The Year of Living Dangerously

“Sometimes it just isn’t bearable to be fully awake.”

Paul Brand, the noted missionary physician to India, observes of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mother Teresa: “She cannot save all India, so she seeks the least redeemable, the dying.” Brand also recalls the words of Malcolm Muggeridge: that statistically, Mother Teresa does not accomplish much by rescuing a few stragglers from a cesspool of human need. “But then Christianity,” Muggeridge clarifies, “is not a statistical view of life.”

Rumors of this same theme echo throughout the pages of a significant novel, The Year of Living Dangerously. The people of Indonesia remember 1965 as “the year of living dangerously.” So named by Sukarno, the late Indonesian president and deity figure, 1965 brought violence, political upheaval, and continued mass starvation to this equatorially inflamed arc of islands in Southeast Asia. Fifteen years later, Sukarno’s title would attach itself to a novel, and then to a motion picture, each sharply depicting Indonesia’s internal chaos. The novel, especially, goes well beyond its own title, speaking about a Third World plight that, when focused on, makes the senses sting. But for anyone interested in increasing his or her sensitivity to problems in the Third World, The Year of Living Dangerously is invaluable.

Written by Australian journalist and novelist C. J. Koch, the book looks starkly at Third World poverty. Picture the story as a stage play in which all the actors are journalists. Through the eyes of Billy Kwan, a dwarf cameraman, we tour a tunnel of poverty in the hot slums of Jakarta, Java. People bathing in sewage, scrounging for rice and scraps of meat, sleeping in huts the size and shape of cardboard boxes—each is shown through Kwan’s compassionate conciousness. We are moved to consider: What can be done about this mass of starvation?

Introducing troubled Jakarta to a newly assigned foreign reporter one evening, Kwan says: “ ‘This amuses you, doesn’t it? But doesn’t it make you want to do something for them?’

“Hamilton was taken aback. ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ he said. ‘But what can you do? Give money away? What would that solve? It’s up to Sukarno, don’t you think? He could spread some of the money here, instead of spending it on women and monuments.

“ ‘What then must we do?’ Kwan murmured in a tone of litany.’

“ ‘Pardon?’ Hamilton asked.

“ ‘And the people asked him, saying, “What shall we do then?” ’ Luke, chapter three, verse ten. The people were talking to John the Baptist—the ones he called a generation of vipers. They were asking him how they could flee the wrath to come. And he told them, if a man had two coats, he should give one to a man who had none. ‘What then must we do?’ Tolstoy asked the same question. One cold night he went into the poorest section of Moscow—where the poor were hanging about the doss houses, starving.… So he bought them hot drinks, and then he began to give them money. He gave until he had nothing left, and still they came.…”

The question—What to do?—becomes an obsession with Kwan; it becomes a nasty, vexatious question that is threaded throughout the rest of the book. What then must we do? Political solutions have failed. Sukarno has wasted his country’s wealth by building structures and monuments to himself—ornaments to give Indonesia an apparent facelift, while the inner decay grows steadily worse. He tours the country, gives speeches, and governs without a stab of conscience. Thus, Kwan is moved to suggest, “Political solutions are for those with no hearts, only consciences—and consciences go rotten.”

Casting away any hopes of seeing help come from politics and government, Kwan announces one day that “the Christian point of view” is what must be adopted even to begin to deal with Indonesia’s poverty. “I mean,” he says, “the view that you don’t think about the so-called big issues, or changing the system, but you deal with whatever misery is in front of you—and the little bit of good you do adds its light to the sum of light.”

Thus, a new perspective emerges. As mass evangelism might be defined as many Christians doing one-on-one witnessing and shepherding, so the approach to dealing with mass poverty might take a similar tack. Any alleviation of pain, any increase of light in a world of darkness, will come only through each individual’s conviction to act—even in the face of hopelessness.

With this theme in mind, Kwan attempts to put his Christian beliefs into practice. He travels to the deepest slums of Jakarta, locates a destitute peasant woman and her dying son, and begins to help. He writes: “The task may be hopeless, but we must still attempt it. We must give with love to whomever God has placed in our path. So I give to Ibu. I can’t take her out of the hut—but I will transform it. If money is all I can give, then I’ll give it on the spot, and change her life where she sits: a bed, chairs, medicine for little Udin, clothes.”

Through Kwan’s compassion we see dignity in the woman he helps; and in a transcendent way, we see the dignity of the poor everywhere. “I can’t make her understand that the canal which she and the child bathe in and drink from carries disease.… In another country she would be a decent woman. Here, she begs, and perhaps sells herself. She is a nullity, a vacuum. But with what dignity she holds herself together around that vacuum, as her shabby national dress holds her body. Her tragedy is repeated a million times in this city.”

It is a tragedy to which Kwan eventually succumbs. He is slowly destroyed by frustration over those around him who callously watch Java sink deeper into the stagnant juices of its own despair. Commenting on his studio wall of contrasting photographs—a mosaic of Indonesia’s poverty—to a fellow journalist, he charges, “These pictures tell a story about the people here that you don’t tell in your reports—that no one’s telling. Who really cares about these people?” He continues, “Journalists have a standard set of phrases for dismissing pain … put a label on it and somehow it doesn’t exist anymore—it just becomes a problem.”

To Sukarno, Kwan begs: “Why can you no longer see the danger you are courting? Unless we love God and reverence life, we are bound for extinction.” Even Christians and the church are not excluded from the chastisement: “I don’t think the faith is much good unless it’s passionate. Lately I have a feeling the Church has spent its passion. If it has, it’s no place for me. There’s something fine about Islam, don’t you think? The passion’s still there.”

As might be expected, the book portrays this little man as eventually going out of control. He has truly cared and acted, but he has done so alone. In the narrator’s words, “He had set himself on the sort of path that can isolate a man utterly.”

Yet the heartlessness of those who have remained uncaring—the foreign journalists who stay forever as nothing more than “Peeping Toms on life”—is viewed in a far more revealing light. They are pictured as self-gratifying clowns, living life half-asleep. “Sometimes it just isn’t bearable to be fully awake,” the narrator asserts.

The Year of Living Dangerously is perhaps more a book of questions than one of answers. But the questions seem important: the one, for instance, that asks why communism looks so appealing to struggling Third World nations. Says a troubled Indonesian: “You [the West] are told by your leaders you must be anti-Communist. I understand. But—forgive me for saying this—you people do not care about us, you only pretend to. The Communists do care about us.”

It is the subject of compassion that this book addresses. Perhaps it is compassion, true and in action, that keeps people such as Mother Teresa “fully awake” even amid the suffering that surrounds daily. Henri Nouwen, in his book titled Compassion, suggests that to be compassionate on a one-on-one basis with those who suffer is the one true way to understanding the condition of being human. He adds, “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compasssion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears.”

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