Lost in Jakarta

Jakarta isn't just a city — it's a state of mind. Lost in Jakarta is a literary memoir of life, love, and quiet chaos inside Indonesia's vast and unforgiving capital. Set among flooded streets, neon-lit malls, roadside kiosks, and crumbling colonial quarters, these interlinked stories observe a city shaped by contradiction. Wealth and poverty coexist without apology. Tradition collides daily with globalization. Beauty, ambition, superstition, and endurance are woven into ordinary lives. Moving between the worlds of expatriates, office workers, street vendors, midnight butterflies, and the quietly resilient city streets, the book captures Jakarta as it is lived — not explained. From skin-whitening obsessions and motorbike fatalism to gossip, ghost stories, and love negotiated through malls and money, each piece reveals how people adapt, endure, and sometimes drift. Written with restraint and empathy, Lost in Jakarta avoids easy judgments and romantic clichés. Instead, it offers close observation, dry humor, and moments of unexpected tenderness in a city that can exhaust, seduce, and humble in equal measure. This is not a guidebook, nor a confession. It is a portrait of a place — and of what it means to belong, even briefly, to a city that never quite reveals itself, yet lingers — unfinished — long after you leave.