My room is small, clean, and spare, and there is even a light on a table next to the bed. This is obviously a well-ordered home with a routine. There will not be much adventure here, but that can come after I have learned to speak the language. We negotiate a price of eight U.S. dollars per night, including food. I move in that afternoon.
Within minutes of my arrival, Inid, Diana’s sixteen-year-old sister, bursts through the door holding a tiny white Shih Tzu. Tall, slim, and model-beautiful with shoulder-length black hair, Inid rushes over to me, hand out for a shake.
“Hi, my name is Inid. This is Fifi. Come. I will take you for a ride.”
Inid is stealing me. I’m not sure her sister and brother-in-law are happy about it, but when I look to them for permission, they gesture that I should go.
Inid and I walk up the street to the house where she lives with her mother. She brings me in for a quick introduction and a dog drop-off. Then she hands me a helmet. Yay! It’s not going to be all that stuffy after all.
We shoot through the quiet tree-lined streets on her motorcycle, me holding onto Inid’s waist, and Inid pointing and calling out the Indonesian names of things like dokar (horse and carriage), ojek (motorcycle taxi), masjid (mosque), gereja (church). I repeat the words into the wind and promptly forget them. This is not going to be an easy language to learn.
“House my friend,” says Inid as she stops in front of a typical suburban home. I hop off the back and follow her inside. She introduces me to a beautiful girl with shoulder-length, shiny black hair that smells sweet from the perfume of a recent shampoo. We sit in the living room for five minutes as the girls giggle and chatter in Javanese, the language of Java; nearly everyone in Indonesia speaks two languages, the language of their island and the language of the country. Minutes after we arrive, Inid jumps up and takes my hand. “Come.”
We ride around several more streets and stop again. “House my friend,” says Inid, and we repeat the routine. Finally, after I have been shown off to her three best friends, we pull into the parking lot of a big Catholic church. I am surprised to find out that Inid and her family are Catholics in a Muslim country.
“Come.”
My little dictator-guide takes my hand and we go into a huge hall for a choir rehearsal. Inid is in the choir. The choir director tells me in English that the group is going to be touring Europe in a few months and she invites me to sit and listen. They sing “Ave Maria” and “Greensleeves,” and some wonderful tribal songs with drums and exotic instruments.
When the rehearsal is over, we whiz home, pick up Fifi, the dog, at Inid’s, and report on our afternoon to Bambang and Diana. I have learned how to say good afternoon, thank you, traffic light, motorcycle taxi, and horse-drawn carriage.
The next morning I hear Bambang and Diana drive off in their car as I am lying in bed doing leg lifts, holding Indonesian Made Easy in my hands. I count to five over and over again, staring at the book and counting my legs lifts. Five times five on each side and then five more sets of five on each leg while lying on my back. Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima. Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima. Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima. By the time I’ve finished my leg lifts, I can count to five. I dress and go out the door.
Didi is in the living room sweeping the floor. She greets me with a big smile and says, “Saya menyapu.” Then she points to herself and says, “Saya.” She begins to sweep and says, “Me . . . nya . . . pu. Saya menyapu.” Again she points to herself, “Saya.” To the broom, “Sapu. Saya menyapu.”
I take the broom and do exactly what she did, saying the words she has taught me. She smiles, proud to be such a good teacher. We both laugh. I decide on the spot that I will not go to a school. I will learn from Didi and Inid, and, I discover later, the neighborhood children.
During the week I do errands and walk and wander with Didi and the baby. As we walk, she points and names, alerting both me and the baby that we are about to learn a new word. I learn goat and swing and kite and nose and mouth and eyes. We have a little trouble when she says something conversational, something that she can’t point to. “Saya capet” (pronounced “chapet”), she says one day during our afternoon walk. I know it’s descriptive of herself—saya means I. The am is understood; there is no verb to be. But since there is nothing she can point to, I have to guess at the meaning of capet. “Saya capet,” she says again, this time bending her knees and sort of rolling her eyes. I still don’t get it.
Capet, I discover later when I look it up in the dictionary that is too heavy to take on our walks, means tired.
I usually spend an hour or two in my room with Indonesian Made Easy, repeating phrases and words out loud, wondering if Didi thinks I’m a little crazy or if she understands that saying things out loud is the only way to learn a language. And I keep strengthening both my thighs and my numbers every morning as I continue counting leg lifts.
One morning I take a motorcycle taxi into town and rent a bike for two weeks. Then I pedal for about half an hour to Gadjah Mada University. I have always loved the feeling of a university campus. I wander among the big buildings, among the students rushing to their next classes. I sit on a stone bench, breathing in the excitement of learning, and I decide that I’m going to study my Indonesian in the campus library.
But first I have to find the library. I look up the word and groan. Library is perbustakaan. Where is the library? Di mana perbustakaan? I walk around for half an hour, saying it over and over again. Finally, when I am saying it easily, I ask a young woman who is passing by. I nod at her answer, but I don’t understand a word she says. I ask three more people until finally someone answers me in English.
