KUALA LUMPUR, May 1 — If you’ve ever come across Indonesian social media postings you might have seen the word jastip.

Jastip Is just the shortened version of the phrase jasa titip — its literal translation meaning “entrusting service” but it’s basically what Indonesia calls personal shopper services.

In Malaysia, personal shoppers also advertise themselves as “trusted.”

Whether locals here got the inspiration from jastip is anyone’s guess.

While many jastips operate locally in Indonesia, many offer buying services for items from abroad with many Indonesians working outside Indonesia taking the opportunity to make some extra cash when they fly back for visits.

Yet the biggest differentiator between Indonesia’s “I will buy this for you for a fee” couriers and ours is that they’ve become a big enough phenomenon to attract the attention of their government.

Pay your duties

In 2024, Indonesia’s Trade Ministry announced that jastip providers bringing in goods from overseas would need to comply with regulations, such as paying the applicable import tax on goods surpassing allowable thresholds.

Currently under new rules introduced in 2025, Indonesians when traveling overseas will not be charged for personal items valued at up to US$500 (RM1,985) but should they exceed that, there is a flat 10 per cent customs duty applied to values that exceed the limit, as well as standard VAT rates.

However unlike previously, there will be no import income tax applied to personal belongings even if they exceed the threshold but obviously items bought for jastip customers will not fall under the “personal item” category.

Yet while the new scrutiny of their hustles means their profit margins are no longer as lucrative, many jastip sellers still carry on their trade as evidenced by how many jastip posts can be found all over social media with X (formerly Twitter) turning up hundreds of posts by jastip shoppers.

These personal shoppers can be found haggling in Bangkok’s markets, queuing at Indonesian Big Bad Wolf sales, buying fan merch or even concert tickets in South Korea or cute anime goods in Japan.

Why are they popular?

By the time many officially imported goods make their way into Indonesia, their prices usually become fairly inflated due to import taxes, duties and of course, retailer markups.

While a huge shipment of goods would definitely be flagged by customs, jastip couriers are a lot more flexible and can offer prices that are competitive even with their usual buyer fees included in the price.

With international leisure travel still a luxury for many Indonesians, buying imported goods via jastip saves them the hassle of a passport and airfare especially with the current ongoing West Asia crisis.

What do you mean, sushi?

Getting takeaway sushi from Bali for someone in Jakarta should, to anyone with common sense, be a bad idea.

That did not stop a personal shopper from buying the raw fish delicacy from Bali’s well-regarded Philadelphia Sushi (now going by the name Filadelfia) for influencer Lily Kenzie.

The influencer put up a video showing how excited she was to get the sushi but then starts complaining about how it smells, before taking a bite and then complaining the sushi seems to be basi (gone bad).

Philadelphia even had to make a TikTok saying they had not commissioned any jastip services and they followed proper food preparation guidelines.

While all that sushi drama happened in 2024, it seems that has not deterred other personal shoppers from doing the same though with better results.

Ice, chillers and cooler bags exist so some enterprising personal shopper or courier probably figured out a way to fly sushi out quickly and without it spoiling too fast.

This is what I surmise because I popped onto TikTok to find a woman happily showing off and eating her sushi shipped all the way from Bali (yes, the same restaurant) to her place in Jakarta.

Personally I wonder how it made it through Jakarta’s infamous traffic.

Malaysia does have people who offer personal shopper services, advertising on social media and sites such as Carousel but they’re not nearly as much of an institution as Indonesia’s enterprising jastip shoppers but then our currency is also a lot stronger.

How will personal shoppers survive the current West Asia crisis? In the busy world we live in, I wouldn’t be surprised if some people decide paying a little extra is worth avoiding the hassle of queuing for the next hot thing or jumping on a plane.

In related-but-not-quite-news, Indonesia’s Chikuro, a maker of Japanese-style crispy chicken rolls, is apparently such a hit with Malaysians they’re buying them in bulk to bring home and just recently a TikTok reseller going by the handle @emma_delicious_bakery managed to sell 500 of those rolls in just two hours.

It goes to show that personal shoppers, at the heart of it, are really no different from the average entrepreneur in understanding the market and being able to cash in on trends.

