Dada 30

‘You studied before you let everything go and came to work here’ he says.

He wants to know if I`d be interested in going there to work. It would mean I could live in KL and also travel part of the year all over Australasia doing fish and other marine business.

‘It’s a very dynamic industry he said.  “You’re young and it seems to me it might be the kind of life you`d enjoy!”

 I said ‘yes it’s true, but that, actually, I didn’t care one way or the other. I liked it around here on our own island.’

Then he asked me if whether I would be interested in changing my life. I replied that you can never really change your life and that, in any case, every life was more or less that same and that my life here wasn’t all that bad. He didn’t look pleased and told me I could never give a straight answer to anything.  I had no ambition and that this was disastrous in business, especially one so quickly changing as this one where quotas move fast from year to year and island to island amongst the greater and lesser Sunda’s.

I carried on working. I did not want to upset him, but I could see no reason to change my life. After giving it serious thought, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I was very ambitious about having a career especially to please my father. But when that business with Dada came about, I didn’t want to continue with my studies. I realized soon that none of that sort of stuff mattered very much especially when you talk about identity and what it means to have it taken away. Pirates do not care about that , traitors neither; they have neither country nor nation. They are in between people. People who live on the land only want to measure their days by the sun.