White People Don't Like Papaya

For my high school graduation gift, my grandmother bought me tickets to Costa Rica to visit her where she was volunteering with the Peace Corps. The day I landed at the San Jose airport, she met me and took me out to lunch, assuming correctly I’d be hungry. The place we went was as wide as your average elevator. The entire inside was painted turquoise blue. She asked if I wanted juice with my lunch. I looked at the list of juices: orange, lemon, pineapple, watermelon, mango, and papaya. Determining to be more exotic than I actually was, or at the very least to be someone kind of adventurous or someone who liked to try new things, I chose papaya. I admit I chose it precisely because I had never had it, and it sounded romantic. It sounded like something I should love, and long for after I had left Costa Rica. It sounded like something I could savor while sitting on a beach watching sea turtle bury their eggs.

It tasted like that impossible-to-get-out-no-matter-how-many-times-you-brush your-teeth taste in your mouth when you are sick.

In Bali, every morning, lovely saronged women make our breakfast. Ignoring all nutritional advice about how you should eat different things every day, we essentially have the same thing every morning : fruit salad, banana pancakes and fried eggs with toast. The fruit salad consists of banana, pineapple, watermelon, papaya, and lime. My husband doesn’t like papaya either. The lovely saronged women don’t notice that we never eat it or that we’re always trying to pawn it off on our toddler son with the excuse that we’ve heard it is exceedingly good for him and his chronic constipation. Our son, of course, reaches for a slice of banana.

Since I have been in Bali, I have confessed to a few other expats that I don’t like papaya. I said it in an almost whisper, as if I am the only person on the planet who suffers from this embarrassing condition. The first neighbor I confessed to said matter-of-factly, “You know, I don’t like it either. But I find if I get enough lime on it, it can be okay.” Well, I thought, now we know why they garnish their fruit salads with lime: it’s the papaya coping mechanism.

Last week, my son’s school was on holiday. At first, my husband and I didn’t know what the holiday was, how to spell it, or what it would impact in terms of services. It didn’t take long to learn that Galungan is a Balinese holiday that takes place every 210 days. Essentially, when they want to explain it to Westerners, they say it is the Balinese version of Christmas. Except that there isn’t any gift giving. What they are trying to impart is that it is just a big deal and everything is closed. Including anything serving Westerners staying in the area.

With my son’s school closed, Kent suggested we find a nanny to help with his care for the week. When I said this to our neighbor, she laughed at me and said all the nannies were off too.

Kent protested, “This can’t be right. Somebody has to be working. I mean, we’re staying here. It’s not like they can’t not offer us services.”

Au contraire.

When they say there are no services, they mean there are no services. It is not like Christmas, where almost everything is closed, but your favorite bookstore and pizza delivery place stay open. No lovely saronged women were going to come to make our breakfast. No one would come to make our bed or do our dishes. The point of Galungan is to go to temple and make a series of offerings to the gods, not to serve white people who have forgotten how to cook or take care of themselves.

We quickly brainstormed for what we could make ourselves for breakfast. It took us a minute to remember what we used to eat when we had to make our own breakfast. Thankfully, those lovely saronged women didn’t completely neglect us: they stocked all the refrigerators with fruits and eggs, so we all could make our own fried eggs and fruit salad. When I opened the refrigerator door, all I could see was a rainbow of watermelon, papayas, pineapples, and limes. We didn’t know what to do with all the papaya. It felt slightly wrong not to like it as it sat there on our refrigerator shelf: the fruit a vibrantly beautiful orange with its inside covered with black shiny seeds opulent as caviar. It's a fruit that looks like it could have been served on a silver platter to Cleopatra on her barge up the Nile.

Yet our neighbors did not feel this twinge of guilt, of not liking such a fruit.

One neighbor brought over a fresh loaf of bread from the good bakery in town as a thank you for letting her use our cell phone when hers had died. She stopped back by to make sure we had received it, as we had all been sleeping when she dropped it off.

“I also have a papaya, if you’d like it.” She said.

“Um, no thanks.” We said. “We don’t really like papaya.”

“Damn,” she said. “I don’t either.”

“I haven’t yet met an Australian, English or American person who does.” I said.

After we ate our breakfast that we made our selves, I went for a bike ride through the town. Indeed, everything was closed, including all the favorite haunts of the Expat community. The only people wandering the sidewalks were white people who looked like they were slightly bruised from being kicked out of their hotel and like they may have been starving. I considered stopping to ask them, if they, by chance, wanted our papaya? Apparently, it is full of good enzymes…

But since they were white, I don’t know if they would consider it a generous offer. They might instead feel like the recipient of a gift that no one wants at a White Elephant Christmas party. Needless to say, that was how we felt. At the end of the day, our papaya ended up in the compost pile.