JAKARTA, Indonesia — June 10: In my last two letters I wrote about the chaos and terror that took over Jakarta — and especially the expatriate community in Jakarta — for a few weeks last month. There are more stories, much worse stories, to tell — but I’m not ready to write that letter yet. In the meantime, even as these stories circulate, a kind of giddy euphoria has also overtaken life here, when what seemed impossible, inconceivable, just a few months ago is suddenly reality. The two twist, coexist, in weird ways — as they do in the thoughts that follow.
What happens when 80 percent of your fellow expatriates leave screaming, when the majority of shopping centers are irrevocably gone, when everything you trust and distrust is thrown into the air to flutter down like feathers?
1.) Skilled professionals become harder to find
Before the problems, it was easy finding teachers for the language school where I work. We could reject the sarong-wearing, Birkenstock-shod, “oooh-isn’t-it-all-so-mystical” neo-hippies, and we could hire people with the required knowledge of English. They didn’t try to seduce every student with offers of “free private classes,” they didn’t come in loaded, they didn’t call 15 minutes before class and give me a knock-down, drag-out account of why they’re just too sexually/pharmaceutically/diarrhetically exhausted to come in and ask if I could reach into the magical hat I must have under my desk and pull out a replacement for them that evening.
Now, I’m forced to hire whatever walks in. I have to go into the hostel area of Jalan Jaksa and elbow my way through crowds of sunburned Japanese surfers and drunken Aussie rugby addicts, looking for someone who might not embarrass me and my organization in front of a class of paying students. I even miss Mark, the male model from New Zealand. Yes, he spent half the class talking about how blond and good-looking he was — but the students often learned something from his tangled diction.
2.) Every foreign guy becomes 10 times more attractive
As the exodus of professional “consultants” (pardon the inside joke) and other foreigners reached its height, many young professional women lost their boyfriends. These women were not prostitutes. They simply appreciated the romance and fun that resides in American manhood (insert your own joke here). Some of these guys were very handsome and tall (multinationals seem to have a minimum height requirement for work in Jakarta). The marines from the various embassies were particularly attractive to the local jet-set girls.
Now, all of these guys have been ordered out of the country by the home office. I don’t blame them — given a choice between proving how macho they are by staying or losing their jobs, it’s no choice at all. However, that leaves the dregs of guy-hood here.
Dewi is a junior trader at a finance house. She wears Versace suits and carries a quilted Gucci bag (for the record, she paid for it all). Her hair shines like bubbling hot chocolate, her skin tone is reminiscent of cafe au lait. Last night, I saw her approached by a guy whose face looked like a boiled fist and who had no ass whatsoever. She actually laughed at his jokes and they exchanged cards — three months ago, she would have laughed in his face and poured her drink over his thinning hair.
And let us not even discuss the handsome Indonesian guys who yearn for the days when tall, strapping Aussie backpacker girls would appear like emissaries from Models Inc. They have my sympathy.
3.) Things you don’t need become really cheap
Walking to an appointment last week, I felt a hand settle on my wrist. I plucked it off. Its owner hove into view.
“Handphone,” he said.
I nodded and smiled. He followed me.
“Do you want to buy a handphone?”
“Saya sudah punya.” I already have one, thanks. I turned to go.
He stood in front of me and opened his long coat. I had always thought those stories about watch salesmen with watches hanging from chest to knees were jokes, but no — this guy had about 15 cellular phones inside his coat. Low overhead is the secret to business success.
I will not buy stolen goods, I thought to myself.
Buying looted goods is wrong.
They represent another person’s hard-earned — hey, is that a Nokia Communicator, the one with the keyboard that Val Kilmer had in “The Saint”?
I reached for it. I caressed it, flipped it open, its amazing features revealing themselves like a coy maiden in a Merchant-Ivory film.
“Duaratus Ribu,” the salesman whispered, smiling, sure I was now in his larcenous clutches.
Eighteen bucks.
Then eight years of Catholic catechism kicked in and I handed it back and left.
Guess what Dewi bought a few days ago?
4.) Things you need become really expensive
“Best Foods mayo?”
“Tidak ada, coba minggu depan.” No luck, honky, try next week.
“French ham?”
“Tidak ada, coba minggu depan.”
“Country Time lemonade?”
The store manager just smirks and turns away, ready to disappoint another expat on a “shopping for home” trip.
5.) Local people find that riots are not fun
I cruised through the market area near my house today. In three kilometers, exactly four businesses are left standing.
