Apartment 45

A Memoir By Bryan Sukidi

June 7, 2024MemoirShare

It's a strange feeling to have written a memoir about my life already, because it still feels like my life has barely just begun. When I was first approaching this assignment for my senior year English class, I remember thinking: I'm 18. What stories could I possibly tell that would be interesting to the reader?

At every stage in my childhood, there have been two versions of the world: the world that I observed through my innocent eyes, and the world that was the case. I wanted to try to capture my childhood through this dual lens, rather than simply focusing on the moments that felt the most formative in retrospect. It's why I chose to write about memories like waiting for my parents to come home from work, or helping my mother fold clothes at her laundromat, or drawing on our apartment's walls with colorful markers and crayons.

Writing this story helped me remember what it was like to be that little boy, waiting for my parents to come home from work without knowing at all the weight of the sacrifices they had to carry. It also helped reveal to me that I am, still, that little boy, clinging to those same feelings of love, hope, and longing from when I was in that world, and the same desire for permanence from when I suddenly had to leave that world behind.

Apartment 45 is about what it means to grow up and watch your parents, your friends, and your entire world unfold in ways you never fully understood as a child. This story wouldn't have seen the light without the support of my mom, my dad, and my sister, who raised me, my classmates who provided invaluable feedback, and my relentless English teacher, Ms. Baker, who pushed me to finish this story even when I didn't feel like I had the courage to do so. Someday I'll share this story with my kids so that they can appreciate just how far a lifetime of sacrifices can take you. For now I hope to share my story with you.

Apartment 45

It’s 3:12 A.M, and I’m stuck. I wrestle my arm from beneath my sister’s legs and free myself from the suffocating covers. I close my eyes–no luck. I twist and turn. I count sheep. I flip my pillow to the cooler side—still, no luck. After a few minutes, I realize what has happened:

I can’t fall asleep.

For the next half hour, I watch the chests of my family members rise and fall, each movement a breathless gasp for life. Apart from my father’s snoring, the peaceful atmosphere of the apartment is punctuated only by the soft buzzing of a fly, the breeze from the window that cools our sweltering bodies. On this summer night, the air is hot and humid and sticky—so much so that I can feel the moistness of my mother’s arms, drops of sweat dripping down our foreheads—but I am used to this, this feeling of being packed into a place too small to fit a family of four.

I’m not sure why my family chose the red brick building on the corner of 10 Webster Avenue, Somerville, Massachusetts to become our home. We lived together on the fourth floor at the end of the hallway, just behind the spruce door that read “Apartment 45.” It’s a humble place: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room, but my parents always rented one of the bedrooms out to other Indonesians passing by. If I had to guess, the entire apartment was about the size of one of my elementary school classrooms. 

I’m also not sure what brought my parents to America. Both my mother and father tell me they grew up in “small farming villages” in Indonesia, surrounded by grids of verdant rice paddies and mountains that spanned the horizon. But when I ask them about details beyond the geography–childhood memories, daring adventures, even the story of how they met each other–they either refuse to tell me, or lower their voices as if revealing some dark secret. Over the years, I’ve been collecting details, piecing together their stories one-by-one. I know my father met my mother on the side of a dirt road. I don’t know if my father always wanted to come to America. It’s only when I’m walking on his back at 10 years old, giving him a traditional Indonesian massage, that he tells me: “Daddy always knew he wanted to raise a family in America. Daddy just didn’t know if it would happen.”

My father was the mastermind behind the whole operation. To reach his dream, he would embark on an 18-year educational odyssey, completing two masters and a doctorate before ever going back. This would allow him to extend his F-1 visa long enough to buy enough time for my sister to graduate high school, and for me to finish middle school. After filling out several graduate school applications, he drove all the way down to the nearest city to send them in by mail. Months later, when he received a mysterious orange envelope and opened it, he learned that he—Sukidi Mulyadi, the village boy who once woke up at 5:00 A.M. everyday to work on a rice farm—had just been accepted into Harvard University. I can only imagine the conversation with his parents went like this:

“Ibu, ayah. Saya masuk ke Harvard.” Mom, Dad. I am going to Harvard.

“Apa itu Harvard?” What’s Harvard?

In 2001, he said his goodbyes to his wife and newborn daughter, to the village of Sragen, and to everything he’s ever known. Two years later, my mother, Uum, and my older sister, Nabila, joined him from Indonesia. Three years later, on October 20th, 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they had me.

