Interview with Justin Bong Williams
Introduction
I decided to interview my close friend from home, Justin Bong Williams, who was born and raised under Indonesian culture. I texted him as soon as I learned about this project, and he was more than willing to tell me his story as an immigrant who had been living two separate lives in America since he was little. I decided to obtain a microphone from carrier library and conduct the interview in person with Justin because I felt that this would make for a more comfortable environment. It’s important to note that I amplified the audio because the interviewee was too quiet to hear in some sections that I found were important for the interview. I also included a lot of the filler words in the transcript and audio because I felt that this made it natural; not all conversations are perfect and I think that including them was better for capturing the responses from Justin and I.
Justin Bong Williams is a 21-year-old who was born in Indonesia up until the age of 3. While he doesn’t fully remember those early years of his life, he has been traveling to and from the United States and Indonesia every year since. Justin even talked about how he moved back for some time in our interview, and even how his mom got him involved in Indonesian embassy-sponsored programs here in Virginia. While he doesn’t have extensive experience, I still knew we could have a lengthy conversation about his mix of two cultures which could make me more aware of immigrant life in America. Furthermore, I knew that interviewing him as a friend would allow for a good conversation, where I could interview someone who would be comfortable with telling their complete experiences. I was interested in interviewing his mother, but she was visiting family back in Indonesia for a 3-month period. I learned many things about my friend that I would never have known without doing this project, and I’m excited to reveal his story and the things I learned regarding immigration in the paragraphs below.
Analysis
I found myself able to associate many concepts that we learned in class about immigration with Justin’s mixture of lifestyles both in Indonesia and here in the United States. I think the most important aspect of immigration to take away from the interview is the concept of assimilation. Assimilation is best defined as the notion whereby on entering a new country, that immigrant groups are encouraged through social and cultural practices and/or political views, to adopt the culture, norms, values, and social behaviors of the host nation in order to benefit from full citizenship status. I’ve found that Justin’s story relates to some of the stages of assimilation noted by Milton Gordon such as acculturation, marital, attitude reception, and behavior reception. While Justin moved to the states at a very young age, he was born to an American father and an Indonesian mother, both of which carried different social and cultural values and behaviors. The first portion of the interview discusses the intermarriage of his parents which influenced his ability to adjust to the American lifestyle, with a mixture of him and his mother’s culture as well. While we talked about how his family had a nanny, a personal driver, and owned a restaurant in the village of Bangka, he has certainly accommodated a much different lifestyle over here than in Indonesia. Justin took special classes to learn English (as a second language) which he now speaks more of than Bahasa, and his Indonesian culture has also been diminished by American music, food, clothes, religion, and his social behaviors. While he said his family ate Indonesian food growing up and that he speaks Bahasa with his family at home, becoming older has assimilated him to our culture; “I did Indonesian school all the way until um, I think like mid-high school, maybe, I stopped in like 10th grade”.
Justin also stated many things about the strength of his ethnic community and the impact of government programs within the DC area which acted as an opportunity structure for his immigrant family. While his mother moved to northern Virginia because of her marriage, I can’t imagine she didn’t think about the context of reception before bringing her kids. The area is a melting pot, with pre-existing and strong ethnic relations of Indonesian families and institutions. He first discussed a program called “class Bahasa” which was sponsored by the Indonesian embassy and taught kids the language and culture, mostly for those moving back to their home country, but also for those whose parents didn’t want them to forget where they came from. I thought it was very cool how much appreciated his birth country’s culture; “Because it was not only a language school, they were big on teaching all of the Indonesian culture to the kids here because Indonesian culture is very rich and Indonesian people are incredibly proud of it”. Justin established a memory he had of his age group playing a traditional bamboo instrument in front of the first lady of Indonesia at a concert. One big thing we think of when discussing contexts of reception for immigrants is a sense of feeling at home, almost like they never left, and I think this program really allowed Justin and his fellow peers to feel that. “It provides a sense of community, especially for people that just moved here, and it allows people to make friends because a lot of the people that I went to Indonesian school with were in, they were all like on the weekends too, like it was our own friend group amongst the Chinese Indonesians”.
