1
This was not the Tinseltown Los Angeles of the world’s imagination. I looked around at my cohorts at orientation for this language proofreading gig for the LA County Board of Elections. They were clad in baggy clothes from Costco, were balding or had drugstore hair dye jobs, sported clompy scuffed shoes or spike heels too fancy for a language proofreading gig. The first day, since this was a government job, involved presentation after presentation about the job rules (no cellphones), how to adjust our chairs and desks to prevent repetitive stress injuries, sexual harassment, COVID-19 protection, preventing heat stroke, and the dress code (no jeans or t-shirts).
The moderator, a stout person who had not yet shared pronouns, went around the room asking which languages people spoke. Mandarin. Spanish. Korean. Farsi. Russian. When I said Indonesian, as someone whose looks reflect white European ancestry, I got a few strange looks. I was likely the only non-native speaker there. It turned out the only other Indonesian speaker present, Utomo, was sitting next to me.
“I had a husband from Bali,” I explained. “Lived there for a year and a half. Then took a course at Berkeley. But I’m not sure I can do this.”
“Don’t worry, the job is gampang,” he told me, using the Indonesian word for easy. “There are a lot of Indonesians in LA. What’s your Whatsapp?”
My phone dinged (oh yeah, no cellphones), and he had sent me an invitation to an Indonesian get-together in a park the following weekend.
“Free food!” he told me. “And there’s a gamelan in Valencia.”
“Gampang,” he repeats. “And after, if you want, there’s more work with the ballots.”
2
The LA County Board of Elections offers translated election materials in eighteen languages besides English, including Armenian, Chinese, Khmer, Farsi, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hindi, Japanese, Thai, Russian, Bengali, Burmese, Gujarati, Indonesian, Mongolian, and Telugu. The multilingual offerings are based on federal legislation passed in 2006, which extended the minority language provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. Any county with more than 10,000 residents of voting age and of a particular language group, or more than 5% of citizens of voting age, whose native language is not English and who indicate a lack of English proficiency on their US Census form, is required to provide election materials in the language of these residents.
Proofreading groups for all of those languages are seated by language in a big room in the LA County Board of Elections building in City of Industry. It’s indeed a pretty industrial city, except when I walk across the parking lot every morning, I hear a rooster crowing.
“There are cameras everywhere!” we are warned. “We’re dealing with the elections here!”
On one side of me are the Koreans. Although they sit in open cubicles, their language is like a wall to my ears—I can tell it’s Korean, but can’t pick up any words or phrases. The people in the Russian group are either stout with orthopedic shoes, or impossibly thin with those spike heels—they are sitting on the other side of me, and I understand occasional phrases, as I’ve studied Russian in high school and college. Burmese sounds round to me—bubbles of vowels floating in the air. The Japanese group is at the end of our row—“Arigato,” I say weakly in their direction. The guy I met who is getting an online master’s degree in physics from Johns Hopkins smiles and nods at me. Terima kasih, one of the other Japanese speakers responds, the one word he knows in Indonesian.
I turn to the Koreans, not wanting to be rude. “How do you say how are you in Korean?”
“An nyeong.”
Now sitting between me and Utomo is Saqueena, a gorgeous Indonesian woman with long dark hair and eyelashes and a tangerine wrap dress who does in fact meet the LA stereotype of young and beautiful.
“Jangan khawatir,” Saqueena tells me. “Don’t worry. I’m your group leader, and I take care of my group. Kita kerja sama, we work together.”
I realize that even though I am living and working in Los Angeles County, I am going to be enveloped in the communal culture of Indonesia for the next six weeks.
3
“Anda is always capitalized, ya?” I ask Saqueena.
She nods and hands me a treat called Kupkak, with a drawing of a cupcake on the wrapper. I usually try to avoid sweets, but I feel cultural pressure to eat sweet things during the span of this job.
“Pelan-pelan kerja,” she says. “Jangan buru-buru. Nanti tidak ada lembur kalua terlalu cepat.”
She tells me to work slowly. Don’t be in a rush, or else we won’t get as much overtime.