Robinson’s Department Store — it used to be four floors of everything. People from outlying villages would come and just gawk at all the shoes and medicine and VCRs for sale. Now it’s four floors of ash, four floors of falling scorched awnings, the huge neon sign melted into a Daliesque lava-flow. As I try to frame a photo of the gutted building, a young woman comes over. She’s wearing the uniform she wore when she worked in Robinson’s, perhaps the only connection she has left to remind her of when she had a job in an air-conditioned building.
“You worked there?”
She nods. We both look up at the building.
“They stole everything before they burned it, and now I have no job.”
“What will you do now?”
“Pulang kampung.” Back to the village.
Any jobs in the village?
Another smirk, a shake of the head. She asks me about jobs. Do I know of anyone who’s hiring — do I need a secretary?
I try to cheer her up by saying that at least she’ll get to see her family.
Jakarta is becoming the land of smirks.
6.) Everybody reinvents history
All of the political cronies of ex-President Suharto now boldly proclaim that they knew that he and his family were corrupt — heck, they knew it all the time! This is, of course, much easier now that you don’t risk a bullet for saying so. Kwik Kian Gie, the Chinese-Indonesian economist, has invented a new term for these people: pahlawan kesiangan — tardy heroes.
Every day, the paper lists new groups setting up political parties. Labor groups, women’s groups, Chinese groups — I have a feeling the next election is going to be a lot like the Philippine elections. That’s not a bad thing — it’s a very good show, sort of chaos married to a block party with a few speeches thrown in for good measure.
People are fired up by the fact that they might have choices after 30-odd years. Bajaj drivers — they drive the little three-wheeled death-traps, kind of a moped with a passenger compartment — argue and wave newspapers, lauding their personal favorites. Democracy is suddenly not some foreign concept. It’s this: guys who make $10 a month having spirited discussions about why Emil Salim is going to save the day.
I personally am amazed that B.J. Habibie has done so much so fast. You didn’t hear about Suharto’s son-in-law, Gen. Prabowo, going to the presidential building wearing a pistol and being followed by several trucks of marines in full battle gear? He tried to trade his own pistol for a meeting with the president — a negotiating gambit you probably don’t learn at Harvard Business School.
Ex-President Suharto announced that he would hold a press conference
today, to explain where he got the $40 billion in assets his
family controls. Oh, we were excited! The possible stories –
“I found it on a bus … No, it was in a credenza … No, I cashed in all
those gift certificates I get every year for my birthday …” His official
salary was only about $1,000 a month at today’s exchange rate.
Alas, his kids talked him out of it. They are keeping a very low profile.
Tommy, perhaps the most reviled of the Suharto offspring, rolled up to a
press conference a few months ago in his purple Rolls Royce. The press
conference was to announce that he hadn’t used his father’s influence to
import the South Korean cars he was selling. He failed to explain why the
cars weren’t saddled with the 300 percent tax usually set on imported cars. He also
failed to explain why he hadn’t imported any spare parts for the cars (the
idea was the cars would never break down, I guess). But the most important
question wasn’t even asked — “Why purple?”
We don’t see that car driving around much anymore.
You can imagine why.
The truth is, despite what you saw on CNN, most of the country is still standing, the people still love to see a friendly smile, people here still fall in love and get married and cry at Indian movies. It’s actually safe to come here, the food is still great and the jungle still holds jewels of opportunity. But, please, before you come — lose the Birkenstocks.
JAKARTA, INDONESIA — May 22: Today, after the triple shock waves of A) Suharto’s resigning, B) Habibie’s taking over and C) my finding out that roughly 80 percent of the Americans here have left, it is decided that a party for visiting journalists and other hardy souls would be nice. My idea to call it “The Party for People Who Didn’t Run Screaming for The Exits” is quickly and mercilessly ignored. While I might sound a bit flippant, please know that my ethnic-Chinese wife and I both agree that she should not go into downtown with me.
Stories have been coming in about what happened to my friends. It might have looked bad on CNN — but imagine this: You’re a French citizen, living here for seven years. You find yourself trapped in a burning shopping complex, surrounded by flames and looters, none of whom are smiling at you. At home, your Indonesian-Chinese wife and your two children are standing by the phone, praying with a friend, as they hear the neighborhood runners shouting out the location of the looting and burning.
“It’s at the school three blocks over! They’re breaking the windows!”
Then: “The church on the corner is burning!”
And finally: “They’re at the corner! They’re coming to this street!”
It’s one thing to talk about this as an abstraction, as a plot to a film. It’s another to sit down in that burned-out shopping center and fall asleep, unable to get home, not knowing if your family is dead or alive.
