Fay Darmawi: In Her Own Words

1.14.2021 - LISC Stories

I was born in Indonesia. I lived there until I was eight years old. I grew up in the middle of Jakarta. My Dad was in the Navy. He had three jobs—he was in private practice at a law firm, he taught law at the university, and he was also an officer in the navy, in the legal department. We lived in military public housing, and I lived close to two mosques. One in the front and one in the back of my house. I was an early riser (which I’m not anymore); I would wake up to the prayers at 5 am and I’d be the first one awake, and I’d wake up the whole apartment. We lived with our extended family. My aunt lived with me in my room, and she would be the first person I’d wake up. We slept on bunk beds. Right behind our complex was one of the favelas, and I would hang out in the laundry porch at the back of our house, and I would just look over the slum from my place. I’d wonder why I was able to be here looking at them, instead of being down there.

My parents were always talking about social justice because we’re Chinese-Indonesian, so we’re the scapegoat for a lot of stuff there. In fact, I was born in 1966, which is “the year of living dangerously,” which was the title of a speech that the then-president gave where he talked about Indonesia wanting to break away from the Western world. To break away from America, basically. There was a coup, and that president was ousted. During the coup, half-a-million to a million communists and Chinese people were massacred. It’s kind of an unknown history. There was a movie made about it by Josh Oppenheimer. I can’t watch it. Nobody in my family can watch it.

So it’s in this context that my Dad really wanted us to leave Indonesia. My family is now part of this diaspora Indonesian diaspora as a result. I have family members in Canada, in Brazil and the Netherlands, in Hayward, California, and we settled in DC because my Dad got recruited by the World Bank. He was a super smart guy. He was the first Indonesian to graduate from Harvard Law School. So our dinner conversations were about the first world and third world, what’s your role in society, how do power structures work, those kinds of things.

We moved from Jakarta to the suburbs of Bethesda, and I hated every moment of it, because it was dead. It took me awhile to adjust. Maybe I haven’t adjusted yet! It was very lonely; it was very atomized. And I couldn’t understand the suburbs. The suburbs didn’t make sense to me from a spatial arrangement perspective. Why would you want to be so atomized? Why would you choose so much loneliness? And it was very hard to overcome. So the minute I learned how to drive I’d drive to other places in the city, and I’d explore Anacostia—and my Mom didn’t know where the hell I was—but I just had to get the hell out of Bethesda.

I also remember when neoliberalism decimated my father’s spirit. He almost went into depression. He took this chance to uproot his family and bring us to the States because he believed in this dream of economic development. He believed in Keynesian economics; he wanted to apply that to Asia. Then this austerity stuff happened. He was not down for that. He felt that it would ruin everything. This is all we talked about when I was in high school and college. So it was kinda ordained that I would be doing what I’m doing now.

I applied to Penn early and got in and that was it. The application had a space that said “please choose your major,” and I wrote “Urban Studies.” I loved Penn. Loved, loved, loved, loved Penn. I loved Philly. I loved the program—it was a small, intimate program in this large school with lots of different resources. And there were other classes I could take and incorporate into my major. I focused most of my attention on Urban Studies, but I did take a mythology class, and the mythology professor told me that I understood it really well, and she was like “you need to make mythology your major.” And I’m like “mythology as my major? I don’t think so.” I didn’t understand what my career path would be.

After Penn I went straight to MIT. I learned how to think there. I did a Masters in City Planning there. Then the economy crashed in Massachusetts. This was in 1990. It was a rolling recession. The recession rolled from the east coast to the west coast, and I got in my car and tried to beat it. I had my then-boyfriend drive me out to San Francisco. That’s when you could come to San Francisco without anything. I lived in a group house in Rockridge, Oakland. It was the ten of us in a huge house. I had the front room of the double parlor. So it’s basically the living room without a closet. It faced the bus stop. $150 a month. I lived there while I was looking for a job. I had saved money from waitressing, in high school, and that helped.

