My father’s job immigration moved me out of my home country at nine years old, when I had been old enough to learn Indonesian grammar with some formality, but too young to realise anything of how the country came to be. I know little of the Japanese invasion and the Dutch colonial era. I know nothing of what Indonesia was before the World Wars. I only began studying recently about Indonesia’s genocide of West Papua and Timor-Leste.

This piece of text is not a call for pity of my ignorance: I am a privileged young woman living in a different developed country; I grew up having everything I needed, if you compare my upbringing to the majority of young people across the world. Privilege shouldn’t be an embarrassing, fearful secret some upper-middle class (or above) people of my age deny having so they find their places in an unfamiliar world, a world that punishes people who aren’t born with the privilege they grew up having or might have taken for granted; sometimes, privilege is the testament to how hard your ancestors had worked to get you where you are; sometimes, privilege is the positive generational result of imperialism. If you are afraid of being hated, that is a privilege; you are not afraid of being killed for existing.

It took me time to realise home is the tangible and intangible things that give shape to my life. Home is the dendeng and ayam balado I asked my mum to cook every other week whilst growing up. Home is the British academic curriculum my international school had imposed on me. Home is the stories of hardship my parents underwent in their youth. Home is the number of countries I have moved to before turning twenty-five, never being able to decide which of them makes me feel the most settled: home is what makes me different to others; home is what drives me to connect with people. Home is how protective I feel of the Indonesian customs and traditions in risk of eroding the longer I stay disengaged to the culture and people; home is how distant Indonesia is to me on foot.

At present, I am a legal citizen of where I was born. My loved ones’ dream for me is for my citizenship status to change, possibly to accumulate even more privileges than the ones I already have. What no one will take away is the relief I feel every time I land on Cengkareng, a relief akin to that of coming home after a long day at work.