On My Hands and Knees
by Christhalia Wiloto
Even after I stopped talking to him, I still heard my dad’s voice every day. I think it’s the plight of the writer. Other than my mom, there was no other person I spent more years of my life with. No one I understood more, no one who loved me more than him. His words came to me, easily, like lines of dialogue between two characters. I worried love would always feel this way.
I walked in circles on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, retracing my steps in that familiar gallery from memory, but I couldn’t find Willem de Kooning’s Woman I. The painting was no longer on view, I later realized. I sat on the bench facing Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 instead to rest. This large canvas that took up the whole wall was a work of tangled lines, of abstract drips and pours and splatters. I couldn’t tell where one drip ended and another splatter began. Sitting alone on that bench, I thought of my dad. I could never tell where one conversation between us ended and another argument began either.
I had just sold my first poem, titled “Abstract Expressionism,” to The Margins. The $50 that the Asian American Writers’ Workshop deposited into my bank account helped me believe that I was a writer. I looked from the painting on the wall to the ceiling. On the wall above the painting and below the ceiling was a sign that read, “The Nelson A. Rockefeller Gallery”. This is what I’ve always wanted, I thought to myself. This is my dream, isn't it? Of course, when I was staring at the ceiling of my childhood bedroom in Jakarta dreaming about one day becoming a writer in New York, I never imagined that it would happen like this. That my dad would get so sick. That I would have to drop out of NYU because my family could no longer afford my tuition. That I would find myself alone in the most expensive city in the world with no degree and no money. All I had left was this life I had imagined for myself—this dream of becoming a writer. The trouble with dreams is that, when you’re dreaming, you don’t actually know whether you’re in a dream or a nightmare. The dream is your reality, the life that you are living. “Terserah kamu mau ngapain. Terserah kamu mau tulis apa,” Do whatever you want. Write whatever you want, my dad spat at me over the phone, even as he had difficulties forming the sounds of the words through a lisp since his stroke. “I will never read anything you write anyway. I will never understand anything written in your complicated English.”
I had written “Abstract Expressionism” two years before. I usually flew back to Jakarta for school breaks like other international students, but I couldn’t afford the flight home. I couldn’t afford a lot of things that summer. Entry to MoMA, however, was free with a valid college ID. One afternoon, I was wandering through the museum to escape the summer heat when a label on the wall caught my attention: “‘Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented,’ de Kooning once remarked.” Immediately, I thought of my mom. And I knew I had a poem.
I didn’t finish the poem until later in the fall. The title came last. It occurred to me to google Willem de Kooning; I read that he was a core member of the New York School and a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism. I looked at my poem, this thick block of prose, and thought that the text looked like an abstract—as in, the abstract that comes at the beginning of an academic paper. Titling my poem “Abstract Expressionism” felt fitting. Perfect title, the poetry professor had written on her copy of my submission for workshop. In another classroom that same semester, an American film history professor said, “The cultural logic of late capitalism is the necessity of thinking about how everything is integrated.” He was doing a lecture on Cold War-era American cinema and how the CIA funded Hollywood to create propaganda for the U.S. government. It wasn’t just filmmakers that the CIA funded, the professor explained. They funded painters and novelists, too. I sat up straight in my seat, suddenly remembering a conversation between me and my dad: “Arswendo dulu dapet beasiswa ke Amerika loh.” You know, your uncle Arswendo had received a scholarship to study in America. He added, “It was a small school though, somewhere in Iowa.” I paused. “Iowa?”
It was no secret that the U.S. government had used the CIA to financially back the Indonesian dictator Suharto and the 1965-66 Massacre of approximately one million innocent civilians accused as communists. This history had been investigated by the journalist Vincent Bevins in his book The Jakarta Method and by the filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer in his Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing. It was also no secret that the U.S. government had financially backed American arts and literary institutions like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to be used by the CIA as cultural weapons throughout the Cold War. This history had also been investigated by Eric Bennett in Workshops of Empire, following decades of his own work as a writer. As a student sitting in that windowless basement classroom, however, I began to ask myself a particularly absurd question: “Was my uncle given a CIA-funded scholarship to be trained as an asset and used to write the propaganda novel Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI for a U.S.-backed dictator?”
