There was a notice at the tourist office in Ubud which announced a village ceremony and a Kecak dance that was to follow it. All were welcome, though when we went there was clearly an invisible wall between us together with a couple of dozen of tourists and the villagers who we sat amongst during the evening performance. Heretofore, with the exception of the dances we saw at STSI in Solo, all the dance performances we had seen in Indonesia were to the accompaniment of gamelan orchestras. The Kecak dance is unique precisely because the gamelan is absent. In its place are the guttural utterances and chanting of "kecak" by several dozen village men whose movements around a small, raised fire that illuminates the circle of bodies, with hands raised in the air shaking in unison one moment, swaying the next, keep the light from extending too far into the pitch darkness of a rural evening. It was both an eerie and humorous experience. It was humorous only because snickers from amongst the young village wives, mothers and grandmothers unaccustomed to seeing their 
men act so strangely broke some of the mystery. The men, from son to grandfather, who were naked from the waist up and were one and the same as toned as any male form can be, were unperturbed. Their performance was accented by a pair of women and an individual man, all dressed in costume who performed a few scenes from a Hindu epic near the fire, but within the circle of village men at a certain point in the performance. The skill and unity of the male dancers was as awesome and impressive as any professional performers I had ever seen. I think that experience articulated to me more than any words could have ever done, the strength of a Balinese village. There was something about the ability of the men to perform as a unit for the purpose of the village, with a disciplined focus, that was truly awe inspiring. Americans who talk so unabashedly prideful of protecting individualism, might benefit from considering the value and purpose sometimes only found in the cooperation and determination of a group.
Juxtaposed temporally next to the experience at Jungjungan, was another performance, the following morning, of the most commercialized and undisciplined dances we had seen. Perhaps we should have been forewarned by the location of the performance: not in a village or adjacent to temple grounds, but on a stage before a modern, roofed amphitheater situated outside of Ubud in the direction of Kuta, the tourist center of Bali. The cost of the performance was higher than any we had previously viewed and tourists were brought in by the busload, principally from Kuta. The dancers performed daily from Monday to Friday and their lack of interest in what they were doing, as well as the dirt on their costumes, reflected it. In retrospect, I can see how this experience foreshadowed the few hours we would spend in the lap of International vulgarity, Kuta beach.
Our experience in Kuta was brief. Far to brief to make a fair assessment of the place. Still, I'm sorry it was as much a period of my precious time, which I no doubt waste from time to time, that I could ever consider throwing away in such a place. Don't get me wrong, there is a nice beach there; nice restaurants across the street serving tasty drinks; older Balinese women offering to massage you for a few rupiah; young female Muslim tourists from Java or some other nearby islands, fully dressed with a tudung to cover their hair, walking past women in bikinis, some choose to reveal their rose tipped breasts; and both single Balinese men and young Balinese couples sitting on the beach gazing in a fascinated way at these relatively wealthy, ostentatious foreigners. Balinese society is possibly as artistic as any known to man, but the influx of tourism to that small island has turned their art into a commodity. This commodity, not the art, is found on every block of Kuta. Its profusion has transformed it from the art that it once was. I can not deny the value it has to those who are consumers of these products, nor the value in monetary terms gained by the Balinese themselves. Yet, something in me sees in a thousand like carved Balinese ducks for sale, a symbol of a society that is both what we saw at Jungjungan and at the same time something completely different. I fear a loss of beauty that is forsaken in that universal quest for what can be gained on the international marketplace for the next unit of a carved duck.
Impressions are different from one individual to the next and can be deceiving to anyone. Bali, in a unique way seems to have preserved a sense of itself, or more accurately has preserved an alternative self. As long as young people like Made (or even like Dadang in Bandung) realize the value of the village and all that it has to offer...as long as they have the clarity of vision to see that there is a trade that occurs in choosing one type of lifestyle over the other, places like Made's Bali can survive. We may not always understand it because they may not always want us to. While talking to a restaurant worker in Ubud, I asked her and others in a restaurant that was staffed solely by young Balinese, but whose clientele was exclusively foreigners, what they thought of foreigners. Individually and as a group, they all declined to say. This contradiction is one that I will never understand. If my impression is correct, they refuse to criticize because their culture teaches them the value of suppressing negative opinions, yet they strive to possess that which causes them to have criticisms in the first place.
I mentioned to a businessman in Bandung that we preferred doing business with families and he told us that businesses in Indonesia are often family run because there are so many people and yet it is difficult to get a job even for those who have a college degree. Then he commented with a gesture, pulling his eyelids from the corners towards his ears, that ethnic Chinese in Indonesia do the same.
