Review of The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha

Sonia Nair

There’s a line on the first page of Indonesian author Intan Paramaditha’s choose-your-own-adventure doorstopper saga The Wandering that underlines the desire to travel of the unnamed narrator, who deems the act of staying still synonymous with stasis; ‘You’ve grown roots, you’re gathering moss.’ Drowning beneath the roaring motorbikes, the cries of street vendors, and the scorching weather of Jakarta, the narrator believes that unless she’s going somewhere, she’s going nowhere. I wonder how intensified this feeling would be at a time when we’re all forced to stay still. The luxury of travel and the privilege of movement will always be reserved for the elite few, but the number is steadily dwindling. Not even the blue sheath of an Australian passport can get you home if the colour of your skin is brown.   

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A common discussion among Malaysians living anywhere other than Malaysia is how to game the system if you have two passports. Belonging to one of 20 odd countries around the world to not allow dual citizenship, Malaysians living abroad have to make a tricky decision – retain the Malaysian passport of their birth country, attain citizenship of the country they’re living in while illegally keeping their Malaysian passport, or give up their Malaysian passport altogether in the pursuit of a new country’s citizenship. The paths in and out of the country on two passports are well-established, borne out of a diasporic oral whisper network. If you’re a Malaysian-Australian, you leave Australia on your Australian passport and enter Malaysia with your Malaysian passport, preferably through one of the automatic gates to garner the least amount of suspicion, bettered still in the event of unwanted questioning if you can speak in the lilting sing-song cadence of Malay. It’s always the return flight that stumps me – the one I can never remember. Logic dictates that if you use your Australian passport, the Malaysian authorities will find out, but if you use your Malaysian passport, you won’t have the requisite visa required to travel to Australia. There is a way, for thousands before me have done it and thousands will continue, but I’ve chosen to retain my Malaysian passport. Too much is at stake.

The narrator in The Wandering is bequeathed a pair of magical red shoes by her demon lover that allows her to pursue 15 different lives that we, as readers, are directly instrumental in shaping. We can voyage with her to New York, Berlin, Amsterdam or even back to Jakarta. But despite being wondrously transported from one place to the next, falling through never-ending tunnels and ending up on never-stopping trains, borders are as erect and impenetrable in the narrator’s experience of her fictional world as they are in our real world, enforced by governments ‘fanatical about constructing fences and walls’.

As soon as the narrator first puts on the red shoes, she finds herself in a taxi headed to New York’s JFK Airport, having bypassed the onerous process – if you come from a third-world country – of applying for a visa, waiting for it to get approved, and undergoing the potentially dehumanising prospect of walking through an airport as a brown person.  

No matter who you are – a tourist planning summer holidays or an expat moving abroad – keep in mind that travel sucks up time and energy even before you reach your destination. If you’re from the Third World, or a country identified with terrorism, expect the hassles to increase. A visa application is a mirror, reflecting back at you the distortions of international relations. 

Even with the help of an otherworldly devil, the narrator can’t shed the one thing that clings to her regardless – her little green booklet stamped Indonesia. Indonesia’s passport is ranked 72nd on The Henley Passport Index, which measures the mobility of the world’s hundreds of passports. And this stricture is always at the forefront of the narrator’s mind, no matter which path you follow her on. It causes her to second-guess going out with an undocumented Peruvian migrant devoted to her, coerces her into entering a charmless relationship with an old white orientalist in the hopes she’ll gain a green card, and is her ultimate failing when she finds herself on the wrong side of the US-Mexico border. The total and complete internalisation of national borders’ surveillance function is never as strong as it is in the US – the narrator travels to both Amsterdam and Berlin, but either never stays long enough to find out, or it simply doesn’t warrant a mention.  

