‘Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in fine gay colours that are but skin–deep.’
(Mathew Henry 1662-1714)

We all have it. Everyone’s is different. It holds us together, it protects us, and the miniscule differences in pigmentation cause no end of trouble around the world today.

We call it ‘skin’, the Indonesians call it ‘kulit’, pronounced ‘cool-it’ as in ‘relax, don’t get heated, man’. So, what do people think about the divisive subject of ‘skin’ here in Jakarta?

This is what I found out:

Indonesian attitudes towards skin are simple, almost unexplainably simple. In other words, they are not able, or are reticent, to tell me why they think dark skin is ‘bad’. Oh, but it is ‘bad’, everyone knows this for a ‘fact’. The argument goes something like this: if you have dark skin it means you work outside. If you work outside it means you’ve got a crap job. If you’ve got a crap job here it means you are very poor indeed, probably living on or below the poverty line. And if you live there then death and degradation are a-scratching at your door….if you’re lucky enough to have a door that is. Next time you spend a day at the pool check out your fellow swimmers. Between 10 a.m. and sundown you will have only mad dogs and Englishmen for company. After that the vampires come out followed by the rest of Jakartan society. Why? Simple. Social status. People with money want to look different from those without it, with or without their clothes on – and staying out of the sun is one way to do it.
Light skin on the other hand is considered good; ask any of your Sundanese friends. It’s a sign of health, wealth, and beauty. We’ve all seen local women in the street, a 10 second burst of ultra-violet radiation (the phenomenon we call sunshine) has them reaching like twitchy fingered gun fighters for umbrellas, magazines, bags, anything to prevent the sun from burning through their ‘uv’-enhanced make-up and reaching their sensitive, apparently react-a-light faces. It’s like watching the ‘duck and cover’ instruction film in colour, ‘Agghhh!! Run for your lives! The sun’s coming out!’ Radiation suits have yet to be seen on the catwalks of Indonesia, thank goodness, but perhaps it’s only a matter of time. But, then again, if you have the lucre you really don’t need to go outside anyway.

Can we blame the women for indulging in this public display of mass hysteria or ‘colour-psychosis’? I don’t think so. How many of the local male population prefer ‘hitam manis’ to ‘putih bagus’? Not many. Watch terrestrial television for half an hour on any given day. Now think back. How many of the 600 adverts you’ve just been bombarded with played some kind of colour bias card, used gorgeous white/Indo models, or pushed products sponsored by the multi-million dollar skin lightening/whitening industry? Quite a few, I’ll wager.

Here is the most common scenario: Beautiful black Barbie coyly parades her ample booty in front of wealthy, clean-cut, café latte Ken. However, Ken is blind to her charms (he must be gay we think). She’s like an ebony statue beheld at the height of an eclipse. She‘s an interest vacuum, like a black hole sucking in dark matter. She’s almost invisible and quickly forgotten. But wait, after 3-4 weeks of ‘Honky-Cream’, Barbie has bleached some of the grime out of her skin. Ken’s interest is aroused. ‘Where did she come from?’ we see him thinking, ‘she’s pretty hot, how come I never noticed her before? She must be new. If only she were white enough to be seen with in public.’ After 8-10 weeks, Barbie is so white she’s in the running for Miss Scandinavia and Ken is ready to introduce her to his mommy. I’m still waiting for the ad that runs on another 20 seconds and we see white Barbie turn to Ken and say ‘Ugh! Piss off!’ before sliding into the back seat of her newer, lighter boyfriend’s limo.

Bule or Western attitudes are at first glance the polar opposite of Indonesian attitudes. Not historically but certainly today, dark skin, or at least tanned skin, is thought to be desirable. We associate the tan with wealth though not super wealth but rather nouveau riche arriviste wealth, leisure time, foreign holidays, and overpaid celebs. We refer to a person’s healthy or ruddy complexion. ‘They’ve got a bit of colour in their cheeks’ my mum’s generation would say admiringly of a recovering invalid. To create sexual tension our romantic authors would often look towards the hot blood and the olive skin of the Mediterranean races. The tall, handsome stranger is not dark by accident and don’t forget, Emily Bronte’s romantic Heathcliff was ‘a dark skinned gypsy in aspect’.

So, fair or pale skin is deemed less desirable. We say, ‘he was as white as a ghost’, or ‘she had turned deathly pale’. Our pale skin, our pasty, pallid complexions show every blemish and highlight all the signs of age. We find only disease, death, and poverty in our whiteness. Hence the universal bule desire to loll around in the sunshine. Except in Australia, where the descendants of Celtic sheep rustlers now know they are lying on the planets biggest BBQ and, if the skin cancer statistics are to be believed, are coming off second best. Down Under, attempting to get a tan nowadays equates with not wearing a condom at an orgy or shooting heroin with a needle you found on the way home from the pub. Now Australians are painting themselves with liquid zinc before they go anywhere near the beach.