I sat on the soft green carpet, my cheeks a little warm from the plum wine that someone had poured into a yellow mug for me. Aisha was throwing a houseparty in her apartment in Bed-Stuy. Her little sister kneeled over her mixer in the corner of the living room to DJ. She was taking a music production class that semester. A sculpture student sat on the couch with their laptop, furiously typing to finish their application for a Brooklyn Museum Fellowship before the submission deadline at midnight. A graphic design student passed around individually wrapped, ready-to-eat packets of marinated quail eggs that their mom had brought from Hong Kong. A sociology student arrived late because she was coming from a talk that an independent 2024 U.S. presidential candidate was doing on her campus. An urban design student asked the hosts if she could smoke a cigarette out the open window. Another design student started dancing. I ripped open the plastic wrapper of another ready-to-eat quail egg. I had eaten at least six of them. Each small egg was perfectly savoury, its yolk creamy in my mouth.
I heard someone say, “That was the last of the wine.”
Someone else called out, “Does anyone have an ID to run down and get more drinks?”
It occurred to me that everyone at this party was younger than me. It also occurred to me that each of them would graduate with their Bachelor’s degree before I did.
As I zipped up my faux-leather puffer jacket to leave at the end of the night, Aisha mentioned that she was going to a screening of a documentary by an Indonesian director at MoMA the next day. Or, seeing as it was past 1 a.m., later that day. “You should come,” she said.
At the ticketing booth of the museum, I pulled out my NYU ID card from my wallet. My card had been de-activated by the university once I couldn’t afford tuition. I hadn’t been able to tap myself into campus since. The woman behind the ticketing booth, however, wouldn’t have known that I was a college drop out. All she needed to see was the purple card in my hand.
“Enjoy,” she smiled warmly as she handed me a ticket.
In the lower level of the museum, I found Aisha and her friends already seated. I slid into the empty seat beside her. The theater began to fill and I noticed Aisha turning to look around the room, her brows furrowed. “Orang Indonesianya pada di mana aja sih?” Where are all the other Indonesians? The rows were packed with white faces.
I didn’t know much about Monisme or its director before coming to this screening. I hadn’t even watched the trailer. All I knew was that it was a documentary about Mount Merapi, an active volcano in Central Java on the border between Jogja and where Eyang, my paternal grandmother, grew up in Klaten. I didn’t watch a lot of nature documentaries. My reference to the genre were the Planet Earth episodes narrated by David Attenborough’s iconically soothing British voice that my elementary school teachers played in the classroom whenever it rained and we couldn’t play outside on the basketball court during recess. It wasn’t long after the lights went down and the film started, though, that I understood Monisme wasn’t that kind of documentary.
By the time that the theater lights came back on, I felt aware of my heartbeat. It wasn’t beating faster or anything dramatic, still I was aware of my own pulse. Its rhythm in my head, the back of my neck, my fingertips. The director, Riar, and a moderator who introduced himself as one of the two curators who put together this film festival took their seats on the stage, brightened by spotlights. Sitting in the audience, I tried to make sense of how the film made me feel. Monisme was a film that questioned what it meant to be an Indonesian storyteller. The volcano at the center of this documentary was the pulsing heart of the narrative, sure, but the story was less about the geology of the volcano and more about how human bodies interact with the pulse of the earth. Sand mining destabilizes Mount Merapi’s dormant state, threatening everyone in its vicinity and beyond. Still, the mining continues. Monisme documented this absurdity through docufiction.
I had never heard of the term “docufiction” before that evening. Docufiction was the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction. In Monisme, it was documentary footage stitched together by narrative storytelling through the inclusion of scripted scenes. The product was a film that both documented the actions of a corrupt governing state and meditated on how we could still leave a record of stories we wanted amidst the oppression and censorship of the state.