Sometimes I wonder what my childhood might have looked like if my parents had stayed in Indonesia: to spend each day hunched over, picking and planting crops under a scorching sun; to weave through the traffic of Jakarta riding a beaten-down motorcycle. To be born in America, there was a cascade of decisions that had to fall perfectly into place—lifetimes spent watering the soil just so that I could germinate and sprout, so that I could stand upon this rich soil of opportunity. Some people say it takes generations for a person to leave an entire world behind in search of something better.

It took my family one generation.

“Man your stations, Bayen!”

Following my sister’s orders, I closed my eyes and pressed my right ear against the apartment door. It was 9:05 P.M, and Nabila and I were up to our typical nightly shenanigans.

“They said they’d be home at 9:00,” I squealed.

“Just wait. Be patient for once.”

I was just about to take my ear off the wood when I suddenly heard the elevator doors creak open, followed by a crescendo of footsteps. I alerted my sister as quickly as I could:

“NABILA! Code Red! Code Red!”

The sounds grew louder, and with each footstep, our anticipation skyrocketed. But we couldn’t be sure. Five seconds later, when we heard the rattling of the keys of my mother’s lanyard just outside the door, we knew who it was, and we sprang into action.

Our apartment door had both a top and a bottom lock, and whenever my dad tried to unlock one of them, Nabila and I would quickly lock the other. We repeated this several times until we were on the floor laughing, at which point my parents would break through, and we’d sprint back to our bedroom to hide under the covers.

It was during these silly, childish moments that I felt closest to Nabila—just two children, up against the world. With my mother busy with work and my father preoccupied with his studies, Nabila was the one who took care of me: when I was hungry, she made me my favorite DiGiorno’s microwaved pizza. When I needed signatures, she’d forge my parents’ onto my permission slips and reading logs. In third grade, I remember when my school started to offer parent-teacher conferences. I’m sure they must have been confused when they saw a short, 7th-grade girl show up to the meeting.

But while Nabila and I shared a lot of things in common, like our love for hosting tea parties and building pillow forts, we were set apart in one, fundamental way: our citizenship. I began to notice this whenever my parents would drive me to CVS to take my passport photo, and Nabila wouldn’t come along. I felt it in the way that my parents would tease me about being a U.S. citizen—that, in my family of “Sukidi, Uum, and Nabila,” my name was “Bryan.” Sometimes, I could sense the envy in their voices whenever they joked about life in America being “so easy” if you were a citizen. But what that actually meant in practice, I had no idea. 

So when my mother accidentally left our passports on the living room table one afternoon, I seized the opportunity to investigate matters for myself. I flipped through the pages, analyzing each one carefully. They don’t look that different? Sure, one passport was red, and the other was blue, and they had different flags, but other than that, they looked fairly similar. Why was it such a big deal, then? After all, I was born here, but my sister came when she was two. We’re both American, I reassured myself. And we’re both Indonesian, too. 

Part of this was true. In front of my white friends, I felt like the most Indonesian thing to ever exist; it’s why I wore a black hat with the word “Indonesia” embroidered in bright, gold letters for three years straight in middle school. But whenever I was in the same room as Nabila, I didn’t feel Indonesian at all. Nabila spoke more Indonesian than I did. She knew the Indonesian national anthem better, too. And whenever we were arguing with each other, she’d start talking to my mother in Indonesian to win her over. 

But regardless of our citizenship statuses, or who seemed more American or Indonesian, I knew some things for certain: Nabila was Nabila, mom was mom, and dad was dad. And yet, it always felt like my parents had a clearer path for my future—that I would go to high school, then college, then work and start a family in America—than they did for my sister. My path, it seemed, had already been charted by countless others before me; my sister’s path wasn’t even on the map. Eventually I stopped thinking about it. I hid beneath the warm blankets of our family’s bed, waiting for the bedroom door to open, for my parents to tickle me until I begged them with tears and laughter to stop.

When I enter the glass doors to Community Laundry, the fresh scent of Tide welcomes me almost instantly. I wipe the fog off my glasses and locate my mother, who’s standing across the table just by the staff door. 

“Hi, mommy! I’m here!” Three of the other mothers turn my way. 

“Hi, Bayen!” She lets out a smile. 

I place my bag on one of the white salon chairs and get to work: first, we unload the clothes from the cart, then pile it sky-high onto the table, then tackle each individual piece. The rhythmic hum of washers and dryers surrounds us on all sides. As I mimic my mother’s movements, tucking the sleeves of each t-shirt, folding the bottom half over, and adding them to the pile, I can’t help but sigh at the sloppiness of my work in comparison to hers. 

