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It was supposed to be a beautiful story.

The Balinese boy I barely knew was putting a faux jade pendant necklace on me as we said goodbye. My vacation in Bali was ending and I had no idea when I would return.

As he explained that he had purchased the necklace on one of his rare trips outside of Bali, I was a bit dumbfounded and more than a little touched.

It did not matter that the necklace appeared cheap by my standards. The pendant was pretty and was one that he had obviously treasured.

More important, the gesture was unlike any that I would have encountered from men in the United States. There was no feigned indifference and no clinical assessment of the other person’s interest. No one waited two days to e-mail or call; no one suggested dinner and a movie, and no one asked, “My place or yours?”

I had met the boy only a few days before. Our first handshake took place as I emerged from the fancy swimming pool of my resort hotel in Jimbaran Bay, Bali. He would be the guide for me and a girlfriend on our scuba diving trip the next day to Nusa Penida, an island off the southeast Balinese coast.

The diving turned out to be excellent. The water was sparkling clear. The fishes were bright and pretty. Our Balinese dive master could not have been more friendly and helpful.

He was not my type and I was not even interested. But maybe it was the sun, the sea and the beauty of the underwater kingdom. At some point, flirting began. Two days later, it continued on another diving trip to the shipwreck of the US Navy cargo ship Liberty, located off the coast of Tulamben in Northeast Bali.

It was all a bit surreal.

Indonesia has always touched a part of me that I cannot fully describe. For many years, the country was home to a grandfather I never knew. He did not know how to read and write and passed away before I was born. He arrived in Balikpapan from China at age fourteen, created a new life and built a family. His children, my mother included, grew up speaking Bahasa.

When my mother was 10, he moved his family back to China. Years later, long after he had passed away, my mother would leave China and immigrate to America with me.

In Bali, the consequences of their actions reverberated in my head. I could have been one of the local women walking around trash strewn streets with a large basket of goods on her head.

Instead, I was a New York-based lawyer with the ability to purchase all the possessions of my diving guide without batting an eye.

Time, distance, culture, language, economics and the randomness of fate had all created their barriers. Even the flirting was a barrier of its own. Perhaps another time, another place, another me would be open to getting to know the Balinese boy better. But I did not feel that way, and I had decided that nothing beyond harmless flirtation would take place.

When the boy presented his farewell gift, it summarized everything that would and could never be, including the consequences of two generations of actions that were not my own.

Against the odds that we would never meet again, his gift offered simplicity and sincerity. Far more accustomed to the often transactional nature of dating practices in the United States, I fell speechless.

Soon enough, though, words returned to me. For better or worse, the beauty of my story was too good to last. Upon my return to the United States, the Balinese boy asked via e-mail, “May I have your mobile number?” and insisted, “I will waiting [sic] for you.”

In the story that I had weaved, nobody was going to wait for anybody anywhere. “I will not return to Bali for a long, long time,” I wrote back. “In fact, I may never come back.”

With that, what could have been a beautiful story from the land of my grandfather ended with antiseptic clarity. I stashed away the jade pendant necklace and returned to the far less surreal but much more nonchalant dating scene of America.


Ying Ma is a New York-based writer.