Eat, Pray, Love

rants—living belowdecks, working twelve hours a day, one day off a month, cleaning. His fel-
low workers were Filipinos and Indonesians. The Indonesians and the Filipinos slept and ate
in separate quarters of the boat, never mingling (Muslims vs. Christians, don’t you know), but
Yudhi, in typical fashion, befriended everybody and became a kind of emissary between the
two groups of Asian laborers. He saw more similarities than differences between these maids
and custodians and dishwashers, all of whom were working bottomless hours in order to send
a hundred dollars or so a month back to their families at home.
The first time the cruise ship sailed into New York Harbor, Yudhi stayed up all night,
perched on the highest deck, watching the city skyline appear over the horizon, heart ham-
mering with excitement. Hours later, he got off the ship in New York and hailed a yellow cab,
just like in the movies. When the recent African immigrant driving the taxi asked where he’d
like to go, Yudhi said, “Anywhere, man—just drive me around. I want to see everything.” A
few months later the ship came to New York City again, and this time Yudhi disembarked for
good. His contract was up with the cruise line and he wanted to live in America now.
He ended up in suburban New Jersey, of all places, living for a while with an Indonesian
man he’d met on the ship. He got a job in a sandwich shop at the mall—again, ten-to-twelve-
hour days of immigrant-style labor, this time working with Mexicans, not Filipinos. He learned
better Spanish those first few months than English. In his rare moments of free time, Yudhi
would ride the bus into Manhattan and just wander the streets, still so speechlessly infatuated
with the city—a town he describes today as “the place which is the most full of love in the en-
tire world.” Somehow (again—that smile) he met up in New York City with a crowd of young
musicians from all over the world and he took to playing guitar with them, jamming all night
with talented kids from Jamaica, Africa, France, Japan... And at one of those gigs, he met
Ann—a pretty blonde from Connecticut who played bass. They fell in love. They got married.
They found an apartment in Brooklyn and they were surrounded by groovy friends who all
went on road trips together down to the Florida Keys. Life was just unbelievably happy. His
English was quickly impeccable. He was thinking about going to college.
On September 11, Yudhi watched the towers fall from his rooftop in Brooklyn. Like every-
one else he was paralyzed with grief at what had happened—how could somebody inflict
such an appalling atrocity on the city that is the most full of love of anywhere in the world? I
don’t know how much attention Yudhi was paying when the U.S. Congress subsequently
passed the Patriot Act in response to the terrorist threat—legislation which included draconian
new immigration laws, many of which were directed against Islamic nations such as Indone-
sia. One of these provisions demanded that all Indonesian citizens living in America register
with the Department of Homeland Security. The telephones started ringing as Yudhi and his
young Indonesian immigrant friends tried to figure out what to do—many of them had over-