At Kafe Batavia, the downtown restaurant housed in a 150-year-old traditional Dutch mansion, the journalists are taking advantage of the open bar with both fists. I take pictures of them holding up the front page of the Jakarta Post, with its banner headline “I QUIT!” We sit down to talk about the future.
No one here knows anything — we’ve just been reacting to what we see on the streets and read on the Net. We all agree, however, that we probably know more than some talking head in New York who might have visited Bali for a week last year and now knows everything about Indonesia.
It is quickly agreed that Habibie is probably going to be a transitional figure. The army will probably choose someone with more global respect. When? Estimates range from three weeks to six months, with one beery correspondent holding out for a year. We throw rolls at him.
We all talk about the policy changes that we might see. Yet this too is sheer conjecture — there are too many live wires, too many loose ends. We’d like to see ethnic equality, we’d like to see complete transparency in the financial market, we’d like to see a coalition government and the dissolution of the long-standing Golkar party, Suharto’s party. Membership is compulsory for military and government personnel. But again, what we want and what we’ll get are probably very different. Rumor and prediction have taken the place of our day jobs.
We click glasses and toast the quiet as I think about finding new private students — surely not all of the embassies are empty? Somebody must want to learn English, right? One fellow offers up the name of a somewhat obscure Muslim cleric as Habibie’s successor. We all scratch our heads, but this man has some very good sources and I will not bet against him, not now.
After dinner and wine, we light cigars and talk about our favorite disco reopening. We wonder how the exodus of bules (the local term for white people) will affect the earning potential of the local party girls. My single friends offer anecdotes about the new marketing practices being employed: barhoppers calling and inviting themselves over for late — very late — “dinners.” I want to find someone in the glass business to work with — every window in Jakarta is gone, it seems. Construction and renovation companies will boom, if there really is a portion of the International Monetary Fund set aside for rebuilding our city and getting life back on track.
Later, at the Taramur disco, it’s not the usual cattle-car/critical-mass situation on the dance floor, but I can see that the professional night-lifers (I’m only semi-pro) and the “business girls” and “rent boys” — who rely on this scene for their livelihood — are relishing reentering their nocturnal world. Dry-ice fog envelopes the dance floor, dancers whoop and grind against each other, and even I am the target of some marketing techniques (mostly having ice cubes rubbed on my chest — why do they think this will turn me on enough to take them home?). I merely smile, sip my beer, and do the white-boy shuffle.
My cell phone rings. I duck out of Tanamur to answer it.
Another triple shock wave: Suharto has left the country. His son-in-law, the general of an elite military force, has been removed from command and may be arrested. The army, at this moment, is marching into the Parliament building to clear out the students after five days of protests.
“Are these confirmed?”
“Only the last one — I can see it on CNN right now. The other two came from a good source.”
“Have they started shooting yet?”
“No, but they look pissed and ready for a fight.”
I sigh, hang my head. “Damn.”
“Yeah,” he answers, “welcome back to the shit.”
May 27: Happily enough, that protest broke up at 5 a.m. with no bloodshed. And since then, the most amazing things are happening.
The people of Indonesia start winning a few.
Companies that mysteriously got tax vacations of up to 10 years start getting investigated.
Two political prisoners are released and more are promised.
The members of the two election bodies, handpicked by Suharto, start resigning — willingly.
Habibie goes downtown, to the riot-stricken areas, to the burned-out shops and malls.
He tells the owners, most of whom are ethnic Chinese, that he is going to push for unity and fairness. He says that this will not happen again, and he will devote resources to helping rebuild.
He starts acting like a president.
But here’s the thing, here’s the moment that makes us all catch our breath: An angry store owner steps up and — shakes his fist at Habibie, the president! Six months ago, that fist would have ended up in jail, after a few very bad hours.
There’s a new rule in town: The old rules are dead.
Today, the paper says that the flood of evacuees has turned. The expats and Indonesian-Chinese who ran for Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or anywhere a plane was going are coming back. They keep looking around, waiting for the riots to start anew, waiting for the sky to fall again. When we meet, I smile and shake their hands and act reassuring. They look like they’ve been through a bombing raid — and they’re the ones who left.
The ex-president, I hear, is still in his home downtown, surrounded by his family — they didn’t leave, it turns out. A majority of Asian executives polled by a regional business magazine say that he and his family should be prosecuted for corruption. I wonder how that story goes down at their breakfast table.
