May was three or four days in Batam — not a relocation, not the month-long arcs that came later, but long enough for the city to start repeating itself. I crossed from Berjaya Waterfront in JB Stulang, not Singapore HarbourFront: causeway logic, Johor side, the ferry lane I knew when play still felt like play. Immigration on the island at HarbourBay, not Batam Centre. And through it all, the joke I live inside: the Burmese bule — foreign enough to be misread, never local enough to belong.
What a Burmese bule is
In Indonesia bule means the foreigner — usually the white one, the tall one, the one who gets English first and harga bule if he is not careful. The word is not cruel; it is descriptive, sometimes affectionate, always a little transactional. I am not white. I am Burmese — Myanmar passport, Southeast Asian face, twelve years of Singapore English in my mouth, Johor Bahru in my monthly rhythm. And still, in Batam, I am read as bule enough.
Burmese bule is what I call the in-between: too foreign for local price, too brown for the backpacker hostel myth, too fluent for silence, too alone for family rate. Taxi drivers guess Singapore. Shop aunties guess China. Grab maps guess tourist. I do not correct every guess. I let the category sit wrong on my shoulders like a poncho that almost fits.
There is comedy in it. There is also truth. A Burmese guy who has lived most of his adult life outside Myanmar learns to be foreign everywhere — even in ASEAN, even on a Riau island one ferry hop from Stulang. Batam does not care about your inner memoir. Batam cares that you crossed water with a stamp and kept coming back for a few days more.
Berjaya Waterfront to HarbourBay
Johor side first: Berjaya Waterfront at Stulang — not the Singapore terminal tourists picture when they say “Batam ferry.” Same passport pocket, e-ticket on phone, seat by the window because the strait still deserves witnesses. The boat is utilitarian — businessmen, families, someone asleep against a life jacket, weekend shoppers who know exactly which mall they want. I sat among them as the wrong kind of bule: no linen uniform, no company retreat, just a Burmese face from JB practising calm while Jie Mao stayed home with the router and the chair he owns.
Water widens; Stulang recedes; Indonesia arrives as low buildings and haze before it arrives as stamps at HarbourBay. Queue, photo, stamp, thank you — orderly without romance. The officer did not ask my story. Grab into town; humid flat heat through shirt fabric; diesel, fried shallots, salt. He tried English; I answered; we both relaxed into the bule protocol: simple words, clear destination, no need for ancestry.
Nagoya: Groundhog day in Batam
I kept returning to Nagoya — the neighbourhood that feels trapped in time, as if Batam decided the late nineties were forever and never apologised. Same mall corridors, same neon fatigue, same food-court air, same loop of errands that reset each morning like a calendar nobody updates. Groundhog day in Batam: wake, eat, mall shade, haircut, ferry thought, sleep, repeat. Not ugly — just stuck, honest about being a border island that sells repetition to people who need a cheap change of air.
I got a haircut in Nagoya because that is what you do when you are bored and slightly foreign. The barber was skilled; the mirror was honest. But a trim does not grant citizenship. I could not suddenly laugh on cue with wkwkwk in the chair, could not slap my thigh and say mantap and mean it the way the aunties at the next stall meant it. I am Burmese bule — I can enjoy the sound without owning it. Politeness is not fluency. Fluency is not belonging.
Everywhere that week Asal Kau Bahagia seemed to be the anthem — Armada through mall speakers, through taxi radios, through the same chorus following me down the same corridor twice. Happiness as long as you are happy, the song insists, while I walked loops that proved I was only passing through. By day three I was humming Apa Kabar Sayang without deciding to — how are you, darling — and the question landed wrong because the darling I missed was a cat in Johor Bahru, not a person in Nagoya.
Missing Jie Mao
Three or four days is short on paper and long when you are counting absence. Jie Mao does not travel for mall loops. He occupies a chair, judges silence, forgives return. I sent no heroic updates — only the private ache of someone who chose a border island for cheap reset and discovered the reset had his face in it. Apa kabar, sayang — fine, Batam, fine, bule, not fine, home without the cat.
I ate well anyway — seafood rice, chili that asked for water, iced tea sweating in plastic. Street food treats all passports as temporary. Vendors offered sunglasses I did not need. I smiled the smile of someone who knows he is being read as money on legs and does not take it personally.
Back to Stulang
HarbourBay again, then Berjaya Waterfront, then the room where Jie Mao performed indifference until he did not. I logged the trip the way I log deploys: small, documented, complete — except for the songs stuck in my head and the Groundhog loop I can still see when I close my eyes. Burmese bule, quickstop, Nagoya time capsule, haircut without mantap, anthem without answer. The cat forgave me. That was the stamp that mattered.