On stage, Riar spoke about how he went into these jungles of Central Java with his camera to record the heinous acts of the paramilitaries—the gangsters hired by corporations or the government, or both, to control a territory. Referred to as preman in Indonesian—from the Dutch word vrijman, meaning free man—these paramilitaries serve as a proxy for the corrupt governing state by terrorizing locals into submission.
With a little smile, Riar said, “Whenever they asked me what I was filming, I would say I was making a fictional film.”
The paramilitaries didn’t want to be surveilled, for their actions to be documented and reported on. But, like most humans, they wanted to be seen. When they were told that they were being filmed for a fictional horror movie, they performed for the director’s camera.
The audience chuckled at this. So did I, my fingertips pulsing.
Riar continued. “Horror is the most popular movie genre in Indonesia commercially, but I also think that our national state cinematic language is horror. Our people have been through so much trauma— from the colonial era, to the thirty one year dictatorship, to the corruption that remains today— that horror is how we make sense of our lives and our stories. Even that state propaganda film the Suharto regime produced used the cinematic traditions of the horror genre. The paramilitaries loved the idea of being in a horror movie.”
Again, the audience laughed. This time, the laugh that escaped my throat felt different. As soon as he had referred to that state propaganda film, my heart raced.
The director and the curator left the stage at the end of the Q&A and, as the theater began to clear out row by row, Aisha said, “Let’s talk to Riar.”
“Do you know him?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, but we can just say that we’re Indonesians.”
We waited for the director at the lobby, but the museum security guard asked us to exit the building. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket for warmth as we continued to wait on the sidewalk. Aisha adjusted the batik scarf around her neck. We kept trying to spot him through the glass walls.
“Tuh, itu orangnya tuh,” she said when he finally came out the door. There he is.
A crowd formed around him. One person after another stopped him to tell him how great his film was.
“We’re heading to the bar!” someone shouted to the director as they walked away.
Riar nodded at them and wrapped up his conversation with the man he was speaking to. When he turned, his body had begun to move faster, as if he was ready to catch up with his friend. I only had this one brief moment. I gently touched his arm.
“Hi,” I said.
He stopped. “Hi.”
I knew I had to be quick. Not just because he was leaving, but because I might lose whatever little courage I had if I didn’t just say it out loud: “I loved what you said earlier about Monisme as a work of docufiction. I get it, sometimes we write fiction when we don’t feel safe speaking the truth yet. I’m a writer from Indonesia and I came to New York to study fiction at NYU. So I mainly write fiction, but recently I’ve started writing a nonfiction essay collection about how I was in the middle of a professor’s lecture in an American Film History class when I learned that my uncle received a CIA-funded scholarship to attend the International Writing Program of the Iowa Writers Workshop so that he could be commissioned to write the novelization of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI.” At the mention of the title of that state propaganda film, I knew that I had his attention. I kept going. “And then I realized that the writer and director of that film, Arifin C. Noer, had also received the same scholarship to attend Iowa. So to see your film screen at MoMA, of all places,” I talked with my hands and now they gestured to the building towering over us, “it meant a lot to me to see an Indonesian film like yours here.”
I felt my pulse, fast, everywhere. Aisha introduced herself and spoke about her own interests in experimental documentary filmmaking as a film student. I heard footsteps, cars driving by, engines, somebody else’s laughter, the screeching and blaring honks of the city, my pulse, and then the director’s voice again,
Do you guys want to come out and have a drink with us?
I always pretended like I knew what I was doing. The negroni came served with an orange peel and ice cubes that almost went up my nose. I quickly learned to take smaller sips. The staff at the bar of the Warwick Hotel had pushed five tables together to seat our whole party. A server placed a small bowl of peanuts on the table and I thought of reaching for a few just to have something to do with my hands, but decided against it. I worried I would choke.