Here in Indonesia you can never hide your bule credentials. You will always be a target for over-charging, for the rip-off merchants, and for beggars who think your pockets are lined with gold. Ever been spotted in a taxi at the traffic lights and had all the beggars swarm en masse to your window like bees to the honey pot? However, there are also distinct and powerful advantages to being fair in a country that applauds fair skin.

Skin bias has a very strong affect on newcomers to the city. It’s a little taste of what it must be like to be famous. There’s an energy to it and you feel the buzz – everyone pointing, laughing and staring and following you around the shops. You can’t walk anywhere without people trying to engage you in conversation, and all to a chorus of ‘Hello Mister!’ How extraordinary it is to be asked to pose for a photograph with total strangers in the mall or in the park, just like you’d do with real celebrities. At least when my photos are developed I can say ‘look, that’s the day I met J-Lo at Heathrow.’ What do they say when they get their photos back?

The euphoria of new fame (which soon wears thin if you enjoy privacy) is often accompanied by strong feelings of guilt. The first-time traveler, the naïve tourist and the young businessman come freshly cut from the predominantly democratic, politically correct, somewhat green fields of their host nations. Trumpets blow for liberty, fraternity and equality for all races and creeds, and any racial bias is strictly regulated by law. Rampant political correctness has even driven the humor underground. How strange it is then, to arrive in a country and be elevated to a position above your normal station for doing nothing more than being pale.

The old hands have learnt to accept these unwarranted benefits as a form of compensation. If one morning you get ripped off for 3 bottles of water, nevermind – in the afternoon you get to swim at a Sports Club you’re not a member of. Nobody challenges you because you’re wearing your membership all over your body. So a balance is achieved over time.

And of course the clincher, the greatest compensation known to man or woman, bule or bulette, the reason most old hands are old hands, the one some keep coming back for is, for want of a better term (!), romance. No amount of ‘Hello Misters’ will put you off. Any amount of intrusiveness (the downside of fame) can be handled, when you’re punching above your weight at the sexual Olympics. Fame is sexy after all. Bule men and women carry the exoticism of rare gems. People think they’re good to look at and worth a lot of money (although those bules who keep their heads would know the former is not necessarily true and the latter is extremely relative). And the exoticism is reciprocated in spades; for bules, these shades of olive/chocolate are seen as smooth and unblemished and there’s always, as with the Indonesians, that sense of vive la difference.

Human nature is hard to fathom especially when it comes to something as ordinary as skin. Is it just a case of just wanting what we don’t have or is it somehow deeper and perhaps darker. The irony is that with both groups trying to control the shade of their skin, they could end up looking exactly the same.

Kevin says he doesn’t know if he would follow his wife again because he doesn’t know if, after Jakarta, she would want him on the next move. His job in Ethiopia ended suddenly but his wife’s company had an opening in Jakarta so he followed her. The first six months he settled the house and negotiated all the pitfalls of domesticity; hiring and firing drivers, setting up the parameters for privacy when servants were in the house and getting his children established in school. He found work in Bali helping the recovery efforts but the contract was short-lived; he was let go by his company when he asked for a few days leave at Christmas. Another job search yielded substitute teaching at an international school. He didn’t find the work satisfying and he ended up spending time drinking coffee and working out. Because of family needs for two incomes, he returned to the States to a full-time job. Now he sees his family just a few times a year and wonders at the wisdom of the move.

Zane found the same substitute-teaching job at the same international school and discovered that he had found his passion. He is pursing an on-line master’s degree program in education now and is eager to teach when he can. He’s very happy here, when he isn’t teaching he trains for marathons and climbs mountains on solo expeditions. He doesn’t mind being alone and has found other men envy his role His European and American friends often say “How did you get so lucky?’ Still, at cocktail parties, he likes to tweak people and tells them that he is here as a dancer. If they turn away, he dismisses them. If they seem curious, he tells them that he is a “kept man”. If that doesn’t put them off, he is happy to go into the details of his life here.

Harry doesn’t have good luck at cocktail parties. He often senses people think he’s a bum or that he must be incompetent, because if he were worthy, his wife would be following him. The irony is that even though he sacrificed a “career”, he has usually worked in his field wherever they have moved. He has even increased his salary; despite the fact he has also taken on managing the household accounts and doing significant amounts of childcare. The sense of disrespect is particularly bitter because he made a conscious decision to sacrifice his own work in order to promote his wife’s advancement. They had met overseas and decided they wanted to continue international careers, in the last six years he has followed his wife to Haiti and Jakarta. He plans on following her again, wherever she goes, because that’s his game plan and he is sticking with it.

Doug, an expert bridge player, adapted to Jakarta via the card circuit. Playing with expatriate women whose skill in gossiping exceeded their skill in bidding wasn’t much fun, but being the only foreigner in a room of 100 fantastic Indonesian bridge players was a unique experience. In fact his only painful experience in Jakarta was dealing with servants, as the notion of having servants was repulsive to him. It disturbed him enough that although he is willing to keep following his wife, he’s added the criterion of ‘no servants’ to the country selection list.