A friend teased my responses from Gencontrolz roundtable on reproduction and care labor. “I want to say ‘no’ to all your questions.” I giggled. He knows my impulse really well; how my response to Fai’s, Michelle’s, and Phuong Anh’s prompts is not really an explanation, nor an answer. It’s questions. More and more questions.

As I read the conversation again, I’m quite annoyed by my own words. Why am I being avoidant? “Can we … ” “Can we ..” “Can we …” I ask that a lot. Searching for diversions, if not possibilities. When someone ask you something but you ask back, you know deep down you don’t have the answers. You don’t know shit. It’s true though. I do not know shit. Well, not all shit. I know few shits. But many, most shits, I don’t.

I feel irresponsible, to be honest. My eye twitched everytime I end my sentences with question marks. I’m not so sure how to go with things. I’m still thinking. I’m still wondering. Am I still allowed to ponder when the demand of being an academic, a researcher is to answer a question? So many uncertainties, my phrase becomes shaky.

I say the same things again and again. English is not my first language, but I have to make a habit of thinking with this language. Indonesian and English, sometimes my colloquial Javanese, jumble around, tangled. And when it arrives to the content of my question, they start spreading dusts and clouds in my head. So I take more time. I become slower in responding and answering. Thinking with and through different languages is onerous. I need more time, more labor, more energy to put down clear words. When things are not clear for me, I beg for question marks.

But language is not the most difficult part.

I remember the night I felt heavy and just bursting out my frustration. I’m working with familiar sources: newspapers and popular magazines. They’re not unique. Nothing’s exotic or “more authentic” from a magazine circulated in the mid-twentieth century. But I’m drowned in the depth of people’s words … There was a long list of short messages from anonymous readers, coded with subscription numbers or a city’s name, collected by a dedicated contributor who curated one or two songs every two weeks. Long time no see. I miss you. What’s up, you never say hi to me. My heart is broken I wish you learn your lesson. Wishing you success on your exam. These are radio-like messages; circulating words and words of greetings and contempt. A virtual intimacy in the age of so-called “state building.” I felt heavy. These people and their words are not mere “mass culture.” They were anonymous, pseudonymous, but not at all faceless. They were real persons trying to engage with the world and at the same time making a normative world where notion of family and heterosexuality define their intimacy.

I’m still pondering. On people’s past-lives in Indonesia. On the ways they assume and practice care. On how housework and family dynamics become an intellectual source. I’m still thinking. Care, emotion, intimacy: how history can help us understand such conceptual alliance. I’m sitting. With Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. With Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents. With Simone Weil’s attention. With Felicity Aulino’s description of care rituals in Thailand. With Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and Black care. With Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment. With Merav Shohet’s thought on sacrifice and the limits of love among the Vietnamese. With Xine Yao’s Unfeeling and Tyrone Palmer’s philosophical iteration on Black antagonism. I move back-and-forth between periods and places: house-making in modern imperial Japan and Republican China; women’s writings and movements in late nineteenth-century India and Egypt; practices of freedom by Wolof, Lebu, Fulbe, and Bamana women in the eighteenth century; family dramas in twentieth-century Iran and Malay peninsula; Victorian domesticity across Western Europe. History unfolds everyday for me, for us. We’re held by the time.

So, I put down more questions marks.