The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands

6. Between Stress Beach and Fantasy Island

6 Between Stress Beach and Fantasy Island Along the Batam coastline that faces the Singapore skyline is an area inhabited by liar bars and housing, which is surrounded by empty lots and half-finished buildings. It is an area that is—as the Batam Industrial Development Authority would phrase it—“not yet developed.” Migrants call this Pantai Stres, or Stress Beach. From the shacks that serve as makeshift bars the skyline of Singapore appears to be just within reach; on a clear day one can identify specific buildings without great difficulty. As Saskia Sassen (1996, 23) has put it, the post-industrial city is the “urban form that dominates our image of today’s advanced urban economy.” Even for migrants who had never dreamed of crossing into Malaysia or Singapore before coming to Batam, the view of the city—which makes explicit the boundary between the “developing” and the “developed” worlds—and the stories that are constantly circulating about life there lead most to imagine what life on the other side might be like, particularly when they discover that the opportunities on Batam are not what they had hoped for. In 2003, during a visit to Batam, I noticed an odd structure being built at the far end of the beach, near the commercial settlement of Jodoh. It had the size and shape of a cruise ship, yet was a concrete building that stood twelve stories tall, with its “bow” pointing straight at Singapore. Curious, I asked around and was informed that it was going to become a hotel and a nightclub. The name of the “ship,” I was told, was “Titanic.” One man living in a liar village near the ship suggested, with heavy sarcasm, that a better name would be “Whore Ship” (Kapal Lontong), since prostitution, drugs, and gambling would certainly be the main sources of revenue. Intrigued, I wanted to meet the owner and see the inside. My journalist friends gave me little reason to hope for success, however, telling me that the owner, Pak Edi, never granted interviews. Indeed, the first few times I dropped by the compound to ask for a meeting, the group of uniformed between stress beach and fantasy island : 145 guards at the gate told me that Pak Edi was not available and that I should return another time. But after a week of daily visits my persistence finally paid off and I was escorted to his makeshift office located in the row of barracks at front of the building. Pak Edi, an ethnic Chinese businessman probably in his mid-fifties, was seated at a table with his daughter, studying the blueprints for the building. He invited me to sit down and asked what he could do for me. I told him that I was making a film and writing a book about the development of Batam and that this ship appeared to be representative of the future of the island. Perhaps, I suggested, he could give me a tour and tell me about the ship. After initially deferring to his daughter, I continued to insist and finally he agreed—obviously flattered. Originally from the island of Kundur in the Riau Archipelago, Pak Edi’s family had worked for generations as small-scale rubber planters, exporting the yield directly to middlemen in Singapore until the 1960s. But as a teenager—with intensifying discrimination against ethnic Chinese (see chap. 1)—Pak Edi left Riau for Singapore in search of a different life. He ended up spending twenty years traveling the world as a seaman before returning to Batam in the late 1980s with money and Singaporean connections that were put to use in the booming economy. As he walked Titanic. Photo by Liam Dalzell. Reproduced with permission. 146 : chapter 6 me through what would become the disco, karaoke rooms, restaurants, and a conference hall, he told me, “I’ve loved ships since I was a child so that’s why I’m building this. Sea ships are easily damaged but this one will endure! Give it a hundred years and it’ll be fine.” As we climbed the stairs from floor to floor, Pak Edi—increasingly talkative—continued to comment on the possibilities that Batam offered for an entrepreneur such as himself, particularly the island’s strategic location and the fact that workers did not go on strike like they did in Jakarta. Obviously fascinated by the island’s proximity to...