I am reading candidate statement after candidate statement. Though I was worried my Indonesian wouldn’t be good enough for this gig, it turns out my level is perfect. Our job is to read over already translated materials, such as candidate statements and measures, and proofread them while comparing them to the English versions. My best language skill is reading, and I am an English major whose first job was proofreading for a tax attorney (before helping him with his website and then pivoting into tech), so in terms of understanding the nuances of the English, I can be particularly helpful.
Anda means “you” in Indonesian, though it is a very formal way of saying you to people you don’t know, perfect for a candidate statement. I notice that Saqueena, whom I’ve already started calling Queena, calls Utomo Om, which means uncle, though she calls me directly by my name.
“Utomo!” I call to him when Queena is away from her desk. “There are so many ways to say you or refer to people in Indonesian. What is the appropriate way to refer to you and Queena?” Since I lived in Bali, I do know many Balinese language honorifics, but they are not appropriate for people from Java. Utomo patiently lists a bunch of possible terms, including kak and mas and bung and teh and mbak, for us to politely refer to each other. There are multiple terms depending on age and status.
“But which one should I use?”
“You can call her Kak Queena and me Kak Utomo. That’s a common word we would use in Java.”
I feel more confident, knowing I will call them the right thing.
A few days later, after proudly calling Saqueena Kak Queena several times, displaying my cultural competency, I ask her what term she would use for me.
“Since you’re a bule, it’s okay to just use your name… or I could call you Ibu [mother].” She thinks about it for a moment.
“Do you want me to call you Tante?” she asks beaming, using the word for aunt.
From then on, I am Tante, she is Kak Queena, and we both call Utomo Om.
4
I start proofreading the candidate statements, still worried if I can do this job. Candidate statements have many repetitive terms, which is good, because my brain starts seeing those terms and phrases, instead of the individual words, and understanding them instantly, so my reading goes faster. I’m actually good at proofreading, I realize; I’m at the right level for that. I can’t yet do full-on detailed, grammatically accurate translation from English to Indonesian. Before this gig, my streets-of-Bali bahasa was fluent only in talking about uncooked rice or cooked rice, cockfights, if I had already eaten or taken a bath, the sunset, how much were those shallots, or asking how to fold a banana leaf to make a banten, an offering to the gods.
Now I’m learning a new vocabulary.
Most candidates, whether for school board or city council or water board or state representative, describe themselves as “compassionate (belas kasih, perasaan kasih, penuh kasih, kepedulian)” and “involved in the community” (terlibat pada masyarakat) which is of course “vibrant” (menawan) or “charming” (pesona) or “special” (khusus). Schools will always be improved (memperbaiki). Democrats stress how diverse (beragam) their city is. Republicans stress maintenance of order (penjagaan ketertiban) and use words such as collapse (runtuh), declining (merosotnya), and threat (ancaman). Verbs the candidates of both parties use to describe their actions include spearhead (memelopori), support (menopang), organize (menyelenggarakan), improve (memperbaiki), inspire (mengilhami), and reinvigorate (menyegarkan kembali). Everyone mentions the problem of homelessness (ketunawismaan).
The candidates grew up and raised their children in the communities that they love, often had parents who crossed borders to get there, moms and dads who worked as housekeepers and gardeners to send them to college, and they’ve gone to college and maybe law school and own a house in a city off the 60, east of LA, and greatly contribute to their community. They mention how their lives reflect the American dream, and that they want to bring that dream to more people.
“The Korean boss is too harsh,” Queena tells me in Indonesian, smiling so it looks like she is saying something positive. Today she is wearing stylish flare jeans with camouflage Doc Martens, and a tight indigo top. “She doesn’t make coming to work fun. And, remember to hide your phone.” She hands me a cookie rolled into the shape of a tube, dipped in chocolate.
“Terima kasih!” I thank her.
I wish the pay were better. It’s crappy pay, especially given such a long commute, a bit above minimum wage, but at least I am helping more Angelenos vote and learning more Indonesian. I imagine the people around me are sharing one-bedrooms with several people, or at least live with a spouse or lover, or they are retired, so they consider the pay decent. It could be their first job since they immigrated here. Maybe they will post photos on WhatsApp or WeChat showing this clean, bright office, or the larger warehouse space with rows of shiny ballot-sorting machines, to impress their friends and family in the old country with their American office job, a stepping stone to respectability.
