I had always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Rosland, Rafiq and Mr.Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made both Rafiq and Mr.foster, in their own way, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars? -P.184, September 28, 2021