The illusion of choice, heightened by the supposed freedom of the choose-your-own-adventure construct, is revealed many times throughout The Wandering. Stories loop in on one another time and time again – even if you think you’re taking a different path, you end up on the same trajectory. Happiness proves elusive for most of the narrator’s selves – as the narrator observes, ‘happiness is a terminal, not a destination; nobody stays there too long’. Sometimes a choice of three options is presented to you but choice A takes you to C, and choice B still takes you to C. The zigzagging of the narrative requires you to go back to go forward, putting a spanner in any linear progression of plot, or life, as the narrator observes, ‘You feel you’ve run as far away as possible but have still been caught.’

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One of the aphorisms that recur in The Wandering is ‘good girls go to heaven; bad girls go wandering’. Paramaditha couches the act of travelling through the lens of a woman from the global south who travels by herself, privy to the many microaggressions that come from doing so, and through the overarching prism of gender – eighteenth-century Europe is conjured, where women who wandered the streets on their own weren’t considered good women, underlining that it wasn’t always acceptable that Western women travel by themselves.  

What does it mean to be a good woman? We never quite find out because The Wandering isn’t interested in good women. It revolves around revengeful women, impulsive women, murdering women, selfish women, disobedient women, manipulative women, judgemental women.  

In an interview with fellow writer Mirandi Riwoe for Peril magazine, Paramaditha said she finds it important to tell stories about women who resist structures of power that confine them.  

‘Some women experience more pressure than others, and they might resort to small, almost invisible tactics, while others might resist in monstrous ways.’ 

The women in The Wandering, the narrator included, endure in ways both small and monstrous – from a woman who cheats on a husband she doesn’t love with his cousin, to a woman who unleashes an army of murderous man-eating rats on her tight-knit home village who forbade her from being with the man she loved.      

In a riposte to the confines of heteropatriarchy, the only true happy ending of The Wandering is when the narrator enters an undefined yet long-term relationship with a woman. 

At first glance, the second aphorism to reappear throughout the novel, ‘every mirror is a door’, sounds like the sort of opportunistic saying that typifies everything Paramaditha writes against – ‘the discovery of the self and the feminist agency through a capitalist frame, the consumption of exotic places, and [where] the people encountered merely serve as a backdrop.’ Eat, Pray, Love narratives, basically.  

In Paramaditha’s hands, the supposition that every chance to reflect becomes an opportunity for self-commodification is upended into something darker and more unwieldy. In one instance, a magical mirror is the door through which the narrator is forced to confront her past as a murderer.  

The ignominy of travel is similarly evoked to counter any romanticised notions of luxurious, stress-free movement. Rats damp from filthy puddles dart along train rails and sniff intently at garbage. Airport terminals are sterile and discombobulating. Passengers cram their bags into overhead compartments as one passenger fights against the traffic of the narrow aisle so he can get to the toilet. Travel doesn’t always offer the narrator salvation or reprieve, no matter how much she wants it to. Perhaps a hint of the darkness that Paramaditha evokes lies in the original Indonesian title of the work – gentayangan – which, unlike its translated English form, describes the wandering state of spirits; spirits who are no longer in the world but have yet to cross over. Like these spirits, Paramaditha’s narrator oscillates between certainty and confusion, stability and adventure, displacement and belonging.

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Despite being a novel grounded in the constraints of travel and mobility and the ensuing displacement, The Wandering crosses every other boundary imaginable. The demarcation between reader and writer is dismantled as readers assume a level of narrative agency, even if the character they’re assuming doesn’t have much agency at all.

And in one of the most significant acts to shrink the world into the size of a snow globe, an object that reoccurs in The Wandering, Paramaditha weaves a tradition of cross-cultural storytelling throughout the book, placing Southeast Asian folklore figures Malin Kundang and Kuntilanak side-by-side with Greek goddess, Hecate, ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, American pop culture icon Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, French film Amelie, Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tales and German folktale character, Rumpelstiltskin, among many other emblems of a global narrative tradition.

At a time when our fates are inextricably tied to where we live and travel is forbidden, The Wandering pushes for a transformative kind of global solidarity – one that flies in the face of closed borders, and doesn’t relegate any one story, person or setting to a backdrop.