Dina had been living in Jakarta her whole life, but she had been thinking about elsewhere for years. Not because Jakarta was wrong, it was loud and dense and home, but because she was curious about the texture of life somewhere completely different. She joined Slowletter looking for exactly that: a window into a life that did not look like hers. She found more than a window.
The letter about language and belonging
Dina's first Slowletter letter was in English, which she spoke fluently and had taught herself partly through American sitcoms and partly through a stubborn determination to read every original-language novel she could find. She wrote about what it felt like to think in Bahasa Indonesia but dream occasionally in English, the strange doubleness of being at home in two languages and fully at home in neither. She sent it without expecting a reply that would understand what she meant.
A reply from Melbourne
Liam had grown up in Melbourne in a family that spoke Malay at home and English everywhere else. The experience Dina described, the doubleness, the belonging-to-two-languages-but-fully-to-neither, was not just something he understood. It was something he had never read articulated exactly right before. He replied immediately. His letter was long. He told her about the specific experience of being a second-generation migrant who speaks the home language with an accent that marks him as foreign in two countries at once. Dina read his letter three times.
From letters to a shared project
After four months of correspondence, Dina and Liam discovered they shared an interest in documenting language, not academically, but personally. Dina had been keeping a notebook of Indonesian idioms that had no good English equivalent. Liam had a similar notebook for Malay. They combined them into a shared document that neither of them had planned to create. It grew slowly, letter by letter, with explanations and context that only someone from inside the language could provide. It became their project, not because either of them decided it should be, but because both of them cared about it.
What the distance made possible
Dina says that corresponding with someone in Melbourne made her see Jakarta differently. Having to explain her city to someone who had never been there forced her to notice things she had stopped noticing. The detail she reached for when writing to Liam, the particular smell of the wet season, the way the city's traffic sounds like breathing, were details she had not thought consciously about in years. The letters made her a more attentive resident of her own life. Liam says the same thing about Melbourne. Distance, it turned out, was not the obstacle. It was the whole point.
“Having to explain her city to someone who had never been there forced her to notice things she had stopped noticing. The letters made her a more attentive resident of her own life.”