
See a larger image here: http://www.britannica.com/media/full/215.
At last daylight broke. The sun climbed and heat enveloped the world. Through sunlit streets Alan and Ratih went in search of a restaurant. At the lowest levels of the sunlight were the vendors of fruits, vegetables, scrap metal, old and new clothes, and junk. Pedicab drivers and all sorts of people sat, stood, or crouched against buildings and away from them. Not far from the hotel, on the other side of the intersection, they found a Chinese restaurant. They went in and sat down near the window. Alan looked at the hundreds of people trying to sell their wares, some buying, always in motion, yet seemingly standing still. Traffic moved in all directions under the constantly and predictably changing traffic lights. A man with a kind, round face sold a yellow blouse to a small woman with oily blue hair after much gesturing and moving of lips. He turned excitedly to his neighbor, who was selling old shoes, and showed him the money he had just made.Here's another of Bandung by Matt Koenig:
. . . an attempt at visually presenting, at least in part, the human problems that come with material progress.. . . all of which fits in perfectly with the stories in this amazing collection. You could read article after article about poverty in Southeast Asia that tell the same story about the wealth of the few and desperation of the many, about "progress" and its discontents. Or you could read this collection to give you a sense of all that, but with a personal connection to it through vivid characterization and rich sensory description.
The title refers to the imperviousness of those at the top vis-a-vis the dire needs of humanity at the lower levels of a developing Southeast Asian society. The twisting and turning corporate towers are overwhelmingly on the prowl to take over more of the world, and push the common man and woman back into invisibility. Every day, when I lived in Indonesia, I was confronted with the many for whom life offered little more than their persistent lack of a decent meal.
. . . somewhere between Kabul and Bangkok, nature changed the menu. He hardly recognized any species of whatever they were. The market stretched for blocks. His dictionary said he was passing baskets of jackfruit, rambutans, litchis, soursops, custard apples, durians, roselles, pandanus leaf, brinjals, santols, rose-apples, tamarinds, wood-apples, nipa, langsats, bergamots, bullock’s hearts. There were five pages of such words. Even if you knew the name, how did you eat them? They looked forbidding. Most of them didn’t seem amenable to being picked up and eaten on the spot. There were little red hairy ones and big yellow pock-marked ones; purple things that looked so much more like an old prizefighter’s ear than a cauliflower did that Jack felt sure the English language would change that term, if he could only find out what it was called. He walked for a mile in search of an apple, but found none. He finally settled for a banana, and watched as the stall owner threw it on a grill.If you're like me you want to know what some of those things look like. Today's fruit is langsat: