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| Sacha Stevenson at De Luca in Plaza Senayan. She parodies everyday life in Indonesia on her popular YouTube channel |
Sacha has caused a modest stir in the last few months with her YouTube series, “How to Act Indonesian,” a satire that glides gracefully on thin ice. In her videos, the 31-year-old Canadian — an Indonesia resident since 2001 — flits easily between the caricaturish Indonesian characters she uses to act out odd, troubling, amusing and endearing moments in local life.
The videos dwell on hypocrisy (Sacha cleans her house with care but throws trash in the street) but also cross into pure silliness (Sacha sings while fishing, seems to have caught something, and reels in an old, empty can).
“It’s Indonesia from my perspective,” she says.
The videos seem odd in a way that’s hard to put one’s finger on at first, because they’re not quite Indonesian, but also not quite foreign — just like Sacha.
At age 19, with high school and a deportation from Jamaica (“Someone told the police there that I was a prostitute, which I wasn’t,” she says) under her belt, she made her way to Jakarta to teach English.
“I didn’t really hang out with any bules,” she says. “I didn’t hang out with any of the teachers. They’d go to Jaksa after work and drink beer and I didn’t do anything. I just went home and was reading and trying to learn Indonesian and doing local, Indonesian-type things.”
She rejected housing subsidized by her teaching program, opting instead to live in a bare, unfurnished apartment usually reserved for domestic servants in wealthy households.
“I was like, ‘I’m in Indonesia — I want to see what local people are living like,”’ she says. “I came here to have new experiences, not to hang out with a bunch of bules.
“So I did that. And after about three months, I had enough vocabulary that I decided I was probably fit enough to start going on trips. At that time I worked four days a week. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday every week I would take the bus to Batu Karas, which at the time was about a 12 hour bus ride, before the Bandung toll road. During those 12 hours I would stay up and talk to the bus driver, and it would be my Bahasa Indonesia lesson.”
She soon tired of teaching.
“After my contract, I went traveling to North Sumatra, and I stayed there for eight months and spent all my savings,” she says.
During her travels, she converted to Islam and began wearing the hijab.
“I was like, ‘You guys are treating your wives like crap. Give me your book, I want to see it, what’s in there?’” she says. “So that’s why I started getting into it in the first place. And that’s when I started to notice a whole bunch of discrepancies. Like, ‘You’re saying this, but I can’t find that anywhere in here.’ Stuff like that.”
She orders a third beer.
After a few years, she decided to give up the hijab to pursue a career in Indonesian television, and since then, her orthodoxy has faded away, although she did learn Arabic and earn a prestigious degree in Islamic studies in the years after her conversion.
“It’s on my identity card, my KTP,” she said. “You know how people say they’re a KTP Muslim? I’m an Islam KTP. They don’t follow the rules, but that’s what they say, because you have to have a religion here.”
After North Sumatra, Sacha had a brief television heyday on a popular comedy travel show called “Wara Wiri,” on which she played a foreigner who could not speak Indonesian — constantly the but of jokes from locals in the know.
Eventually, the show replaced her with “another bule,” and she decided to become the first person to rollerblade across Java from East to West, which she did after six weeks of training.
She also met Angga, a small business entrepreneur from Bandung, who she married last week “in a small ceremony with 400 guests.”
In August of this year, she began making her “How to Act Indonesian” videos on a lark, and they took off right away, some accruing almost 300,000 views. She’s since been invited to Google Indonesia’s headquarters to speak with the team there about her experience as one of Indonesia’s top YouTubers.
On top of that, she has accepted a book deal.
“It will be a comedy, in the style of an English language course book,” she says.
Her plans for the future?
“I don’t know how long the YouTube fame will last, Indonesia gets bored really quickly, but I think there’s still room to grow on YouTube,” she says. “After getting disappointed with television and feeling the power of making my own stuff, it feels really good.”
As a YouTube partner, she has begun to monetize her videos, and she has started to merchandize and explore product placement.
Sacha loves Indonesia. Her fans know it, and it comes across in her videos once the sarcasm fades.
“I’ve received death threats,” she says. “But the response has almost all been positive. And the videos that cause some controversy also get the most hits.”
To learn how to act Indonesian, subscribe to Sacha Stevenson’s channel on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/
source by thejakartaglobe.com
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