No Holds Barred

Elizabeth Pisani’s formidable reputation as a straight-talking journalist and AIDS expert precedes her. Bhimanto Suwastoyo profiles the author of a new book on AIDS in Asia.  

Ordinary and predictable are two words that have definitively never been used to describe Elizabeth Pisani. The girlish, youthful looks of the petite Pisani have deceived many into dismissing her as a tame, eager-to-please rookie -- to their detriment.

Meek she certainly isn’t either.

As a foreign correspondent here during the heyday of the authoritarian New Order regime, she was one of the very rare journalists who dared risk the wrath of the then military eminence grise, General Benny Moerdani. During a function, she casually said to him: "So, I hear the armed forces are busy killing people in Aceh."

The inquiry came at a time when the government was busy closing off the province to conceal the intensive bloody military operation aimed at ridding the area of members of the Free Aceh Movement. While Moerdani’s piercing stare was enough to send most seasoned journalists scurrying away, tail between their legs, Pisani got away with it. She ended up visiting the province even though it was off limits to the press and foreigners.

Her life has been anything but ordinary. Born to Anglo-American executive parents, she was already widely travelled by the time she reached her teens. She caught the Asia travel bug while still in school during a brief visit to a friend in Hong Kong.

The fascination with Asia grew after she graduated with a degree in Classical Chinese from Oxford and decided to seek a job in Hong Kong.  She continued on to Indonesia where, as a journalist for an international news agency, she rubbed shoulders with both the rich and powerful, the poor and the forgotten.

Her fluency in many languages, including Spanish, French, Mandarin and Indonesian (both formal and street slang), has opened many doors for her.

Although she has jetted around the world and worked in such places as the danger-ridden streets of Africa, the comfortable enclaves of international organizations in Geneva and the wintry corners of China, Indonesia has become her adopted homeland.

"It is strange, but whenever I arrive in this country, I have this feeling that I have returned home," she says.

Pisani struggles to explain why this is.

“There’s a generosity of spirit in this country that I’ve never known anywhere else. Or perhaps it’s just that the combination of permanent low-grade chaos and semua bisa diatur (everything can be taken care of) pretty much reflects my own character.”

She ditched her promising international journalism career to follow the man of her heart in 1993, and then made a move in an entirely new direction by studying epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"I wasn’t quite sure what it entailed, but I knew I’d learn some number-crunching and have luxurious hours in wood-panelled libraries just thinking. Deadlines be damned," Pisani says with a smirk.

It certainly seemed more interesting than writing reports on the foreign exchange market, and her love had a spacious rent-free house awaiting in London.

"While I was working in Asia as a journalist, I became interested in the politics of population control. Sex and birth, health and death, priests and condoms, forced vasectomies and contraceptives. The different approaches taken by the mega-nations of Asia would determine their own future, and perhaps the world’s.”

With a degree in her pocket, and with the same enthusiasm she had shown throughout her career, Pisani then threw herself wholeheartedly into the world of HIV and AIDS by working with the then fledging UNAIDS organization in Geneva.

For hapless individuals inquiring into her field, Pisani calmly answers, without blinking, “Sex and drugs.”

“Saying I do sex and drugs saves me explaining that epidemiology is the study of how diseases spread in a population,” she says. “It saves me from the social suicide of admitting that I am a scientist, a glorified statistician, a card-carrying nerd. And it is a good conversation starter. Everybody has something to say about sex and drugs.”

Three decades of working with passion in this field have made her familiar with the wheeling and dealing in AIDS prevention efforts in both international and local organizations and governments, including their failings.

It fueled her dream to write a book on HIV and AIDS, one that would be scrupulously scientific but presented in a light, easy-to-understand manner, instead of the mind-numbing, boring avalanches of data and facts usually found in scientific publications.

"Writing is something I am good at, and what better way can there be to get people to know more about the good and bad sides of an important issue than through a book which is serious but not dull, and which I hope, will be as informative as it is enjoyable.”

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS is to be published by Granta in the UK, WW Norton in the United States and Penguin in Canada this year. In testament to her close affinity with Indonesia, an Indonesian version of the book is to be launched here at about the same time as the London debut.

"Essentially, it is a book about getting high, getting laid and getting money. Lots of money," she says.

In her usual swift, efficient approach, it took her just over a year to write her book proposal, find a publisher and finish the manuscript. Most of the writing was done at her parents’ summer retreat in Ireland and the cozy room of a friend in bustling Bangkok.

Pisani, who loves anything smacking of ethnic cultures, cooking, cats, yoga and kayaking, has the extraordinary ability to remain at ease in vastly different situations, from sharing a simple meal with a dirt-poor peasant or addressing a conference of the world's top experts on HIV and AIDS, chatting with prostitutes in the steamy and seamy underbellies of third world countries or conversing with an artsy-fartsy intellectual crowd.

Characteristically, Pisani is unfazed by what may lie ahead. After her book hits the

best-seller list, of course.

"Ya udah," she says, uttering the Indonesian equivalent of "Oh, well.”

 "We'll just see."

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