that Wayan was throwing me a Balinese birthday party, “it’s going to be so boring.. .”) It
wasn’t boring, though—just quiet. And different. There was the whole dressing-up part, and
then there was the whole dance performance part, and then there was the whole sitting
around and staring at each other part, which wasn’t so bad. Everyone did look lovely. Way-
an’s whole family had come, and they kept smiling and waving at me from four feet away, and
I kept smiling at them and waving back at them.
I blew out the candles of the birthday cake along with Little Ketut, the smallest orphan,
whose birthday, I had decided a few weeks ago, would also be on July 18 from now on,
shared with my own, since she’d never had a birthday or a birthday party before. After we
blew out the candles, Felipe presented Little Ketut with a Barbie doll, which she unwrapped in
stunned wonder and then regarded as though it were a ticket for a rocket ship to
Jupiter—something she never, ever in seven billion light-years could’ve imagined receiving.
Everything about this party was kind of funny. It was an oddball international and intergen-
erational mix of a handful of my friends, Wayan’s family and some of her Western clients and
patients whom I’d never met before. My friend Yudhi brought me a six-pack of beer to wish
me happy birthday, and also this cool young hipster screenwriter from L.A. named Adam
came by. Felipe and I had met Adam in a bar the other night and had invited him. Adam and
Yudhi passed their time at the party talking to a little boy named John, whose mother is a pa-
tient of Wayan’s, a German clothing designer married to an American who lives in Bali. Little
John—who is seven years old and who is kind of American, he says, because of his Americ-
an dad (even though he himself has never been there), but who speaks German with his
mother and speaks Indonesian with Wayan’s children—was smitten with Adam because he’d
found out that the guy was from California and could surf.
“What’s your favorite animal, mister?” asked John, and Adam replied, “Pelicans.”
“What’s a pelican?” the little boy asked, and Yudhi jumped in and said, “Dude, you don’t
know what a pelican is? Dude, you gotta go home and ask your dad about that. Pelicans rock,
dude.”
Then John, the kind-of-American boy, turned to say something in Indonesian to little Tutti
(probably to ask her what a pelican was) as Tutti sat in Felipe’s lap trying to read my birthday
cards, while Felipe was speaking beautiful French to a retired gentleman from Paris who
comes to Wayan for kidney treatments. Meanwhile, Wayan had turned on the radio and
Kenny Rogers was singing “Coward of the County,” while three Japanese girls wandered ran-
domly into the shop to see if they could get medicinal massages. As I tried to talk the Japan-
ese girls into eating some of my birthday cake, the two orphans—Big Ketut and Little Ke-
tut—were decorating my hair with the giant spangled barrettes they’d saved up all their
money to buy me as a gift. Wayan’s nieces and nephews, the child temple dancers, the chil-
nora
(Nora)
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