Compassion was selective, and often came with a distorted twist. For what was always left unsaid in these vignettes was the starkest fact of all: that these conditions of life, with people perched precariously at the edges of need, were the common conditions in which a majority of land-poor Javanese lived in rural areas and in urban slums.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 967