Riding my bicycle around, pondering these surrealistic days, I find myself thinking of James Fenton’s remark as the other journalists left before the fall of Saigon: something along the lines of “Won’t it be nice to have the place to ourselves?”
I didn’t stay because I wanted to be the last white guy in Jakarta. I didn’t feel particularly brave or noble.
The truth is: I just wanted to stay. Other people stayed for their own reasons, some selfish, some foolish, some were simply too lazy to pack.
I don’t want to sound too sentimental, but the people who stayed were dear to me before — and the fact that they stayed makes them only more precious. That night at the Kafe Batavia, our eyes met — Ah, you stayed, too — and the wine tasted especially robust, the cigars were particularly fine, and the embraces we exchanged were stronger than they were before. Perhaps it takes a coup to really see the people you live with.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — May 20: “The American Embassy advises all American citizens to avoid nonessential travel to Indonesia at this time. American citizens are urged to leave Indonesia.”
I bang the top of the monitor with my fist. I knew that the rise in fuel and food prices would drive people into the streets. I knew that there might be some looting and that maybe my Chinese/Sudanese/Dutch wife and her family might need to stay off the streets for a few days.
But now I am being asked to leave. Seven years of teaching, of making friends from every circle of Indonesian society — would I run?
My cell phone, both land lines and my e-mail are flying with messages. My friends and family here are desperate for information — what’s burning? Who’s been hurt? Where is safe? My U.S. friends and family are simply sticking to one message: “Get out. Get out now!”
Paul, my best friend here, calls, worried.
“Uh, buddy, how would you feel about me coming out and staying with you a few days?”
CNN says the roads are blocked, Singapore’s Straits Times says looters are pulling non-Indonesians from their cars. My house is big and easy to defend with high walls and guards, but Paul is all the way across the city.
“Do it. If you can’t make it through, pull back to the embassy. Watch for me on the road.”
“I’ll bring meat.”
“Don’t bring a damn thing, just get here. Trust your driver — if he thinks you should pull back, pull back.”
My wife watches as I get ready to go out, her lovely face clouded with worry. “Please don’t go. I’m serious, Jeffrey.”
I kiss her and tell her to call my cell phone if the trouble starts moving toward us.
On my bike, I am the usual big white galoot the locals have come to know around my neighborhood. In a car, I might be the enemy. On a mountain bike in shiny shorts, I’m just some foolish tourist out exercising.
I come to the head of the street to find that a mob has blocked off the road. I ride through, smiling and asking what’s going on. “Isip-isip, doang,” is the answer — just playing. I don’t look at the men — they seem edgy, as if the battle to get rid of their leader, President Suharto, might have to be fought at the gates of the university they stand in front of.
Down the road, a car is burning. It’s a Timor, one of the cars the president’s son decided to import illegally. I get on the phone and warn all my Timor-driving friends to stay off the roads.
I see trucks begin to turn around — but I also see a way to get through. I look back down the road and see Paul’s white Isuzu Panther slowing down. I fish my phone out of my bag as it starts to ring.
“Paul, I see you.”
“Haris says we can’t make it.”
I think hard for a moment.
“I’ll ride you through; you can make the turn. They know me.”
The driver takes the turn slowly as I wait, pacing me as I ride next to them. The crowd parts; I’m glad I don’t have to do this in an area where I’m not known.
Paul’s smile of relief is priceless. “I’ve got three big tenderloins,” he says, patting a parcel from the restaurant he manages.
We get to the house and big hugs ensue. Paul is wiped out.
“Troops were walking up and down my street all night. Downtown is — it’s gone, Jeff. It’s just gone.”
I hand him over to my wife and get back on the Net.
“The American Embassy is bringing in evacuation flights for all American citizens … Meet at midnight at the International School. One carry-on bag is allowed.”
I don’t even consider it. I’m caught up in the moment, adrenalin substituting for common sense. I don’t think about a new president here after 32 years of the same — let’s call it “creative fund-raising.” I don’t think about every one of my private students — the source of the bulk of my revenue — going to Korea or Singapore to wait the fires out. I certainly don’t think about figuring out what to put in a carry-on bag. My attitude is: I’ve been here for seven years. I live here.
Now I’m back out on the bike, riding through the rural kampungs,
looking for
information and cans of Coke, which will probably be worth their weight in
gold tonight. Women in the villages ask me for news, knowing our
compound
has a satellite dish. Three young people I know ask me to find them jobs.
Riding
out here, it’s almost as if the drama on the roads and in the city is on
another planet.
I am constantly stopping to take calls. The image of a great big white guy
on a green bicycle, on a path in the jungle, stopping and speaking a foreign
language into a cell phone — if that isn’t conspicuous, I don’t know what is.