Justin also established local institutions, such as his school, and local stores owned by Indonesians that aided his family in adapting to living in the area. He entered a program called “ESOL” which allowed him and other immigrants from different countries to learn English as a second language. The main goal of the program was to provide “extra support when it came to doing stuff like reading and the writing portion…in my school in Arlington, the people in my program were a lot of Mongolian immigrants, Pakistani, and Ethiopian. I was the only Indonesian there in my school growing up”. While it made him feel as if he had two lives (as he said), this program allowed him to better fit in with those in similar situations and kept him on track to earn a higher education in America. Furthermore, Justin talked about how all of the Indonesians in his community had someone to go to for a service when they needed it. He even stated that his parents had received help in buying their house from an Indonesian realtor; “there was one guy who was a car dealer, and he would sell all the Indonesian people cars. And one guy was a real estate agent and all the Indonesians, including us, like bought all of our property through the one guy”.
Conclusion
I found completing this project to be very insightful in learning more about not only my friend, but also about the experience of immigrating to a different country and how it affects your traditions, culture, and social behaviors. Had I known more about the interview prior to writing my analysis, I feel like I could’ve asked more questions regarding the concepts we talked about in class, especially about his mother. There are certain topics of discussion I would’ve explored deeper with Justin. A question I wish I had asked, for example, is how his family who stayed in Indonesia differs from him and his mother in aspects such as their attitudes, clothes, norms, and hobbies now that they have lived in America for quite some time. Compared to other students’ experiences (I assume) I was grateful to see my friend enjoy talking about his home country’s culture and his experience as an immigrant. Sometimes I was unable to get responses out because he could talk so much about certain questions I had asked him. After doing this project, I hope to go home and talk to his mother about her experience, without a microphone, where I think I can get a good conversation going without any pressure on her.
[00:00:00]
Logan: So we’ll start off with your name and where you’re from.
Justin: My name is Justin Williams. I’m from Jakarta, Indonesia.
Logan: All right. And when did you come to America and why?
Justin: So, I came to the United States in 2003. Um, my mom is from Indonesia. She’s from an island called Bangka and from a town called Pangkalpinang. My mom grew up in a very small village, like in Bangka, out of little outside of the city, and my grandfather ran a restaurant on the island. And my mom went to Jakarta to study at an all-women’s university for two years and ended up working at a company that my father, who was an American, did a lot of business with since the company was a heavy machine sales company. My mom was a receptionist, and my dad did construction engineering, so they ended up meeting in Indonesia and we lived there for a few years. My sister is two years older than me and we lived in Indonesia until 2003 and then ended up moving to the DC area partially because of my father’s work, but my mom also had some other friends from Indonesia move into that area.
Logan: So you were obviously very young. Do you know what was incentivizing your mom to leave and besides, I mean I guess they met together from work, so was it your dad?
Justin: Um, yeah, my dad was an American citizen and wanted to eventually move back to the us. He had been living in Indonesia for over seven years before he met my mom and spoke fluent Indonesian and everything. Sorry, what was the question again?
Logan: Why your mom came, you answered it. Yeah, so your mom came straight to Virginia with you?
Justin: Yeah, we moved to the DC area or in Arlington, Virginia. My dad’s company was in DC like right outside the area.
Logan: And how was the experience in Arlington for your mom?
Justin: Arlington is very different than Indonesia in like almost every sense of the way. Indonesia’s almost a completely different world compared to the US. Like Indonesia is very strong values in family and religious, like people take care of each other even on the street. Strangers are just very friendly and, in the US, it’s like kind of all on your own. And that’s what my mom definitely found very different.
Logan: Yeah, I got you. So, tell me about your family. You said you have one sister. Um, do you have family members that live overseas still?
Justin: Yeah, my mom is one of five. And I think almost all of them have one or two kids. My grandfather married and had a divorce and remarried, so I had two grandmothers and like just a huge family. When I go back to Indonesia my whole life, after moving back, we spent almost every summer in Indonesia and my family is huge there and it’s just a very different experience because in the US we didn’t really have any family until when my aunts eventually moved to the US to study and live with us. But when you go back to Indonesia, like it’s our entire family all together all the time. We all lived close together and my grandfather had a restaurant, so still has it. So. Our family eats dinner together at the restaurant, like 30 people every night. And it’s a very different experience in the US where it’s just my family of four.
