Postcard from Ubud, Bali
Or: A fear of the dark
I am writing this letter from Ubud, Bali, where I have been a guest at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. It’s not been the worst place to have to come on a work trip. Not at all.
During the day, I spend a good amount of time thinking about and working on my next book. I’ve done a fair bit of hanging out with lovely writers. I’ve seen a little of Bali, not enough. Of course, I’ve sat on panels and talked about my book, Shanghai, and Shanghailanders. From my villa, which sits atop a steep cliff, I stare out at the unobstructed view of the jungle with its 100-foot palm trees and greenery so dense that the river rushing below is mostly auditory suggestion. I am trying to do what I want on my own terms. My own terms usually involve, and I suppose have always involved: not having to speak for hours, cushiony surfaces, books and paper and snacks. The older I get, the more convinced I am that people never essentially change.
I miss my husband terribly. When you live with and love someone for a long time, you start to imagine the world through their eyes. And I think that’s a gift really, to be able to see the world twice, thrice over. Oh, he’d love that. Oh, he would have wanted to go exploring there. What I would give to have him sitting in the corner and readily available, while I silently lounge and read and write and eat snacks, ha!
And, of course I imagine the kids’ desires mapped onto this place, too. H would spend all day in the infinity pool overlooking the jungle. She would be terrified of the ants and geckos that sneak into the room. M would go bonkers at the number of scooters zipping by, a school of fish weaving through a sea of cars.
During the daytime, the jungle view is simply beautiful. I open all of the curtains in my modernist glass-walled cube of a stand alone villa on stilts, the two-bed two-bath accommodation that other festival guests in other less flamboyant resorts have taken to calling the “James Bond suites.” I think that moniker captures the privacy, luxury, and drama of this place. The retractable skylight window above the bed might have a little something to do with it, too.
At night is when the jungle shows her true colors. And I, mine. The view outside becomes pitch black, the green forest darkening into a mass of shadows and sounds. I click on the lights in my villa and a pair of tails slither under the sofa. I think they are geckos, but that may be my natural optimism. Yes, I scream. I rush into the bedroom and lock the inner door. There are three tiny sugar ants forming an equilateral triangle on my pillow. There are two enormous jungle ants dancing on the threshold of the bathroom. I feel the futility of locking out the outside, the fragility of a single pane of glass. I feel all of the invisible cracks in the walls and the measly seams of this cube on thin stilts in the middle of a jungle. I feel imaginary monkeys dancing on my balcony. I hear the birds pecking on the glass of the skylight above my bed. Are those birds, or are those men?
Two nights ago, someone opened my door, I thought. All I did was cower in my locked bedroom for a few minutes with my phone in hand. All I could think to do was ready myself to call my husband, as if his voice alone could protect me, all the way from Shanghai. No creature appeared.
The next day over lunch, one writer told me that another writer had indeed opened a wrong door with their keycard. They saw a pair of kitten heels (mine, obviously, because who else would bring a pair of kitten heels to the jungle), realized their key had opened the wrong villa door, and turned around and left. The timing was not as I’d remembered it. They claimed they had come into my room in the early morning. I recalled the sound of the door opening late at night. Either way, someone had entered my room. Maybe two different people had entered my room at two different times! Humans, animals: insect, reptile, all closing in.
Here’s a question: what to do if someone enters your room where you are staying alone, in a standalone villa, in the middle of a jungle? I took to sleeping with the cordless hotel phone tucked under the pillow.
Then the night passes, the morning arrives at 5:40am when the sunlight wakes me from the corners of the windows. I yawn and press the button to open the retractable skylight. My own private circle of perfect sky. I press the button to open the curtains, revealing yet another glorious Bali morning through the walls of glass, baby blue sky and forest green once again, framed. My imagination once again, contained. Setting is character. Setting creates character.
This is all to say that: I think if I were to stay in Bali for another couple months, I might have been able to bang out a killer psychological thriller. And to my dismay I find I am more “Bond girl” in need of rescue, than I am a 007.
Alas, it is back to Shanghai and literary fiction for me. I’ll be taking away friendships that I hope I’ll keep for life, and a travel experience unlike any other I’ve ever had. What a gift this week has been, this week of heightened senses, of fear and surprise and sound and silence. Time. Beauty. The softening of the barriers between the self and the world.