“Mommy, I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

“You want to do something else?”

“Sure! Like what?”

“You can wash, dry, or fold.”

“Is that it?”

She nods her head. For the next couple hours, I spend my time at the laundromat doing a little of everything: I load the washing machines with dirty clothes, take the four-wheeled laundry carts for a ride, and even try on random strangers’ outfits fresh from the dryer. One of my favorite games I used to play was the “stain guessing game,” where I concocted stories in my head about where people’s clothing stains came from. Did the red blotches come from marinara sauce accidents, or were they the remnants of a bloody murder case? The laundromat became my playground, and I relished in the creative freedom I had found—the freedom to take my stories in whatever direction I wanted.

But by the end of the day, something has changed: the sweet scent of Tide is no longer sweet, and the harsh, fluorescent lights turn on just as the sun is about to set. I look at my mother, who is standing at the same, gray fold-up table, in the same exact place as before, still folding away. A rush of guilt comes over me, and I ask my mother: “Do you still need help, mom?” 

“It’s okay, Bayen. We go home soon.”

I met Daniela through Breakthrough: Greater Boston, an afterschool and summer program whose mission was to send “more kids like me” to college. Daniela had wavy, black hair that went all the way down to her waist, and she was known in the program for being the queen of sarcasm. She spent most of her time hanging out with the other students who spoke Spanish, and I never interacted with her beyond playing four-square during recess or saying “hi” in the hallways. But before I could even get to know her, she was gone.

We were eating lunch when a couple of my guy friends and I were guessing who each of us had a crush on. At some point, my friend Manat brought up Daniela’s name, and we looked at each other before scanning the lunchroom.

“You know, she’s in my class, but I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“She might have quit.”

“Nah, she’s probably sick.”

I was confused. Where was Daniela? We moved on in the conversation, but for some reason, I couldn’t understand why I became so emotionally invested in Daniela’s existence, as if to confirm for myself that she was a real person when I knew, for a fact, that she was. I felt my stomach churn. She’s probably sick, I reassured myself. Just last week she had taken home the “spirit stick,” a prestigious award given each week to the student that demonstrated the most enthusiasm and spirit. 

People just don’t disappear like that, right? 

It was weeks before I thought of Daniela again. I was walking the hallways of the East Somerville Community School when I came across the following poster:

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS! If you ever must deal with I.C.E, it is important that we all know and practice our rights:

1. DON’T OPEN THE DOOR…
2. REMAIN SILENT…
3. PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION…

The posters had been put up every couple feet, but I didn’t know what, when, or why they were there. I whipped out my phone and typed in “ICE” before getting a page of images of actual frozen ice cubes. I tried again, remembering the periods: “I.C.E.” 

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

When I got back to class, I asked two of my friends from Breakthrough, Gillette and Aliyah, about what happened to Daniela.

“Oh, her? She went back to Venezuela.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know–I mean, you know how it is.” 

To this day, I still don’t know if Daniela’s family was deported by the government, or if they chose to go back. Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference. It’s not that any family chooses to go back, to abandon your dreams and return to your home country; it’s that, after years of hard work and sacrifice, you had no choice left. 

After a couple more questions, I confirmed that Daniela was gone.

The next day at school, I stood in the main office with my sister, waiting for the principal to greet us. It was a Monday morning at 7:57 A.M., and Nabila and I had been chosen by our teachers to deliver today’s morning announcements: my sister would read the boring stuff, and I would end with the pledge of allegiance. Every day since Kindergarten, I recited the pledge with my class until the words became ingrained into my memory–but this time was different. Speaking over the PA system was my first ever public address, and as a timid 5th grader desperately trying to correct my stutter, I was terrified. I confessed to my sister: “Kaka, I don’t wanna do it anymore.”

“What? Bryan! Just do it! You’ve got it.”

“Okay.”

As Nabila closed out the morning announcements, I imagined my teacher ordering everyone to stand, to put their right hand over their heart, and to turn their eyes towards the American flag. Nabila then handed me the phone, and after taking a deep breath in, I exhaled the rehearsed words:

“I pledge allegiance… to the flag… of the United States of America.” 

I took another deep breath. Only years later would I begin to realize the cruel irony: to force students to stand up, to put their hands on their hearts, and to turn their eyes to the flag, when America has failed to do the same for them. To pledge allegiance to a country that has refused, time and time again, to accept them. I thought of all my friends in the Breakthrough program. My father’s Indonesian peers who were never able to finish their education here. Their children, whose futures here were cut short. Nabila. Daniela. All the broken dreams, left to die on apartment floors. 