Logan: That’s cool. Sounds like a tight net between your family. So how often do you travel back to Indonesia?
Justin: After moving to the US mostly every year we would go back for the summer. Well, until kindergarten. I think like when I was in preschool, we would go back for majority of the year, maybe like five or six months. And in elementary school we would go back during the summers and occasionally if we could, try to go back for Chinese New Year. But usually just the constraints with time. Like when I started, when you’re in a kindergarten, school is very easy to skip. But once I got to middle school, I couldn’t really take that much time off, besides the summer.
Logan: Yeah, definitely. Life gets, you know, harder. There are more things to do.
Justin: Mm-hmm.
Logan: So, have you brought, have you said you and your family have brought that culture here to the United States? Like what’s life like at home? Do you guys eat Indonesian food?
Justin: So growing up mostly, I only ate Indonesian food. A lot of rice, various Indonesian dishes. When we were kids, we really liked eating tofu and something called Depe, which is another soybean-based product, which is really popular in Indonesia. But we just ate mostly Indonesian food growing up in the US in the DC area. There’s a really large Chinese Indonesian community, like my family’s Chinese Indonesian. So, growing up we had a sense of community. The US as well, and like I became really close to like all of my mom’s friend’s kids and like we would all have birthday parties together and celebrate Chinese New Year and like New Years and all like the big holidays and everything. Like even a lot of Chinese Asian people are Christian or Buddhist. So like within our community we would celebrate all the big Buddhist holidays and all the Christian holidays and everyone’s birthday. It was just a lot of fun and it’s even a little crazy. Within the community, everyone has someone, like there was one guy who was a car dealer, and he would sell all the Indonesian people cars. And one guy was a real estate agent and all the Indonesians, including us, like bought all of our property through the one guy. There was still a community within the US but it was just smaller, but it was like a tight net.
Logan: Yeah, that’s still pretty cool that, you know, you have people in local institutions from Indonesia that you can, you know, relate with. What would you say is something you miss most about Indonesia and would bring here if you could?
Justin: The food in Indonesia is out of this world. It’s so good and Indonesian food is, there’s really not a lot in the U.S. especially in the DC area. There’s like maybe one or two Indonesian restaurants that are like pretty lackluster. To get good Indonesian food in the US you have to go to California, Philadelphia, or New York. And there’s a few good places that all the Indonesians know about.
Logan: So did you, speaking of the west coast, did you come in from the east or the west? Because I know Indonesia’s closer to the west coast.
Justin: We came first to DC area. A lot of Indonesian people moved to California. But there’s just a lot of Indonesian people within Philadelphia and Queens, New York. California and Philadelphia I think those are probably the biggest Indonesian communities outside in the, or at least in the us.
Logan: And what about the language in Indonesia. I know your mom speaks pretty fluent Indonesian and you do as well. So tell me more about that.
Justin: The language in Indonesia is called Bahasa. Growing up in the us like I went to typical American school, um, until I was in third grade. I was in like the English as a second language program called esol. So, Half of class was like integrated with everyone else, and then half of class was with like a separate group. Um, just extra support when it came to like, doing stuff like, reading and the writing portion. Usually, math and science would be like with the whole class. And um, the English portions would be in a separate room with like a few assistant teachers. And in my school in Arlington, the people in my program were a lot of Mongolian immigrants, Pakistani, and Ethiopian. I was the only Indonesian there in my school growing up, but it was almost like having two lives because I would go to a typical American school on the weekends and have all of my like American friends as well as like I went to Indonesian school on the weekends. It was a program like called Class Bahasa sponsored by the Indonesian embassy in DC but they rented out a community center in Arlington and it was either, there was either be in Arlington or in Maryland and all of the Indonesian people in the area, like I’m Chinese, Indonesian, and they have Chinese, Indonesian people.
