After Kina Grannis Was Detained In Jakarta For 100 Days

Monday, June 06, 2016

A few weeks back I saw the video below where I learned about Kina Grannis and her band getting detained in Indonesia for 3 months because of work visa's that the touring company/operators didn't secure.



She's written a blog post about the experience:

I disappeared for a few months at the end of last year — perhaps you noticed. I re-emerged in January, and while I wasn’t ready to share my story then, I promised that when I was ready, I would. But, I needed time. Time to be at home with my family and friends; to just exist without having to explain or understand or analyze what had happened. Or perhaps I needed to do just that, but from the privacy of my own home, inside my own brain; to try to make some sense of it all before I was ready to talk about it out in the open. So I’ve taken my time, slowly reacquainting myself with my life and my music and my work and the online world. I’ve started feeling like myself again. However, with life finally inching its way back to normalcy, the thought of reliving the experience just as it’s starting to loosen its grip on me hasn’t felt entirely appealing. I’ve debated quietly moving on and putting it behind me, but as much as part of me has felt compelled to do just that, there is another, bigger part of me that feels like in order to really move past it, I need to share it first. Maybe because I feel like there is something to be learned here. Or maybe because I hope that with sharing it will come some healing, too. Maybe I’m afraid that if I just let it fade away as if it never happened, it will all have been for nothing — as if I’d simply been robbed of those months of my life. In any case, I’m ready to share my story now, or at least the parts of it I'm comfortable disclosing at this time. So here it is, the Cliff’s Notes version of my 100 days in Jakarta.

Indonesia - meet Vietnam.

Oh wait.

Trời ơi!

You've met.

I'm always rooting for Kina Grannis and remember her coming onto the Asian American mass radar in a big way in 2008 for winning the Crash the Super Bowl music contest.

(Video from 2012 VH1.com interview)

It sounds like she's getting to where she needs to be, using the music to help make sense of what I can only imagine is a picture of contradiction.



Listen to her two-song EP "Jakarta" at iTunes.

Here's A Video Because It Just Takes You To A Good Place