And without knowing at all the lie I was about to tell, I concluded: “And to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

When I awoke to the sounds of tears and wailing, the last person I expected to see was my own father. I shut my eyes immediately after opening them—had he seen me? No, he was facing the other way. Even though my eyes had only been for a split second, I had caught a glimpse of everything: he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back hunched over, wearing a wrinkled, Hanes t-shirt. My mother was comforting him, rubbing his back despite being pushed away. My sister was asleep, and couldn’t translate for me. I was alone. 

Slowly, I pieced together the incomprehensible words of my dad. But of all the words my father spoke that night, I understood only three: “Saya mau pulang.” I want to go home.

The story of my parents’ sacrifices had been told to me countless times before, but tonight it took on a new meaning. Tonight, I could feel the way the bed would jerk violently every time he sobbed. I could see the helpless expression on my mother’s face when she realized she couldn’t do anything but cry, too. To the village, my father was a living legend: the man smart enough to make it to Harvard, the father strong enough to leave the village to raise his family here. My mother, too, had devoted 18 years of her life to folding clothes–a skill with almost no perceived value or importance to society, and yet it was the only skill she brought from her village that would reliably support a family of four. 

When I think about my parents, I now think about what I never saw. How the deep ridges on my mother’s hands have come to resemble the creases of her folds. How the rips in my dad’s faded, Hanes t-shirt symbolized his refusal to ever buy new clothes for himself, because everything he earned went towards supporting his two kids. Until that moment, I never truly stopped to consider the costs of leaving home, and the mere fact that my home, Apartment 45—the one that always seemed safe, impenetrable, permanent—might not, in fact, be theirs. 

“You don’t want to listen to me? Choose your own way.” My father declared, his face rigid and stiff.

I brushed him off and went back to my computer.

“Udah. If you don’t listen, know this: this will be your last year in America. Pack your bags.”

“You say that every year, dad.”

“No, this time I’m serious, Bayen. If you don’t listen to me, we will.”

Whenever my father threatened to send either me or my sister back to Indonesia, it was always in response to something my sister or I had done. I was around 7 years old when my father first told me he’d “send me back to Indonesia in a cardboard box” as punishment for not doing the dishes. This, of course, never happened, and I stopped believing him after that.

It wasn’t until I watched my father walk across the graduation stage and receive his PhD in 2019 that I felt the lies my parents once used to tell me suddenly become a reality. As I waited for his name to be called, I remember scrolling through the countless articles documenting my father and his success story, trying to discern what was true, what was false, and what was grossly exaggerated. I didn’t know what to make of the articles that foreshadowed his return to his country. The reality that hadn’t fully set in yet: that my father’s graduation, the long-anticipated end of his educational journey, meant that he would no longer be eligible for an F-1 visa, and, by extension, that none of us would legally be allowed to stay in America. I was 13 years old.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to reconstruct the sequence of events from our last year together in Apartment 45, but everything is a blur: my father telling us that they would be forced to move back this year. Nabila, a senior in high school, applying to colleges and checking the box as an “international student.” Rejected. Waitlisted. Rejected, from all 18 schools she applied to. My father refusing to acknowledge her existence for the next year. My mother comforting my sister, repeating to her that “it’s okay, it’s okay.” My realizing that 7th grade would be a year of lasts–that I should pack my bags, and prepare to live in a country I’ve never been to. Then, my father’s sudden announcement that we’d be able to stay in the U.S. for “one more year” through a special F-1 program. Nabila reapplying to every, single, school. My dreadful application process to private boarding schools, haunted by the thought that maybe, just maybe, I’d end up in rejection like my sister. And then decision day.

By March of 2020, my sister and I both knew where we were going: she would be attending Tufts University in the fall on a full scholarship, and I’d be starting boarding school at Milton Academy on a full ride as well. Opening my own acceptance letter felt like I had finally come up for air after months of not breathing. It was the first time in my life that I felt like I had earned my place here–not by the arbitrary rules of citizenship, but by my own academic merit. My sister and I were like pioneers, forging our own paths forward. Just like my father once had. 

When my parents announced they were finally ready to leave Apartment 45, I didn’t go with them to the airport. It was August 2020, six months after COVID had struck the world, and my parents were paranoid about catching COVID and having to quarantine upon arrival. So, as a way of keeping everyone healthy and safe, my father ordered me “not to come.”

