My Life, I Guess (A Memoir)

Chapter 10

This is probably going to be the chapter where you're not going to like me. If you hadn't already.

One time, when I was a kid, I was in my room upstairs doing whatever. My parents had gone out, so it was just me and the maid--

Record scratch. "You had a maid?! Wow, you must've been rich rich."

As an aside, I should probably preface that here in Indonesia, maids are quite commonplace for households that are middle class and above. My family was upper middle class, so we would normally have one or two live-in maids in the house at a time. Richer families most likely have three or more, and they would be in uniform. We were never that extreme.

Anyway, for some reason, I had left my phone downstairs on a coffee table. As I was in my room, I started to hear voices outside. Male voices, and I was immediately suspicious. Maybe my dad was home and brought friends or relatives? What were they doing upstairs? Across from my room was my parents' bedroom, and they would never let anyone in there.

I went out of my room and walked toward my parents' bedroom, where the door was open. Out came three strangers, all male, who started to crowd me and say that they were friends of my dad's. They ushered me downstairs, and I was very confused.

That was the last thing I remember. Later on I was back in my room, and I went downstairs again to find my phone gone.

I learned later on that they were robbers who utilized hypnotism. That was actually popular over here, where criminals would hypnotize house owners into just letting them in so they could take whatever they wanted. Apparently, that was what they did to the maid, so she had just let them in.

My parents were furious. They fired the maid the next day, even though it wasn't really her fault at all. But of course, as a spoiled little kid, all I cared about was my stolen phone. Sure enough, the very next day my dad let me buy the exact same model again.

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My father had a problem with being overly generous with anyone in the family. Unfortunately, I became one of the people who took advantage of that generosity.

It started with that obsession of buying books that I mentioned. He would basically give me money to buy tons of books every three weeks to a month. A lot of those books I never even got to read, I just got obsessed with the rush of it. It got addictive, and thus my unhealthy spending habits began.

My book buying obsession ended, but then it moved on to games. Previously, any time I played games, they were pirated. Even games that were physical copies, over here there was a huge bootleg market. Because the original games are so pricey, game retailers here often sold bootlegged copies of any and every game. They were cheaper, so my dad let me buy those every once in a while as a very young kid, when I still had my PS2.

That's not the obsession I'm talking about, though. It started when I discovered I could just buy legal copies of games through Steam. Until that point, I had just been torrenting games, but of course torrented copies came with their own host of problems. So, once I made a Steam account, it was over. 

Then it went from games to full on consoles. This is when I started to lie to my dad about what exactly I was buying. For example, I told him I was buying a laptop, but I was actually getting a Nintendo Switch. Several years later, when that Switch broke, I told him I wanted an iPad but I needed the money to replace my Switch. Then I used the laptop excuse again more recently, so I could get a PS5.

Of course I feel guilty about this, because I'm not the only one in the family asking him for money. My oldest sister Nina, who is mentally still a child, always wants stuff as well. There are also undoubtedly other relatives who are squeezing him for money like a juice press, which is why he'd had to sell both my childhood home, and the home we had here in Bandung. He also had to sell the car that he originally said would be for me one day, but I was so bad at driving that I never used it.