Sitting across the table from me, I recognized, was the MoMA curator who moderated the Q&A with Riar earlier. Talking to the man beside him, he asked, “What did you get?”
“Gin and tonic. You?”
“A hot toddy,” the curator replied. I watched the steam rising from his mug.
“A hot toddy is a delicious choice,” I suddenly heard myself saying, jumping into their conversation. My boldness surprised me. I kept talking. “I’ve only had a homemade one that a friend mixed for me, though.”
I learned that the man sitting beside the curator was the Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui, whose film Small Hours of the Night had also been selected for the festival. The curators were particularly interested in docufiction films that year. Set in the 1960s, Daniel’s film was an experimental documentation of Singapore’s political history.
“I used to live in Singapore,” I mentioned. “I grew up there for five years, throughout elementary school.”
Daniel smiled. “My film is screening again next Wednesday.”
“I’ll be there.”
Seated to my right, Riar spoke about the sand mines featured in his documentary. I caught the tail end of what he was saying about an Indonesian bill that made it illegal for people to write critically on the extraction activities of mining companies. He emphasized, “Indonesians on the ground can’t speak out on what has been happening to them.”
“Indonesia just elected the ex-son-in-law of that dictator, right?” the curator brought up.
“We just had our presidential election last week,” Riar confirmed.
From across the table, Aisha and I turned to look at each other.
To be an Indonesian student studying in America requires a great amount of money. The costs of tuition alone were exorbitant, especially given how weak the Indonesian Rupiah was against the U.S. Dollar. Very few Indonesians could access this specific kind of education. Leaving NYU in 2024 wasn’t the first time that I wasn’t able to enroll in classes because my family couldn’t afford to pay tuition. I had taken a Leave of Absence in 2019 that lasted three years until Oma, my maternal grandmother, passed away and left us with just enough of an inheritance for me to return to New York. I also missed the first three days of school as a 10th grader in my elite (read: expensive) international high school in Jakarta. And before that, in the 8th grade, the principal once pulled me out of class for an outstanding bill. Not being able to afford school wasn’t new to me, but I never got used to it. I spent so much time trying to figure out how my uncle got a scholarship to study writing in America—in a program as prestigious as Iowa, of all places. Finally being forced to drop out of NYU, despite my near perfect GPA, just because I didn’t have any money made clear to me that there were only two ways an Indonesian student could study at a university in America: you either had to have rich parents or you had to convince someone rich that you can make them richer.
I widened the scope of my hypothesis once I recognized this pattern of how money and power moved through American academia. Writers like my uncle and the director of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI weren’t the only Indonesian students who received a U.S.-funded American education at a school like Iowa and were used as assets within the U.S.-backed Suharto regime. Throughout the Cold War, Indonesian students across different disciplines were lured to the United States by scholarships so that they could be trained in America and be sent back to Indonesia. Once trained, they would be manipulated and pressured to act as American assets to ultimately be used to serve the interests of the richest American corporations.
In my research, I traced the history of Indonesian academia back to 1951, when Professor Sumitro Djojohadikusumo became Dean of the Economics Department at Universitas Indonesia— just as the Dutch faculty of this prestigious university were leaving to return to the Netherlands following Indonesia’s 1949 victory at the end of the Indonesian National Revolution. This left Professor Sumitro with a problem to solve: he had a whole department of Indonesian students to teach, but not enough qualified Indonesian teachers to teach them. That year, he made his first appeal to the Ford Foundation through a friend for educational assistance. Professor Sumitro’s proposal was denied. The Ford Foundation wasn't interested in helping Indonesian students… not until 1955, after President Sukarno had successfully hosted the Bandung Conference that invited leaders of newly independent Asian and African countries to condemn neo-colonialism and to reimagine what transnational cooperation could look like. The Bandung Conference saw the beginnings of the Non-Aligned Movement, which the U.S. saw as a threat in their Cold War strategy. Only after Washington began strategizing for the overthrow of President Sukarno did the Ford Foundation agree to fund a cooperative program between Universitas Indonesia and UC Berkeley. Interestingly, after the U.S.-backed 1965-66 Massacre of approximately one million innocent civilians accused as communists occurred, and President Sukarno was overthrown, and the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto rose to power— many of these U.S.-trained economics students went on to assume key cabinet positions within Suharto’s government. This inner circle of men who shaped the Indonesian economy, still incredibly malleable in a country so young, proudly referred to themselves as the Berkeley Mafia.
