In December 2023, I travelled to Bali for the first time with my son George. One evening, back at our hotel, he gave in to jet-lag while I grew restless.
This is how I later described what happened next:
A pulse of energy insisted I go out, as though adventure were tapping me on the shoulder. I searched online and discovered Seminyak, a district with some nightlife forty-five minutes away. I wasn’t looking for romance, or so I told myself, but for connection. I simply wanted to live every moment to the full, having travelled to this captivating island on the other side of the world.
The bars were nearly empty at nine. It was too early. I circled them nervously, pretending disinterest, until I stepped inside one called The Banyan. A narrow aisle, high tables on either side, cigarette smoke hanging under the lights.
A young Indonesian man waved me over. His name was Buyung. He was thirty-three, from Sumatra. His English was light but fluent, his smile the kind that illuminated his whole being.
We spoke. His father had died when he was three, his mother bent over rice fields, sometimes with nothing to put on the table. Bullied at school, excluded from opportunity, he left to apprentice as a mechanic, but a hatred of automotive grease and conflict with his sister-in-law drove him away. In internet cafés, he met Europeans online; one paid for his first flight to Bali. Since then, he had returned home to Sumatra several times, during COVID, and to care for his dying mother. Now he was back, looking for work.
“What about the future?” I asked.
“I want to meet a bule,” he said—a white man who might take him to Europe.
I laughed, gently. “That won’t be me.”
He grinned, unfazed. “They all say that. We’ll see.”
He was right. I was wrong.
The man I called Buyung is the man I married in Berlin on 4 April 2025.
I had gone out that evening looking for company. I certainly had not gone looking for a husband, still less for a relationship that would carry me from Bali to Berlin, through marriage and the upheaval of building a new life together, and eventually towards another journey across Southeast Asia.
Yet that brief decision to leave the hotel changed the direction of both our lives.
Now, almost three years later, we are going back to Bali, but taking the long way around.
America, Britain and Germany became richer by importing people, skills, ideas and ambition. The real migration scandal is how quickly we forget it.