Justin: And like a lot of most Indonesians are Muslim, and it’s kind of two separate communities. but in Indonesian schools everyone together are separated by age groups. So I did Indonesian school all the way until um, I think like mid-high school, maybe I stopped in like 10th grade, but until I was throughout high school for like the last two years of doing that, I was mostly teaching the younger classes. Because how they usually did it was like you would go through each year, it was just on the weekends and Saturday. And after you were old enough and more advanced in the language, they would put you just to help be a teacher’s assistant. But it wasn’t just only Indonesian students. There was some families who were expats that were moving to Indonesia and they wanted their kids to get exposure to the language and culture. Because it was not only a language school, they were big on teaching all of the Indonesian culture to the kids here because Indonesian culture is very rich and Indonesian people are incredibly proud of it. So they wanted, the embassy sponsored it to show Indonesian culture and give these kids exposure. Like we had to play Angklung, which is a traditional Indonesian instrument made of bamboo, and we would have to perform Angklung concerts. And one of the concerts like the Ibu Iriana, the First Lady of Indonesia attended and that was really cool for everyone to meet her because it was a government sponsored program so there were always a lot of embassy officials, like with the ambassador and everything. Getting to see the Indonesian embassy, which is beautiful inside was really cool.
Logan: So this was in DC?
Justin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Logan: That’s pretty cool that they, you know, offer that for immigrants from Indonesia.
Justin: Yeah. It provides a sense of community, especially for people that just moved here, and, it allows people to make friends because a lot of the people that I went to Indonesian school with were in, they were all like on the weekends too, like it was our own friend group amongst the Chinese, Indonesians. We all went to Indonesian school together as kids. Like we would all go to each other’s birthday parties and like play on the weekends and everything. It was a lot of fun, but it was like having two lives almost. Like an American life and an Indonesian one.
Logan: So, are you up to date with your family that still lives there? I know your mom just went over there. What’s that like?
Justin: Uh, yeah, we all talk on WhatsApp a lot. I’m still very close with them. It was just my grandfather’s birthday, and I was talking to him a lot.
Logan: Do you talk to them in Indonesian?
Justin: Yeah, I speak fluent Indonesian. So when I speak to my family you don’t really speak any English except for one of my cousins who’s 28 now. Um, but yeah, going to Indonesia is very fun because a lot of my family’s there, but it’s also like a completely different world than being in the U.S., like the way that everything goes. In Indonesia on the streets, like there’s street vendors everywhere that just sell food. Jakarta has the population almost seven times Australia’s population in one city. So going there is like completely different than being in any city in America because it’s just so condensed. Like there’s people of all walks of life everywhere, rich, poor, dark skin, light skin. Indonesians like everyone, Chinese, Muslim, Christian, like all different kinds of people. Just all living together. On the roads to go somewhere in Indonesia, say to drive to my friend’s house, on Friday, when all the Muslims are in mosque, like it would take maybe 15 minutes. On a normal day in busy traffic, maybe two hours of just like sitting in the car because everyone just rides motorbikes, so it’s like weaving through traffic.
Logan: Yeah. That’s crazy.
Justin: Like you’ll be in traffic and people will sell snacks, walk up and down on the street selling snacks to you, like while you’re sitting in.
Logan: So what’s that like? If there’s that many people, like what’s the housing like there? Where did you live?
Justin: We had a house in Indonesia, and we sold it in 2012. And when we would go back after selling a house, we would usually stay in a condo that belonged to a family friend, and that also lived in Indonesia half the time. But living in Indonesia is really different than the US because in Indonesia, there’s a lot of poor people and a middle class family in Indonesia will have staff. it’s called a pembantu. Your nanny, they live in your house, and usually these pembantus will come from a very remote part of Indonesia, like a village in central Java or somewhere in Sumatra and they will work for the family. Like we had a pembantu named Deti and she was almost like a member of our family and we paid her. She came to the city to work to make money, to send back to her family. So we would pay her a certain amount every year, but she would basically send every penny back home as soon as we paid her. And then she just lived with us and we, we gave her food, clothing, and like, uh, we gave her a room in our house and everything. So she just lived with us and would do all the chores and helped cook and clean and everything and helped take care of me and my sister when we were little.