“I will take you there,” says Hamid, and we talk as we walk. He is about twenty, a third-year student in the English faculty, and thrilled that he has found me. He has been dreaming of meeting a native speaker, and suddenly I appear. Hamid takes me to one of the inner reading rooms.
“If you study here, I will come to visit you every day. Perhaps I can help you with your Indonesian. And I hope we can have conversations in English. Good luck.”
The next morning as we eat our breakfast of rice and tempeh (fermented soybean), I ask Diana and Bambang to help me write some sentences about myself that I can use in conversation: I am a writer from America (no one knows the United States). I write children’s books. I am living in Yogya with a family. I am in Indonesia to learn the language and get to know the people.
In the afternoon I bike to Gadja Mada and sit in my reading room. I write and whisper the sentences, each one hundreds of times. Hamid picks me up at four and I recite my words. Then we talk in English. Hamid is applying for a student exchange program in Canada. We work on his application.
Each day I bike to the university and sit in the same place. Some of the regulars in the room talk to me after a while, and Hamid always comes to see me in the late afternoon when I am ready to quit. We have coffee and I adjust his too perfect English by adding idioms and teaching him how to slur his words together so he doesn’t sound stilted. He also listens to my lesson of the day.
The second weekend that I am in the house, Diana tells me that she is going to take me to meet the head of the neighborhood organization. He is an architect and he has four children. I smile and nod and indicate that I would like that.
Ten minutes later she tells me again, adding that he lives in a particular house down the street.
“He is an important leader in the community,” she tells me. I smile and nod.
Ten minutes later, she points to two little girls who are playing in front of our house. They are dressed in crisply ironed, flowery cotton dresses, and their hair is freshly washed and combed.
“These are the architect’s children. They are freshly bathed for your visit.”
“When will we be going?” I ask, aware that there is some unspoken message that I’m not getting.
“As soon as you bathe.”
Bathing is not an optional thing in Indonesia. People bathe in the
morning, in the afternoon, and before ceremonies and visits and special activities. Every bathroom has a built-in cement “tub” about three feet high and two to three feet square. It is usually filled with clean cold water that you scoop out with a plastic container and throw over your body before you soap up. All bathroom floors have drains. Those first few scoops are always a shock and you often hear exclamations of “Aaah!” and “Ooooo!” accompanying the splashes.
When I am bathed and dressed in clean clothes, we are ready to go.
The architect tells me that he very much wants his children to learn English and I offer to teach them. He nods with pleasure, and we make a plan for an English class two afternoons a week. The other thing that comes out of our visit is that the architect tells his daughters, and they tell all the neighborhood children, that they have to help me with my Indonesian.
From that day on, whenever I walk out the door, I step into the neighborhood classroom. Children come running up to me, pointing. “Rumah,” they say slowly, separating the syllables and pointing to a house, as though I were their baby brother or sister. “Pohon,” they say, pointing to a tree.
One afternoon I return from the library and Inid is sitting alone in the living room. She greets me, but her bouncy effusiveness is missing. So is her dog.
“Fifi was killed by a car this morning,” she tells me, and like all Indonesians, she delivers her bad news with a smile.
I use my exemption. As a foreigner, I do not have to smile. Instead, I hold her and she allows herself to cry.
After I have been in Yogya for nearly a month, I begin to get itchy. I’m ready for an adventure. I ask Bambang and Diana if they have any ideas. Two days later, they sit me down and translate an article from the newspaper. In one week, the vice-governor of the province of Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo) is having a ceremony for his long-dead grandmother, who was never properly sent off to the next world. The traditional ceremony is to take place deep in the rain forest in the village where his tribal ancestors lived, many miles by boat into the interior.
Perfect. I will go to the ceremony. And when the festivities are over, I shall ask permission to stay for a month . . . in the interior of Borneo.
The next day I bike to Gadjah Mada and study in the library, looking up every few minutes, waiting, watching for Hamid. Finally, late in the afternoon, he arrives.
“Hamid, I am going to Kalimantan in a week and I would like to hire you as my tutor. I have to learn some sentences that I will need as I travel. If you have the time, perhaps we could have a formal class for two hours each afternoon until I leave.”
Like every other student I’ve known, Hamid is happy to have a way of earning money. We begin that day.
I have read in the guidebooks that when you travel in Indonesia, you have to register with the police or headman of each village you visit. I need the polite words and mannerisms to introduce myself to a headman. And I need to learn how to ask permission to stay and whether there is a family in the village that would put me up overnight. I have no idea what kind of travel will be involved or how I will get around. I do know that the rivers of Borneo are the routes from one place to another. I will have to inquire about boat transportation.
Hamid teaches and drills me on things like “It is an honor to meet you,” accompanied by putting my hands together and lowering my head. “Your country is very beautiful.” “It is a privilege for me to be here.” “Do you know of a place where I can sleep tonight?”
I learn how to ask about children and school and work. And I practice saying that I am from America, that I write books for children, and that I have children of my own. Several people have suggested that I tell people I am married and that my husband could not come with me. The lie is not for safety, but rather to avoid pity. With Hamid’s help, I create a husband who is a teacher.
By the time I step onto the plane for Pangkalan Bun, my head is swirling with words and sentences that I’m sure I’ll forget at the crucial moment.
