Riau, Indonesia looks nothing like the white sand beaches, impenetrable rainforests, or volcanoes that tourists might typically associate with the country. Instead, palm oil plantations blanket the province’s hilly landscape. Thick black pipes outline the cramped, two-way roads that connect towns, pumping petrol from the ground. Rubber, acacia, or eucalyptus plantations begin when the palm oil ends. Chimneys of black smoke are often visible in the distance. They signal that someone, somewhere, is setting the land ablaze.
In the fall of 2016, I left my home in Seattle for three months to investigate Southeast Asia’s palm oil industry. As my flight started its descent into Jakarta (my first destination), I looked out the window to see neat grids of shrubby looking trees carpeting other Indonesian islands that were unmistakably palm oil plantations. Although I couldn’t see workers from above, I knew they had to be there, shielded by the towering trees.
I was most interested to dig into the palm oil industry’s labor issues. And according to a trusted source who I met that evening, the angle I was investigating could make my job especially dangerous. Because of the economic value of palm oil, the plantations are often guarded. And the palm oil industry has been known to cast a blind eye to the widespread labor abuses and didn’t want more journalists into plantations to expose them. My source also told me that plantations are often guarded, which meant that managers or security officers must never know that an outsider, much less a journalist, was on their turf. Otherwise, I could be arrested.
“But you’ll be fine,” he added, after he examined my physical features and noticed the growing look of anxiety on my face. I am Chinese, but my skin is more brown than yellow, and because there are still Chinese people living in Indonesia, I’d blend in seamlessly. “Don’t wear that t-shirt, though. I’ll have my wife find some traditional shirts for you to wear.”
That evening, before I flew from Jakarta to Riau, I tossed and turned in my sleep, imagining the worst case scenario; I’d have no idea how to react if I were actually arrested. I wondered if I should I prepare should bahasa phrases on an index card and tuck it inside my notepad just in case.
When I’m home in America and doing the bulk of my reporting over the telephone, it seldom matters how I look. But in person, how someone else perceives me can impact what they choose to share (or not) which, subsequently, affects the depth of my reporting. This revelation sounds like a no-brainer, but reporting on a single project for three months drove this point home.
While most western journalists struggle to gain access in side these palm oil plantations because their appearances are notably different from that of the local population, I was naturally blessed by my ethnically ambiguous appearance. When I donned the traditional batik shirts I had borrowed — with a voice recorder slipped inside a breast pocket — I could pass by security in a car or a motorbike without receiving much of a second glance.
On plantations, my fixer would approach people I wanted to interview first. Once a source consented to an interview, my fixer would beckon me from the car. But to these workers, I don’t look “American” in the traditional sense. They’d glance at my tanned skin and almond eyes and then ask my fixer, “Is she Indonesian?”
I can’t speak for the workers I interviewed, but perhaps they saw what I looked like and made their own assumptions. Perhaps they assumed that because I am Chinese and living in America, I understand migration; that somewhere in my familial history, my ancestors have experienced hardships like they have. Perhaps looking like them meant that they felt more relaxed in telling me their stories without fear of judgment.
Ultimately, my ethnicity was a lock-pick, first used to gain access to the plantations, and then to access some of the workers’ stories that often go untold. One harvester, for instance, pointed out his 14-year old son to me, who was wheeling bunches of palm oil weighing more than fifty pounds apiece. “We are not allowed to have our children help,” he said, admitting to providing the palm oil supply chain with child labor, “but we have no choice.”
One woman’s story has stuck with me like glue. On a rainy evening, I met a woman — we’ll call her Sari — in her home in Riau. She greeted me warmly and looked at me dotingly as I took off my shoes. The TV was on and her children were playing with toys as I interviewed her. She is candid and chatty — one of those characters that journalists love.
I was asking Sari questions about her work spraying pesticides on the plantation. She had done this for eight years with minimal protective gear until she started noticing the toll the exposure to chemicals had on her health.
At one point of our conversation, Sari started talking about how the plantation’s nurses didn’t care much for the workers. Then without me so much prompting her with another question, she spoke further. My fixer unflinchingly translated for me: In Indonesia, women are entitled to two days of menstrual leave by law. But once, when Sari went to the plantation’s clinic to ask for a third day off, the nurse didn’t believe her. Without asking for Sari’s permission, the nurse decided to physically check her — to put it gently — if she was telling the truth.
Whatever journalistic objectivity I had went out the door. It was impossible for me to not react to her story — among those of other workers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Myanmar who have been so outrightly exploited— with shock and sadness.
When I returned from my reporting trip and got around to writing about the issues that women workers face on Indonesian oil palm plantations, I returned to Sari’s story – and others, that struck an emotional chord with me. These are stories, I realize, that I perhaps couldn’t have accessed if I looked differently in the first place.
It’s been over a year since I’ve returned from my palm oil reporting trip and I frequently think about how international reporting gets done. Western reporters commonly parachute into countries where, by appearances alone, they look conspicuous. I wonder how their physical traits impact the story they’re ultimately able to produce. When I now have the itch to report a story in country where I’d seem a bit foreign, I am immediately self conscious of whether my appearance — completely superficial characteristics I have no control over — can impact how emotionally close or distant I ultimately get to my characters. I think back to the conversations I’ve had with palm oil workers who told me their stories of mistreatment and exploitation with sorrow — all of which requires great vulnerability on their part to tell it and on my part to understand it and listen. Perhaps it’s the moments where the line between being a reporter and simply being human gets blurry that can get someone to the heart of a story.
Wudan Yan is a magazine and investigative journalist based in Seattle. Her work has appeared in The Daily Beast, Discover Magazine, Hakai Magazine, Nature Medicine, National Public Radio, Nautilus, The Scientist, and The Washington Post. She received a grant through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to investigate Southeast Asia’s palm oil industry.
Photo by Wudan Yan.
In this case, your appearance worked to your advantage. Is it proper/improper to use that advantage for work? I’m Asian too, so I find this fascinating.
‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ right? my take is that it’s proper to use it as an advantage, as you have that awareness and are doing your reporting ethically.