Eventually I found a gig working for Asian Ink, which is a non-profit doing affordable housing in San Francisco, and there was some shady stuff going on there, so I had to get out. I got another job in the same field, at a regional nonprofit called Eden Housing. This is 1990, ’91. So I beat the recession. I got a job in September, and the recession hit San Francisco in December of that year. Eden Housing was my first real job. I was a project manager, and this is where luck kinda happens. The 1986 tax reform had just passed, and the field of affordable housing was just picking up steam, and people were figuring out the Low Income Housing Tax Program that came out of the ’86 Tax Reform Act. The state of California had passed two new bond measures for affordable housing, so it was the first heyday of affordable housing. There were so many projects and not enough project managers.

So if you can imagine, I am 24, 25, and I’m in charge of three new construction projects, by myself, in Petaluma, and in charge of hiring architects, engineers, contractors; I’m in charge of closing seven layers of financing; I’m in charge of balancing the budgets; I’m in charge of certifications on tax credits, and on and on. Now we have a whole affordable housing industrial complex that handles this stuff, but I learned everything because I was in charge of everything. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but I worked seven days a week for three years straight and burned out.

Then I moved to LA because I was going to get married. I was in LA for four months, thinking that I could, in a heartbeat, get hired by an affordable housing developer in LA. It didn’t happen. At the same time, Bank of America had just started the Bank of America Community Development Bank, and they were recruiting from the community. Part of the reason they did this is because they had hired somebody to do this white paper, and basically the conclusion was that it was easier to teach banking to community folks than it was to teach community to banking folks. So the frontline people are community people, and we reported up to bankers. And it was amazing. Because we were empowered. And there was structure.

But I hated L.A, so I finagled getting transferred to San Francisco while I was at BofA. I loved working at the community development bank at BofA. And I learned that I loved finance. It’s so weird, because when I was at Penn and afterward I was anti-Wharton and anti-capitalist, but then I realized that I was funneling resources to communities that don’t have them. My first three deals in LA were in South Central right after the riots. My first borrowers were church groups. Churches didn’t really know how to do any of this, so I ended up helping them. I had a great time.

I was at Bank of America for seven years until the merger with Nations Bank, when everything changed. In 2000, I got pregnant with my twins and I was put on bedrest two or three times, so I had to stop working intensely, but I still wanted to keep on working, so I asked BofA if they could demote me to account officer, but hire me as a consultant. I needed the flexibility because I knew my kids were going to be preemies. And they said yes. And I never looked back.

I had to create my own space, but the risk was mitigated because I was married and my husband had health insurance. I really went on my own when I got divorced. BofA was my first client. And I worked with other banks as a contract underwriter. I did well. I had enough clients to sustain my business, and I still do. This is still what I do for a living.

My divorce was really tumultuous, and I found refuge in screenwriting. But it wasn’t planned. I just needed to get out of the house, and I only had like Tuesdays from 6-9 pm, and I had to figure out if there were any classes available in that timeslot, and then I saw the schedule and I thought “oh, here’s something. I’ve never tried it. I’m going to try it! I’m gonna try screenwriting class, what the hell. I don’t even know what that is. Whatever.” And that’s when I fell in love with it.

After I started it, I let go of my finance clients for four years. I burned through my savings—I was a single mom—but screenwriting was really hard for me. And I had to go back to finance.

When I was learning about screenwriting I thought “you know, filmmakers can keep people in the dark for two hours sitting in a unified experience, and at the end, everyone has catharsis.” And you could almost, at that point, tell everyone in the room what to do. It’s almost like you have a cult experience. Like go out there and vote for affordable housing! If you can get the narrative arc to get people there, when they’re clapping, then anything can happen.

With An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim was able to move the climate change debate from the ivory tower to everyday nomenclature. I thought: That’s quite a stunning feat. Also, the San Francisco Green Festival in San Francisco is about environmental activism, and so I was wondering if we could ask filmmakers to help us figure out some of these inequities and policy challenges in terms of affordable housing, the public good, transit and schools and move along a value system towards more justice. That’s why I started the SF Urban Film Festival.

I look out into the world, and I try to solve problems using storytelling and film and art. And manipulating objects and meanings around objects. And complicating things. I want to respond to the world and help somehow. I want to solve problems. I want to move the needle towards justice by any means necessary. I tried urban planning. I tried finance. I tried screenwriting. I tried storytelling. I tried film festivals. I’ll try anything. What is it that will get you to wake up? I will learn it, and I will try to use it, I will try to make a platform so other people can be part of it.