Logan: Is that a pretty common thing over there?
Justin: Yeah. Everyone in Indonesia has a pembantu unless you’re like very, very poor. And there’s different levels to it. Like some people will just have just an untrained pembantu. Just someone that will live in the house, someone young, and is willing to do whatever the family will ask of them. And some people have pembantus that go to like training programs to be more trained in childcare. And Rich Indonesians will maybe make their pembantus wear uniforms that are like white and, and they’ll have a team of maybe two or three nannies around their house and having drivers is very common in Indonesia as well. Uh, we had a driver who didn’t always, some people have drivers that live with them and will drive them like on demand. Our driver didn’t live with us, he only drove like if we call them on demand, if we’re going for like a long drive or something. Just because in Indonesia the traffic is insane and it’s just a lot easier to pay someone to drive for you than to deal with that traffic if you’re going on a long drive.
Logan: Did you guys own a car or?
Justin: Yeah, we had, um, a car in Indonesia. Most people have cars in Indonesia, as well as motorbikes. Cars in Indonesia are usually pretty cheap. Like there’s a lot, most of the cars in Indonesia now, at least for a long time, there’s one car called a Toyota Kijang. Like every single person in Indonesia had a Kijang or a variant of that car. Now a lot of the cars in Indonesia are made by Chinese companies, and those are very popular in Indonesia, like BYD, different car brands we do not see in the U.S., but they’re from China. There’s a lot of Chinese influence in Indonesia. Most of all, the development is done by Chinese people, like from China or Chinese Indonesians in Jakarta. There’s a lot of malls, like shopping malls, like a lot of them, over a hundred shopping malls. Just because Jakarta’s just so condensed. So, they’ll make these big shopping complexes with everything like groceries and stores and everything, and they’re just hubs of each, like neighborhood almost, like a lot of apartment buildings will be connected to the mall or something. And there’s a lot of food and different stores and everything. But also there’s just stuff everywhere, like all over the street. Street foods, like when you go into the kampung or the neighborhoods, there’ll be just street vendors, selling everything from like soup to fried foods to dessert, to drinks, like fresh juices, candy, all kinds of stuff.
Logan: Yeah. That sounds pretty cool. And so you went to Indonesia recently, what did you do there?
Justin: When I went to Indonesia, my grandfather has a restaurant that specializes in Chinese Indonesian food, or specifically hakka food. That’s my, like Chinese ethnicity. When I went, I mostly just spent time with my little cousins who also live with my grandfather in Indonesia. A lot of restaurants, like a lot of people’s businesses are connected to their home. So, my grandfather’s restaurant is the first floor of his house, and then it’s a townhouse almost. But like the first floor is the restaurant. And then once you go upstairs, it’s the private living area. It’s like separate.
Logan: That’s pretty cool.
Justin: But living with my grandpa, he made me work in his restaurant every day and I really like to cook, so I wanted to learn. Because I wanted to be able to learn all of the food that I grew up eating so I can teach my children the future. But going with my grandpa every day, like he would take me to the local market and we would buy all the produce every day for the restaurant. Different meats and vegetables and noodles, everything like in the local street market. Talking to all the vendors, and then I would go back and help my grandpa cook all the food and serve different people in the restaurant. But it was a lot of fun. I I really enjoy spending time there because it feels very familiar as well, than living in the US
Logan: And you haven’t been since Covid, since the pandemic started, right?
Justin: Yeah. Since the pandemic started for a while, Indonesia was shut down and you couldn’t go as a foreigner. Uh, I’m not an Indonesian citizen anymore. When I turned 18, I had to choose whether to be Indonesian or a US citizen. So I renounced my citizenship. So when I go back, I have to apply for a visa and, I would not be able to go back to Indonesia during Covid. They recently just opened up the country. My mom recently just went back and saw our family. I’m excited to go back and going back soon, uh, for my cousin’s wedding. Not sure when but coming up.
Logan: All right well thank you. It was good talking to you about Indonesia.
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