Through my novel Love, Arrangements, I explore anxieties around love, belonging, the homeland, family and identity from the perspective of two Indonesian-American sisters discovering themselves and others over the course of two weeks spent in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Indah and Mina–eldest and youngest–represent different and seemingly oppositional approaches to identity. Indah–the paradigm of an eldest daughter of immigrant parents–seeks to find acceptance as an Indonesian both by learning the language and educating herself on her home country. Now at thirty-one, on the cusp of beginning her career as a doctor she finds herself at a crossroads, yearning for a more concrete tie to Indonesia and an equal in love and in life, no longer satisfied with career milestones and the veneer of American success. Meanwhile Mina, the youngest, has done everything in her power to eschew this identity “in an effort to become more a person, less defined by a place”. Yet Mina, having grown up in Indah’s shadow, knows much more of who she isn’t than who she actually is. So she follows Indah to Yogyakarta, a trip taken under the guise of a vacation which quickly results in a whirlwind courtship and the eldest’s arranged engagement to an Indonesian man named Reza. Through this contemporary iteration of arranged marriage–once considered an antiquity of the past but chosen today both as an alternative to the pitfalls of modern dating and a way to ‘return’ to tradition–I trace a bombastic confluence of cultures and families and the necessarily messy question of love.