This was the story I often told myself, that my father told me to stay at the house with our family friends. But as I reflect on my own honest feelings and thoughts at the time, I realize that COVID wasn’t the reason why I didn’t go. It was that I didn’t know how to feel, how I’d react. What would I feel after the plane took off? 

Loss? Abandonment? Despair? Nostalgia? To my 13 year old self, I thought I could convince myself that I wasn’t a bad son, that the real reason for my not going was “to keep my parents healthy.” But in the days, weeks, even months after my parents’ departure, my guilt only festered. 

Looking back, I wish I had been there to see my parents in their final moments, basking in their glory and in everything they had built. When I look at the single, group picture my family took at the airport, I pinch my fingers to zoom in on all the people. Mom. Dad. Nabila. Om Adrian. Om Deka. Tante Dina. Om Poetro. Om Handika. The list of faces went on and on, and each person represented a different chapter of my family’s time in the U.S—18 years of life, captured within a single photograph. I’ll never be able to admit it to my parents, but there’s a gaping hole in my heart that widens everytime I remember that I wasn’t there.

For the first time in 18 years, my parents boarded the plane and came home.

At the very same time, my life journey was just about to begin. 

It was my first night on the third floor of Wolcott House, and everything seemed to be going fine: the sky had darkened, the footsteps from above had quieted, and the luscious quad had grown silent. Tomorrow would be my first day of in-person classes, the definitive moment when I’d step into a new life of freedom and opportunities. The world felt different, yes: I had entered a world of certainties. I knew the showers would work immediately when I turned the knob. I knew that the Dining Hall would always have food when I was hungry. I knew I would have my dorm to come back to if I was ever having a bad day. Living on campus, it seemed as though I had everything I needed no more than a five minute walk away. In that moment, however, things began to feel much, much farther.

As I laid down onto my new dorm bed, letting my arms and legs span the full breadth of the mattress, I felt a younger, more childish version of Bryan resurge from within me, craving to hold someone, to be somewhere I had not been for a long time. It was nice having my own room and my own bed–but only for a moment. What would I do with all the extra space on the bed, with nobody else to share it with? 

If I had the choice to sleep on a mattress too small to fit a family of four, or one big enough to fit everyone in the world, I would choose the former over the latter every single time. But maybe growing up is realizing that I no longer have this choice. 

When I was younger, I used to draw walls of Apartment 45 with all types of Crayola crayons: flowing, green hills under a light blue sky, a yellow circle with lines to denote a sun. Between the kitchen tiles I’d run my crayons through the mortar, transforming the grimy, brownish tint into a vibrant array of colors. The first time my mother caught me was when I was seven years old, sketching out a masterpiece in the corner of our bedroom. Later that day, she took me to Michael’s and bought me a fancy drawing sketchbook. I never ended up using it.

There was an intrinsic quality about the blank walls of Apartment 45 that set them apart from paper: the walls were steadfast instead of flimsy, infinite instead of bound, and I found comfort in knowing that no matter how far away I wandered, my drawings would still be there on the wall when I returned. I knew I would be able to come back and recognize the drawing inside the bedroom closet as my signature when I was five years old, or the stick figures of my family I drew when I was seven.

These sketches have been permanently etched into my memory. But even though I’m confident of their existence, I still can’t recall the act of my drawing on the walls–only that it happened. But were the drawings by me? Were the doodles of rolling hills and yellow suns my own work, or were they the remnants of a family who lived here before us? When I ask my mom about the drawings over a WhatsApp video call, she shoots me a confused look: “What?”

“Don’t you remember, mom? The drawings? In the corner of the bedroom?”

“Di mana? Where?”

I don’t know if my parents remember any of my drawings. My sister says she vaguely does. For the longest time, I couldn’t shake the feeling—the feeling that no matter how much I drew, or how elaborate the drawings, I could not make the walls my own. I had grown up watching other tenants move in and out, until the faces on our floor became unrecognizable. I remember the putrid smell of white paint that would seep into the hallways, the drilling and construction sounds that marked the departure of yet another family. 

Above all, I knew that one day, my family’s time here would come to an end, and that the painters would come to paint a new coat of industrial white onto my drawings. What would it feel like to be that painter—to walk into another person’s home, filled with collections of innocent, childhood drawings, and, wielding a paint roller, to have to erase each and every one of them?

My family’s story of hope and imagination lives beneath a crisp, white coat, ready for another family to make their home in Apartment 45.