What interested me most in my tracing of my young country’s history, however, was whenever my fingers brushed against a scar— a mark left on skin where a wound hadn’t quite healed properly. One geography student from the prestigious Universitas Gadjah Mada also received a scholarship to study at the East-West Center of the University of Hawai’i: Lolo Soetoro. While there, he fell in love with a fellow student— a white American woman. At night when they were alone, he told her about his dreams of returning to Indonesia and teaching at the university. He had lost both his father and his eldest brother in the Indonesian National Revolution, but he believed he could rebuild his young country now that the Dutch had been driven out. The Indonesian student and the American student married; he adopted her son from her previous marriage. Except, unbeknownst to Lolo when he first accepted that U.S.-funded scholarship, he was never so much a student as he was an asset to be used. By 1966, amidst the chaotic days of the Massacre and General Suharto’s rapid rise to power, Lolo was separated from his American family as he was forced to return home to Indonesia and conscripted by the Indonesian military into the jungles of Papua to create a map of the island. I continued my research, tracing and retracing the familiar shape of this scar— until I learned that one of Suharto’s first moves as Acting President in 1967 was to sign a contract with the American mining company Freeport, allowing them to penetrate the world’s largest gold, copper, and nickel mines in Papua.
The shape of certain scars could feel so familiar that I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe these wounds had been caused by the same weapon. So, I kept tracing our shared history. I learned that the U.S. Congress had rewritten their tax code during the Great Depression and WWII to place an unprecedentedly high tax rate on large businesses. Every profit a rich American corporation made would make the U.S. government richer. The U.S. government had every incentive to help rich American corporations get richer, even if they had to orchestrate violence. The detail I found particularly fascinating was that these American corporations had a choice: they could pay their taxes straight to Washington or they could spend their money through philanthropy. In effect, the Ford Foundation became the largest philanthropic organization in America whilst the Rockefeller Foundation was the second—and the U.S. Department of State held influence over these private philanthropic organizations. Philanthropy funded postwar American society, building American academia as well as its arts and culture. At the same time, these institutions were built as cultural weapons— assets to ultimately be used to serve the interests of these rich corporations. I wasn’t surprised to learn Paul Engle received funding to start the International Writing Program at Iowa in 1967 from the CIA, the Department of State, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. I wondered if he knew he was being used, too.
I traced the shape of my own wounds. I found where it hurt most and pressed harder. I had never met my uncle Arswendo before he passed away, but in an interview for the Indonesian academic Wijaya Herlambang’s book, Cultural Violence, Arswendo had admitted that he accepted the commission to write the novelization of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI purely for the money. I understood the allure of money. Here I was in New York City— alone in the most expensive city in the world with no degree and no money. I returned to MoMA on my own the following Wednesday to catch the final screening of Small Hours of the Night. Aisha couldn’t come because she had a class. I was a college dropout and unemployed. I had all the time in the world to be at an art museum at 4:30 in the afternoon.
Shot in black and white, Small Hours of the Night opened to a smoke-filled interrogation room where a man and a woman sat across from one another. A tape recorder rolled and the man began to interrogate the woman. Daniel had the idea of filtering sixty years of Singapore’s history since the island-nation gained its independence in 1965 into one conversation between these two people over the course of a single night. Their dialogue drew on real-life court testimonies from the 1970-80s, sometimes verbatim, of Singaporeans facing charges and death sentences during the height of the guerilla war between communist groups and both the Singaporean and Malaysian governments. Other parts of their conversation were works of fiction, imagined by the filmmaker as he thought about state censorship—what we can say out loud, what we can record, and what we can remember.