I’m probably the only laid-off tech worker here, used to working from home, pool tables in the office, endless coffee and snacks, long lunches, jobs you don’t have to clock into. I’m probably the only non-native speaker here, one of the few American-born. I consider arguing to the big boss that we need to use our phones for Google Translate, since there’s been a week-long delay in hooking up our computer access, and our work would be more efficient that way. But everyone else seems to accept that they will sneak and use their phones, careful to put it away when they see one of the managers tromping down the aisle, so I reluctantly do the same.
One of the Koreans dropped off a finely wrapped cookie on everyone’s desk this morning in honor of Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival. I don’t usually eat sweets, but I can’t refuse. It’s delicious, redolent of honey, sesame oil, and ginger. I can’t leave Queena’s pirouline either—I’m acutely aware that in Indonesia, it would be rude not to eat food that is offered. With my LA friends, it would be normal to refuse sugar, even laudatory. But here, different rules apply. And my brain needs the glucose for hours more of concentrated reading and revising.
To help my concentration, I decide to work standing up. I remember from our orientation that there’s a way to make our desk a standing desk. I fumble around and finally find a black button with an up arrow on my right side and tentatively push it. The desk indeed jerks up. I look over to Queena with a gleeful grin, as I keep pushing and the desk rises.
“Tante! she says. “You don’t have to figure out things by yourself. You have me next to you to help you! Ask me!”
I am used to figuring things out by myself.
5
Right before afternoon break, the boss, a short Asian woman with a bob who is stern in the way county bureaucrats with a modicum of power can be stern, stands in the middle of the room and yells at us: “We are behind. We need to send the voter booklets out starting next week. You must work faster. You are doing this for your community!”
The Koreans nod. The Japanese nod. The Thais nod. The Chinese nod. The Burmese nod. The Mexicans nod. The Gujaratis nod. The Russians nod. Queena and Utomo nod. I don’t nod. Although I feel Indonesian while I’m here, I have so many intersecting communities. What is my community?
As I walk out, I find myself behind a group of Chinese slowly strolling as they chat. I’m originally from New Jersey, where we walk faster. Like New Yorkers. My nearby hurried presence behind them is not enough for them to speed up. It reminds me of when I lived in Taipei in the late eighties, with its crowded sidewalks lined with vendors selling barbecued squid and greasy pork dumplings, where the local solution would be to simply barge into the group and push your way ahead. I briefly consider that, but then walk to the side, past the Burmese with their floating bubbles of speech and then the Russians, the staid woman with a potato face and thinning salt-and-pepper hair and clompy shoes next to the heavily made-up dame with the spike heels pinging on the tile floor. The clompy shoes look familiar, and I remember hearing loud grunting in the stall next to me in the bathroom earlier, and wonder if that was a cultural, or just an individual trait.
“You look pretty!” an Asian woman with crow’s feet tells me, smiling.
I am wearing a red cotton shirt with a billowy white skirt. I threw on the white skirt early this morning, remembering the no jeans rule, though Queena’s wearing jeans today and handed a chocolate to one of the managers, who chatted gayly with her about her weekend shopping, saying nothing about her dress code violation. At a tech company, it would be weird to comment on someone’s looks, even in a positive way, but it reminds me of when I lived in Taiwan and taught my first English class focusing on adjectives. Students with names like Winter and Sunny pointed at others and matter-of-factly said things like “She’s pretty” and “He’s fat,” which seemed to be on the same level as saying “He has brown hair.”
“You’re with the Indonesians!”
“Had a husband from Bali, lived there for a year and a half,” I tell her, smiling back, answering her unasked question about why this weird white lady was proofreading Indonesian.
“I am on the Thai team, my name is Tanya,” she says, reaching out her hand to me. As we shake, she notices the thick book under my arm, Infinite Jest. I keep it on my desk to stealthily page through when Queena tells me, in Indonesian of course, to work more slowly, to ensure we get overtime. The managers who patrol the aisles looking for cellphone use don’t seem to notice an analog book, or the notebook I bring to write down words to remember, doodle or jot down story ideas.
