Medan Stories

He did everything right. He was honest. He worked hard. He protected his family from every difficulty he could - and absorbed the rest in silence, alone, the way his parents taught him. He is a 50-year-old Chinese-Indonesian man in Medan, North Sumatra. He has lost his father, his brother, his business, his marriage, and much else besides. Every morning he wakes up with joints that hurt and cooks breakfast for his 83-year-old mother. Every night he massages her feet. And in the quiet hours after she sleeps - the memories come back. A silver bracelet placed in his hands at fifteen, gone the next day. A perfect score changed to seventy. A nine-year-old boy dragged by the ear for a clean shoe. Ten days suspended for watching. This is the true story of one honest man's life - and the question he never stopped asking: Does the universe notice?