To And From Paradise

Every time I return to the ‘real’ world I hear stories of the walking wounded, the friends and ex-colleagues I deserted in the trenches of the newsroom wars. One, I hear, collapsed in the office and is expected to exit the hospital toes pointed up.

Another has nerve damage so bad he abandons his keyboard several times a day to rush to plunge his fingers into the cool, soothing water of the restroom tap. A third wears braces on her wrists to shore up metacarpals damaged from repetitive stress injury syndrome.

So it’s easy to answer people when they ask why I’ve been living in Bali the past few years, having forsaken the comfortable wages of a financial journalist for the unsteady income of a freelancer. I relate the horrors above and footnote them with the day I walked from the Singapore bureau to a nearby clinic and was hooked up to a heart monitor for 24 hours after an “odd” EKG and a high blood pressure reading.

“Makes a man think, you know, and, man, I did not want to die at 40,” I tell them.

Then I fill in the details – the 12-hour days followed by six hours in the pub, the anxiety attacks before press conferences from fear a competitor would get headline and story seconds before I did, the re-writes demanded from editors that didn’t know Asia, that didn’t know business, that thought the primary facts of any event anywhere are how many Americans were killed and what’s it do to the American economy – and the curious nod their heads and congratulate me on my escape and survival.

What I want to know, though, is what are all these other foreigners doing in Bali?

The tourists, OK, they come for their two weeks and go back to the world. But the others who come and stay? They can’t all be running from Damascus to Samara fleeing the death’s head that beckoned from across the newsroom floor.

And, Bali, after all, when you take away the PR hype, is just a tropical island struggling with its transition from an agricultural economy to a service-based one, overwhelmed by unplanned development and poor infrastructure, its rivers and roadside ditches choked with plastics, chemicals and solid wastes.

If people really wanted to run away from it all and sit by the side of the road to watch the world go by, there are lots better islands from which to do it.

More fundamental, what drives this desire to escape, to Bali or anywhere else, and what keeps the escapees that reach critical velocity from returning to take up their old traces?

We all seem to have this idea that all will be well once we have straddled the Harley, headed for the hills and disappeared over the horizon, if only we could ever get up the gumption to do it. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim kept running and running until he finally found his stopping point in some fictional jungle of the East Indies.

And the real life Nick Leeson, on the verge of his trading losses being discovered, fled Singapore to Malaysia to Brunei, and eventually was caught in Germany trying to get home to the UK. So many of us flee and so often, no wonder Bali is full of refugees who have run here in hopes of a magical fix to lives too thin and shallow elsewhere, only to settle for quick satisfaction and meaning in a patina of mysticism and faux artistic pursuit that has no greater depth or significance than the rituals and structures of the corporate world left behind.

Or maybe some of us are using Bali, or any like place, as a respite, a chance to rest weary spirits before rejoining the battle. Lord Jim after all did finally work out his redemption after a fashion, although it did mean a bullet through the heart, and Leeson didn’t remain hidden in Malaysia, and returned to answer for what he had wrought. Leeson, I am surprised to report, didn’t die of colon cancer after his release from Singapore’s Changi Prison, and now lives happily in Ireland, where he manages a football club and is a “sought-after” speaker, according to his website www.nickleeson.com.

But I have to wonder what incremental battles of will Jim won over himself before he finally had the courage to face his failure, and what strength and wisdom did Leeson gain from three-and-a-half years of contemplation in a Singapore prison cell that helped him face the gauntlet of the public eye and win his battle with cancer after his release? Was it redemption they and we seek? Courage? Peace? Escape to some imagined freedom?

I’m not sure, but whenever I mention to another Bali-ite that I’m thinking about returning to some more cosmopolitan center to take up actual, real-world employment, the reaction is that I have taken leave of my senses and that it would be better to stay and starve. I am practically certain that isn’t true.

For whatever reason – balance, redemption, a search for meaning – I needed these years in Bali, and now, I feel, I need something more. So, I’m off again, only oddly this time, escaping from paradise. 

+ T. Wynn King

Home