“You like to read?” Tanya continues, as we pass the ballot counting machines. “I like to read, too! What’s that book about?”
“I’m not done with it yet, but something about the US idea of the pursuit of happiness and how short-sighted it is, how we’re addicted to media and drugs, and how what we think of our country is really the intersection of our own desires and fears.”
I’m not sure Tanya understands what I’m saying, given that English is not her first language. I’m not even sure I understand what I’m saying. I’m definitely going to have to read and reread David Foster Wallace’s book. I wonder if she is a fan of Russian literature because of her name. I wonder if she is Thai or Thai-Chinese, which might affect her philosophy on prioritizing the pursuit of happiness.
We are almost at the office door, and break is about to end.
“I just read a great book about a man who survived the Holocaust, was in a concentration camp but still found meaning in life. I forget the title. I’ll look it up and let you know.”
“Thank you Tanya, khob khun kha,” I say, bowing my head and pressing my palms together. I am touched by Tanya, connecting with me through a book across regions and times and ethnicities. As I pass her desk, I swerve away from her neighbor, who is having a coughing fit, but fail to see her elbow flung into my direction as part of an end-of-break tai chi move. It whacks my ribcage.
6
I get up to sharpen my blue and red pencils. If you are the first proofreader, you use the red pencil, and if you are the second proofreader, you use the blue pencil. It’s a nice walk past the Koreans and Burmese and full-time employee IT guys with coffee on their desks from the nearby Starbucks or gas station. There’s a new member of the Japanese team filing documents near the pencil sharpener, who peers at me over his oval glasses, framed by long wispy strands of black and white hair.
“You’re on the Indonesian team. Are you Dutch?” he asks me, looking me up and down.
“No,” I tell him, clutching my newly-sharpened pencils. “I had a husband.”
Today I’m reading measures and arguments in favor of measures and arguments against and rebuttals to arguments. In Indonesian and English. This is some serious reading. In a world of TikTok, I wonder how many people actually read any of this, even in English. Words and sentences and measures blend together in my head, but I’m realizing whoever’s job it is to write the actual measures does a lot of cutting-and-pasting. Whether it’s about school improvements or bond repayment, I encounter the same lists of words over and over. I feel like an LLM training on bigrams and trigrams. I learn how to say bring schools up-to-speed for the twenty-first century, I learn how to say servers and tablets and software and hardware and fiber (Queena and I had to actually Google Internet providers in Indonesia to see the language they’d use), how to say new sewer lines, sidewalks, speed bumps, flooring, gates. Getting rid of mold and mildew. And grants and matching funds and principal and interest and installment and advance payment and due date and real property. And long-term and invalidity and severability.
In the haze of reading measures for hours on end, it was an exciting break when we had to communally discuss a word or phrase. “Isn’t this supposed to be pokok, which means interest?” I ask Queena, while reading a bond measure. “But it says popok.”
“Popok means diaper!”
I feel supremely useful. Utomo hadn’t caught that mistake though he’s read this measure already. I circle popok with my blue pencil and draw a big X. It’s fun using pencil and paper. You can put feeling into your lines and words. I have prevented the Indonesian public in LA County from having the word diaper accidentally inserted into their bond measure.
Then, in the supporter list for a measure, I see that the advocacy group Common Cause is mistranslated in a way that means “common reason.” This sends us to the English dictionary and then back to Indonesian dictionaries to come up with Tujuan Bersatu, which means literally “united purpose.” Close enough.
There is another case where the translator used the wrong word for state—in the measure I was reading, the English word state meant “situation,” but the translator had used the word for a state meaning part of the United States, negara bagian.
I have to explain STEAM and STEMM, and how they are different from STEM.
I am most proud when coming to the end of a measure that took four full hours to get through, full of legal language. When I get to the last clause, in Indonesian it is mistakenly titled using the word for conclusion, but when I read the English it is actually a severability clause, which means that its terms are independent of one another so that the rest of the contract will remain in force even if one or more of its other provisions are declared void (I had to look that one up). I use the blue pencil again to cross out the wrong word and add the Indonesian word for severability. I do admire the original translators for getting most of the complicated language right.