In one scene, the man on one side of the table asked, “What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” the woman on the other side answered. “All my life, all I hear are other people’s thoughts. All I want are other people’s desires. All I dream are other people’s dreams.”
I asked myself why I still wanted to be a writer, after everything I learned. The strumming of strings began slowly as credits rolled over black and I still didn’t have an answer. A woman’s voice sang, softly, in a language that sounded familiar but that I didn’t understand. Malay, I thought. I had lived in Singapore long enough as a child to recognize Malay, one of the four official languages of the nation alongside English, Mandarin, and Tamil. Malay was a similar language to Indonesian, and certain Indonesian dialects. The song sounded older, from a different time, like the keroncong my dad liked to play on our speakers in the living room in the early mornings. Perhaps it was the way the woman was singing, that familiar tremble I heard in her voice. Her voice was beautiful, but it wasn’t sweet. Was that anger I heard? Murka… didn’t murka mean angry in Javanese? Maybe anger was also murka in Malay. I wished, then, that I understood Malay. I wanted to know what she was singing. Then, I heard her beautiful, trembling, angry voice sing the words, sing penting ati seneng… and I shivered in that cold, dark theater. I recognized enough of her words to understand a whole sentence. As long as we’re happy. She wasn’t singing in Malay. This was a Javanese song.
I didn’t speak Javanese. I was barely taught Indonesian as a child, much less Javanese. Jawa halus was Eyang’s first language. Sometimes I heard her speak in that dialect to my dad. This language wasn’t mine, but it was his. The credits continued to roll and the woman continued to sing her song in Javanese. I began to cry.
“What does your dad think about you writing about all of this?” the MoMA curator had asked me at that bar that night, after I told him about my research.
The drink in my hand was just an orange peel floating in water. “Kamu nggak bisa mengubah Papa. Dan Papa nggak bisa mengubah kamu.” You can’t change me. And I can’t change you, my dad spat at me over the phone, even as he had difficulties forming the sounds of the words through a lisp since his stroke. “If all we do is hurt each other when we talk, then maybe you and I shouldn’t talk anymore. Do whatever you want. Write whatever you want. I will never read anything you write anyway. I will never understand anything written in your complicated English.” I drank the rest of the cold, melted ice water that still tasted faintly of sweet vermouth and bitter orange peel. I always pretended like I knew what I was doing. I always acted like I wasn’t as afraid as I really felt.
“I’m here,” I replied to the curator, “and my dad is back home in Jakarta.”
I wiped my tears away before the lights turned back on and, when the music faded as the credits came to an end, got up with everyone else to quietly exit the theater.
What did it mean to be an Indonesian writer who writes in the English language? To navigate the tension between self censorship and state censorship as an Indonesian woman? To measure the love in between desire and desperation? My desire to become a writer had led me to New York, to this place of desperation. I had been knocked off my feet, finding myself on the ground, on my hands and knees, like a baby first learning how to crawl. There was a loss of innocence in learning. Tell me, what would come after loss of innocence? What might happen after I learned how to walk?
Outside on 53rd Street, standing in the cold on my own, I zipped my jacket all the way up to my neck and looked straight ahead at the city in front of me. I didn’t fully understand why I still wanted to be a writer. I just knew I wanted to write. Writers write stories because they want to imagine what happens next. I wanted to know what I might do next. I wanted to know what I could get away with.
Winner of the 2026 Online Nonfiction Contest
Judged by Joel Whitney
"On My Hands and Knees" by Christhalia Wiloto offers a first-person snapshot of a layered, driven narrator, financially and educationally at a standstill in unaffordable New York City. Blending the personal essay and historical research with wit, grace and humor, Wiloto tugs deftly at the thread between art and propaganda, and the responsibilities and limits of complicity embedded in our family and national inheritance.”
