I fell asleep, my hair still wet; I recall the buzz of fluorescent light and the clumsy flap of winged termites, the smell of fresh soursop sliced open in the kitchen. A familial clasp around my wrist. Soggy shoes in the wet market. Smoke-tinted karaoke rooms. Megaphone mosque prayers swimming through humidity. The water quality has improved since then, we don’t need the Dettol anymore.

Did we ever, or was that just a quirk of my parents? I wonder how many of these memories are real, and how much I’ve unwittingly fabricated.

Memory is perishable. Each time I open the bag, air gets in and my memory stales a little. I’ve stuck my hand in too many times, have confused my childhood with all the homecomings I’ve imagined. This place, these people—they’ve all changed too much to corroborate anything. You can’t be homesick for a place that no longer exists. Nostalgic at best. Here again, in the city I thought was mine, I hold my jumbled memories up to the light; the reality bears no resemblance.

I climb into our hotel bed, my hair still wet, and G. and I watch another sitcom on his laptop. We could be anywhere in the world.

Before falling asleep, I think I hear the call to prayer beyond our windows. No, it’s just the air conditioner running.

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From “Homecoming.” Used with the permission of the publisher, AGNI. Copyright © 2026 by May Teng