I feel most American when a candidate statement I am reading in Indonesian refers to the Super Bowl and it is described in parentheses using the words for top rugby tournament. I feel almost indignant. “This is wrong!” I tell Queena. To confirm, Queena googles “ragbai” and then “rugby” and it is described in the search results as “rugby football,” so she starts to tell me she thinks the description is correct as I had used the word football to begin to describe what the Super Bowl was.
Then I put my foot down as an American and tell her that was wrong, the Super Bowl is a game of American football, not rugby. She has never heard of it, though she is already an American citizen, and even Utomo nods, “Oh yaaa,” as if he had heard of that before, but I wasn’t sure he had.
7
The candidate statements are done; the measures are done. Finally, we can use the computers and compare hundreds of English and Indonesian ballots for different regions. It’s mind-numbing, but I make sure to double-check the presidential candidates and make sure they’re listed correctly. It’s more exciting when we get pulled into the main area of the building and get to test audio on the online voting machines. We choose our language, and vote over and over again to hear the candidate names being spoken and the measures being read. We can also read the measures that we’ve proofread on the screen, and I thank the universe the word for diaper won’t be included. I pretend I am actually voting each time. I know who I’m going to vote for, and I know from the talk in the cubicles that there’s not one presidential candidate that all immigrants are going to uniformly vote for, despite what politicians say.
8
It’s the last day. Utomo is at my computer and we’re looking at Yelp. At a convenience and health store called Sam’s Nutrition Center, in Monterey Park. “The man serves Indonesian food in the back,” Utomo tells me. “He used to own a restaurant but it closed. It’s delicious!”
Tanya comes by and hands me a small piece of paper, upon which she has written the name of the book she told me about: Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. I wonder what the Thai or Chinese translation is like, and if the book has the same feeling in a different language.
There is a pizza party for the whole group today onsite, but Queena and Utomo want us to go get Indonesian food at Tip Top Mart in Rosemead. We climb into Queena’s large white Mercedes SUV. As soon as we get onto the 60, she starts speeding, the windows open, her hair flying. I grab onto the strap and Queena laughs at me.
“Takut? she asks me. “Are you scared?”
We have a sense of freedom now that we are out of the building. We all openly hold our phones as the car speeds, the wind blowing through our hair. We take the exit to Rosemead.
“Queena, do you like living in the US?”
“Bebas. It’s free here. I can walk down the street wearing whatever I’d like and no one bothers me. In Java, they would bother me.”
We drive on a dusty street lined by cinderblock buildings. In an empty lot are homeless tents.
I say the word I’ve read so many times in the candidate statements, the measures.
“Ketunawisamaan!” I point to the homeless encampment.
We pull into the strip mall Tip Top Mart is in. The owner greets Utomo. Utomo explains who we are. It’s not a real restaurant, but an old Sumatran woman missing a couple of teeth is cooking rice in the back. We go back there and point to the dishes we’d like. The owner clears a table piled with dumplings in plastic containers and draws up a few chairs.
“Makan!” he tells us. “Eat!”
We sit together, eating our rice and tempeh curry. It tastes like Indonesia.
We get dessert at a Chinese pharmacy in an adjacent strip mall that has a sugar cane juicing machine. The worker glares at us as she feeds the sugar cane into the machine. It’s cash only. We each get a cup of fresh sugar cane juice with a big straw.
On the ride back, we speed faster so we can get there in time for the end of the lunch break. We slurp our sugar cane juice. The sugar supercharges our veins. We did our job. It tastes like America. It tastes like happiness. It tastes like freedom. We speed down the 60 that connects Los Angeles to the San Gabriel Valley, the 60 that connects to the 10 which goes all the way to the Pacific. Across the Pacific, there’s an archipelago. It feels like we’re there and here all at once.
Shara Karasic grew up in New Jersey and after double-majoring at Tufts in English Literature and Soviet Studies, taught English in Taiwan and Indonesia. She then embarked on a tech career in San Francisco and now lives in Los Angeles, where she is writing a memoir about raising a biracial son as a single mom. Instagram: @sharakarasic Substack: sharakarasic.substack.com.