Most of the calls go like this:
Them: “Should I go?”
Me: “I can’t answer that.”
Them: “Well, are you going?”
Me: “No, but remember — I’m not that bright.”
JC, my occasional boss, calls. He had to run from two mobs and climb fences all night, finally reaching his house at dawn to see his neighbors turned into vigilantes, ready to defend their homes with 5-irons and cricket bats.
“Jeff, please get down here. The school is ruined, all the windows have been smashed. Come and get me — help me …”
In the car, I tell my driver to take me to Chinatown, to the heart of it.
The first thing I notice are the tanks. Would the soldiers really shoot their own people? Or are they here to protect the first family’s interests, their banks, their car showrooms?
Looking down the street, I can see nothing but gutted buildings, the scattered survivors bearing signs attesting Milik Pribumi — “owned by native Indonesians.” I think about my in-laws, living here for three generations, employing hundreds of Indonesians in their businesses — will those people be happy, now that the jobs are gone? No one has thought this through. It has struck like a snake.
JC greets me with, “Don’t hug me or I’ll start crying.” All the windows of all the businesses are smashed, every store in the neighboring mall looted. We quickly grab the valuables, stopping to laugh every few moments — him with relief, me with the pure joy of being here, of deciding not to run. We load up and head out.
On the way to my house, my father calls on my cell phone, worried out of his mind, asking me to leave. I calm him as I watch cars burning.
At the house, I shift from the Net to CNN to Australian News Service to CNBC, cursing as CNN decides to pay tribute to Frank Sinatra. He had a lovely voice and was a heck of a swingin’ cat, maybe even a hell of an American — but could we please go back to coverage of my world that is burning down around me?
We cheer and salute Maria Ressa, CNN’s local voice — she hasn’t left. We sit and eat our siege rations (beef cooked in coconut milk, sweet buns with spiced beef, Bintang beer) and make scabrous comments about the talking heads from the States, analyzing a situation they are not here to see.
May 22: We settle into a routine. Unable to work, I write and sleep
and ride. My wife relishes the thought of cooking for a full household and
makes her famous spaghetti sauce. Paul practices magic tricks.
In the afternoon, we go to the second floor and look for smoke, trying to
discern burning trash from burning buildings.
I hear that one of my students was beaten
after being dragged from his car. Another source tells of rioters blocking
the roads to the airport and beating up anyone who is not native Indonesian
– pribumi. These
stories are hard to relate to the gentle, kind Indonesians I have come to
know and love.
I am picking over saffron rice with chicken when I hear
screams from our TV room. I rush upstairs — is our office finally gone? Is
the Old Man dead?
I find everyone around the television, mouths gaping open,
my wife’s relatives shaking their heads and jabbering in Chinese and
Indonesian at the same time. I shout for news. Paul turns to me.
“He quit. Suharto quit. Habibie’s in.”
<p.
Now it's my turn to gape. Thirty-two years, hundreds intimidated and
imprisoned,
billions of dollars "redirected" — and it all ends like this? In a quiet room
on TV?
This man has colored the lives here like a painting you see every day,
morning until night. Imagine how you would feel if the painting went away.
We try to grasp what this might mean for the future:
unity; a lowering of the centuries-long discrimination against
Indonesian-Chinese; an end to police shakedowns based on ethnicity; peace.
But mostly, an end to the feeling of not being allowed to talk.
We called
him Bapak, Father, and in Javanese culture the father rules the home
completely, accepting no dissent. This “father” ruled this country, and no
one made jokes. People got in trouble for drawing cartoons of him.
I simply can’t see the new president, B.J. Habibie, being treated with the
same deference. There simply isn’t the same potential for fear. I look at
his face and I feel — I feel that he might be as surprised at this turn of
events as I am.
I take a quick ride down to the University of Indonesia. The young
protesters are
laughing, some are blowing their noses, the way you do after you’ve cried
for a long time.
I ask them what they think of their new leader.
There is some laughter.
But that’s a lot better than the angry shouts of the weeks past.
At night, a friend here calls me. He’s on his way to the airport. He asks me if I’m leaving. I want to say something profound, something I’ll remember, something American.
But the fact is, I can’t think of anything profound to say. All I know is how I feel.
After we hang up, I think of the “we few, we happy few” speech from “Henry V.” If I had decided to leave, would I have “cursed myself and held my manhood cheap,” as King Harry said? I don’t know. I’m just glad I didn’t have to find out.
