Eat, Pray, Love

stayed their visas and were afraid that registering would get them deported. On the other
hand, they were afraid to not register, thereby behaving like criminals. Presumably the funda-
mentalist Islamic terrorists roaming around America ignored this registration law, but Yudhi
decided that he did want to register. He was married to an American and he wanted to update
his immigration status and become a legal citizen. He didn’t want to live in hiding.
He and Ann consulted all kinds of lawyers, but nobody knew how to advise them. Before
9/11 there would have been no problems—Yudhi, now married, could just go to the immigra-
tion office, update his visa situation and begin the process of gaining citizenship. But now?
Who knew? “The laws haven’t been tested yet,” said the immigration lawyers. “The laws will
be tested on you.” So Yudhi and his wife had a meeting with a nice immigration official and
shared their story. The couple were told that Yudhi was to come back later that same after-
noon, for “a second interview.” They should have been wary then; Yudhi was strictly instruc-
ted to return without his wife, without a lawyer, and carrying nothing in his pockets. Hoping for
the best, he did return alone and empty-handed to the second interview—and that’s when
they arrested him.
They took him to a detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he stayed for weeks
amongst a vast crowd of immigrants, all of whom had recently been arrested under the
Homeland Security Act, many of whom had been living and working in America for years,
most of whom didn’t speak English. Some had been unable to contact their families upon their
arrests. They were invisible in the detention center; nobody knew they existed anymore. It
took a near-hysterical Ann days to find out where her husband had been taken. What Yudhi
remembers most about the detention center was the dozen coal-black, thin and terrified Ni-
gerian men who had been found on a freight ship inside a steel shipping crate; they had been
hiding in that container at the bottom of that ship for almost a month before they were dis-
covered, trying to get to America—or anywhere. They had no idea now where they were.
Their eyes were so wide, Yudhi said, it looked like they were still being blinded with spotlights.
After a period of detention, the U.S. government sent my Christian friend Yudhi—now an
Islamic terrorist suspect, apparently—back to Indonesia. This was last year. I don’t know if
he’s ever going to be allowed anywhere near America again. He and his wife are still trying to
figure out what to do with their lives now; their dreams hadn’t called for living out their lives in
Indonesia.
Unable to cope with Jakarta’s slums after having lived in the first world, Yudhi came to Bali
to see if he could make a living here, though he’s having trouble being accepted into this soci-
ety because he isn’t Balinese—he’s from Java. And the Balinese don’t like the Javanese one
bit, thinking of them all as thieves and beggars. So Yudhi encounters more prejudice here—in
his own nation of Indonesia—than he ever did back in New York. He doesn’t know what to do