That’s the kind of savviness many business owners will need in trying times like these so while some of you might laugh at jastip and their clientele, being able to make decent money for decent (mostly) work is no joke.

APRIL 29 — “You feeling all better now?”

I know the people who love me mean well when they ask if I’m well, if I’ve gotten better, if I’m cured.

You don’t ask the survivors of a war if their lives are back to normal now do you? 

On Friday my legs had started swelling again after an hour at the mall, so I eagerly got to the nearest open seat on the train going home.

Right across from me, a much older gentleman was looking at me with disdain.

All he saw was someone who looked perfectly fine.

Nothing about me now, from a cursory glance, would reveal that just a year prior I was spending most of my free time at the hospital.

Stairs, my forever nemesis

Some days I can go down steps normally but early in the morning or late in the evening my legs are either stiff or swollen or both.

The elevator is my best friend most of the time but sometimes when it’s broken or just too far away, the only option is to take that torturous journey while also dealing with my decades-old fear of falling down steps.

When I feel the back of my ankle brush against the back of a stair, it should be a comfort, a way to know I am firmly on the step instead of too close to the edge.

Instead something in me recoils.

It’s not something I can explain, this revulsion when I feel the back of my ankle or foot touch the back of a stair, worst being the grooves of an escalator.

One of those things that can’t be helped as I wear a size 8 so most stairs just barely accommodate my feet.

In Taipei they again became my cross though not quite as torturous as Bangkok’s nightmare long flights where I thought my heavy backpack would topple me over down, down, down like Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her.

So it was fitting that with the Year of the Horse (my birth year) I would finally visit that land not far from Japan, in a complicated relationship with China.

Why Taiwan?

Taiwan’s capital had long been on my bucket list but when I had money, I had no time; when I had time, my money needed to go elsewhere. 

Taiwan had always been on my bucket list and it’s nice when dreams come true. — Picture by Erna Mahyuni

Thanks to internet promos I paid slightly less than RM1,800 for flights and board for a 4D3N trip.

If I wasn’t currently made of tofu, perhaps I could have stayed longer by staying at a hostel but if I was to survive the trip, I would need a decent bed or I would not be able to leave it at all the next morning.

Taiwan isn’t Japan, where I would need to be checking my currency converter lest I accidentally spend a week’s groceries at a restaurant.

Cheap eats could be had, train and bus fares are very affordable as is, suprisingly, Uber.

Outside of souvenirs I would roughly be paying prices similar to the Klang Valley and that would not be much of a hardship.

Being affordable wasn’t why I wanted to go to Taiwan.

I’ve been to China and Hong Kong but what drew me to Taiwan was how much it reminded me of my own hometown.

In Sabah I grew up around Hakka speakers and it pained me that I while I could find Cantonese, Mandarin and even Hokkien books for my mini language library, I had yet to add Hakka.

That was my main mission — to acquire Hakka books, preferably about the language but I would settle for Hakka literature classics.

While I failed spectacularly at that mission due to bad luck and shyness, I found other things in Taipei.

When everything about you is broken

I understand now why people call travel “healing.”

It seemed fitting to finally make it to Taiwan in the Year of the Horse. — Picture by Erna Mahyuni

Once, I would scoff at seeing people on TikTok waxing lyrical about “healing” at various locales, whether it was waterfalls, islands or those music festivals where youngsters basically wear outfits consisting of a handkerchief and one shoelace, adorned with sequins.

When I went to Bangkok last year I was in the throes of depression even if I could not admit to myself.

I know what depression looks like, after all.

I have read books about it, attempted to write a book about it, talked to a doctor about it and called it “healthcare.”

What I told people was that I just needed to be anywhere but here.

When you’re chronically ill your body feels like a prison.

How do you escape it when you carry it with you everywhere you go?

The only answer is to take it, bars, chains and all to where you can forget how the walls seem to close in on you.

While Bangkok was a frenetic change of pace, Taipei was a place both entirely strange to me while promising to be spiritually familiar.

I miss it already.

The next few weeks I’ll write about the too-short time I spent there and then what possessed me to then pencil in a trip to say “Hi” to Mom.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.