In Pangkalan Bun, I check into a cheap hotel and register with the police. They tell me that I will need permission from the mayor to go into the interior.
The mayor’s private office is a big room, perhaps fifteen feet square. Facing the entrance door is a huge desk, ten feet long and very wide. Staring down at me from the wall behind the desk are two enormous framed photographs, one of President Suharto and the other of his vice-president. And under the portraits, barely visible behind the giant desk, is a small man who looks as though he is playing in his father’s office. He is smiling broadly.
I begin my well-practiced monologue. First I lift my hands and lower my head and tell him, with a smile, what an honor it is to be in his presence. Then I move into the fact that I am a writer from America and that I find his country very beautiful. I continue to smile.
“I was living in Yogyakarta,” I continue, “when I read in the newspaper about the ceremony for the vice-governor’s grandmother. I would consider it an honor and a privilege if you would give me permission to go to the ceremony and then remain in the interior for a month.”
He smiles back at me and says with a nod, “Tidak.” No.
I am certain he did not understand me; maybe the words were wrong, maybe the accent was too strong or my speech too quick, so I begin again, pronouncing the words carefully, smiling broadly. Once again I recite my memorized introduction, my practiced compliments, and my request.
He smiles again and says, “Tidak.”
I ask why. He answers in Indonesian, some of which I understand.
“It is dangerous,” he tells me, “for a woman to be alone in that part of Kalimantan . . . I am responsible for you. I invite you to join the government party that is going to the ceremony. You may travel on the boats with them at government expense and you may eat with them and sleep where they sleep. You will be our guest. But when the ceremony is over, you must return with them. You may not stay.”
I smile and thank him, hands in front of my lowered face as I back out the door. “Thank you. Thank you very much. It will be an honor to travel with the government party.”
His assistant gives me information on where the group will assemble. They are leaving tomorrow morning. The good news is that my trip is set; I was wondering how I was going to do it on my own. The bad news is that I was hoping to settle into the village and stay for a while. Now I don’t know what I’ll do for the rest of the month.
Damn. I don’t like being told what I can do and where I can go. It dredges up the adolescent rebel in me. As I walk back to my hotel, I have to remind myself that I am in Indonesia, where my every move has to be recorded and approved by the police. If I’m going to survive here, I have to learn to live with rules.
The next morning I arrive early. Already the lobby of the hotel meeting place is packed. I introduce myself to the coordinator of the trip, who is expecting me; then I step back and observe the group . . . all Indonesian men. They are chattering noisily. The speech is too fast and the people too many; I don’t understand a word. Then my ear picks up English and women’s voices.
Behind a noisy clump of men, surrounded by five young Indonesian men, are two white women, one fairly heavy and tall with long gray hair pulled back, and the other, a slim woman with reddish hair. I stare at them long enough to know they have seen me, but they make no effort to return my smile.
After about fifteen minutes, the smaller woman walks over to me and asks who I am and what I am doing there. I answer and ask the same questions. When she finishes answering, she walks away and I watch her pass the information on to the other woman. Neither of them initiates another conversation for the remainder of the trip.
The bigger woman is Biruté Galdikas. I know her name from the physical anthropology classes I took at UCLA. Galdikas is one of Louis Leakey’s primate women: there are Dian Fossey and her gorillas, Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees, both of them household words; and Biruté Galdikas and her orangutans, whom few have heard of
. A few years ago the three of them went on a speaking tour as “The Trimates.”
When I hear her name, I remember that Dr. Galdikas has been studying the lives of orangutans here in the rain forest of Kalimantan since 1971. She is highly respected in academic circles and I would very much like to walk over and introduce myself, but every time I am able to catch her eye and smile, she turns away.
The other woman is from the zoo in San Francisco, and she never again looks my way. She is in Borneo to assist Dr. Galdikas. The young men around them are students and Dayak tribesmen. Dr. Galdikas towers over her all-male entourage like a great white queen. She is engrossed in the group and it is obvious that she is not planning to acknowledge my presence.
The smaller woman, I find out later, approached me at the request of Dr. Galdikas. Once Dr. Galdikas knows that I have no official status, I am never approached again. The message I get is clear: I have invaded her world and I am not welcome.
There are six boats lined up at the dock, and about twenty-five people. The coordinator of the trip directs me to a small powerboat that seats eight. Our boat is the third in the caravan; Dr. Galdikas and her entourage are three boats behind us.
I am feeling uncomfortable, rejected, and very alone. I watch others climb into my boat and sit down, but the seat next to me remains empty. Like that first night in Mexico three years ago when I couldn’t go out to dinner alone, it isn’t being alone that’s the problem. It’s watching everyone else’s reaction to my being alone. I sit, trying to smile but wanting to cry. I can see the unasked question that is in everyone’s eyes: Why have you been isolated by those women?
Finally, a young, handsome Indonesian man sits next to me. He is taller by a head than the local Dayak men; he has a small, neat mustache, well-trimmed hair, and he’s wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He is carrying three cameras around his neck and two black leather bags over his shoulder.
“Hi. I am Abdul. Where are you from?”