Overseas Chinese have often been referred to as the Jews of the East. Attacks and political sanctions against this group in the countries of Southeast Asia is not uncommon. In 1740 some ten thousand ethnic Chinese were massacred in Batavia (modern day Jakarta). Just over two hundred years later, in the 1960s, an estimated half million ethnic Chinese were killed during tumultuous events in Indonesia. There are still Chinese people living in Indonesia. They comprise about two percent of Indonesia's population. Their presence is less notable than across the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia, where you can often hear Chinese music as you walk down a business street or see large Chinese characters on the exterior of business buildings. Ethnic Chinese still dominate the Indonesian economy. This group comprises a mere two percent of Indonesia's population yet controls eighty percent of the private economy. Ethnic Chinese have been both praised and castigated for their ability to amass wealth in places like Indonesia by exploiting economic opportunity. This is a popular subject amongst academics who always seem to ignore the fact that the Chinese in China have often faired less well than their cousins in the South. Most Indonesians are Muslims and so marriages with non-Muslim Chinese are forbidden. As an immigrant population, the Chinese are not adverse to taking up professions which would be considered completely exploitative, and morally corrupt by the indigenous people such as this example given by a Dutch colonial official, "...countless number of Chinese...have leased government road tolls and subject native farmers at almost every step at the road leading to the market-place to new extortions, so that often they lose half of their produce in this way."* Whether it be Chinese moneylenders or batik factory owners the stories seem to be similar, exploitation of the indigenous by an outsider. For those Chinese who did intermarry with the native Indonesians, Pernakan Cina or Chinese with local roots, more commonly called Peranakans, the distinctions between outsider and insider were ameliorated, but the number of Peranakans has fallen drastically to pure ethnic Chinese, at one time known as Totoks, in this century. (*L. Vitalis, De invoering, werking en gebreken van het stelsel van Kultures op Java, as translated by Chr. L.M. Penders in his Indonesia: Selected Documents on Colonialism and Nationalism 1830-1942).
On the Customs Declaration form handed to you before entering Indonesia, mixed in with a question inquiring of the visitor whether or not they possess prohibited goods such as narcotic drugs, fire arms, weapons, ammunition, laser guns, explosives, and pornography, are also listed two additional prohibited goods: "chinese printing" [sic] and "chinese medicines."
According to international news reports, most of the injuries resulting from the election campaign that preceded our visit to Indonesia resulted from vehicular accidents while caravans of campaigners moved through areas. There were numerous reports from international agencies published in the South China Morning Post about the opposing campaigners throwing rocks at each other and other such provocations throughout the pre-election period, but most of the political violence was directed toward ethnic Chinese and a second affected minority group, non-Muslims. These groups serve as Indonesia's pressure valve for the build up of social tension. In October, 1996 Muslim rioters burned twenty-one churches. In December of the same year three Muslim teachers were mistreated by police. Riots broke out and Christian Churches were attacked. In January, 1997 the troops were sent to Bandung to quell the protests of roadside hawkers after they stoned city officials in protest of proposed regulations on their economic activities. Leaflets were then circulated in Bandung threatening that ethnic Chinese and Christian property would be burned. The New York Times, which usually ignores this part of the world, published an article about a riot that broke out after name calling between an ethnic Chinese businessman and a Muslim youth celebrating a feast day escalated. The ensuing violence touched two Buddhist temples and several Chinese homes and shops.
When I first asked Dadang about Indonesia's Chinese population he told me that he could not speak about them. When I pressed him, he told me that Indonesians were jealous of the Chinese because they had more money than the indigenous populace. He explained that he wanted to know their key to success, but doesn't blame them. While we were eating dinner, he pointed out the restaurant's window to a shopping center across the street and recounted a recent incident. A Muslim woman (i.e., not Chinese) was suspected of stealing something from the shopping center and confined by a security guard who also happened to be Muslim. An ever increasing group of Muslims became angry and they went on a rampage breaking the windows of the complex due solely to the mob's belief that the shopping center was owned by an ethnic Chinese person.
In Yogyakarta, I spoke with a Chinese-Indonesian shop owner. His great-grandfather came from Canton to Yogyakarta in the late Nineteenth Century and setup the shop where we were talking. This shop owner told me that his great-grandfather was an organizer for the "old minority" which was very different from the "new minority." His grandmother was the daughter of one of the Sultan's soldiers (the man I was speaking with looked very Chinese so I suspect this was the only source of Malay blood in his veins). When I asked him if he was Indonesian or Chinese, he responded that he is Indonesian and added that he doesn't even speak Chinese. He did mention though, that his father was very happy when during the Japanese occupation, he learned kanji (Chinese characters used in written Japanese). He speaks some Japanese from the three years of occupation, Dutch, Javanese, Indonesian and a fair amount of English.
This shop owner talked about life as if it were bifurcated by the years before "the war" and after (I suspect he was referring to World War II, but that war extended into the war for independence so the entire stretch could be referred to as "the war" for all practical matters). When I asked him about the difficulties for Chinese during the 1960s, he smiled and laughed but otherwise ignored my question. Instead he pointed to a toko emas (gold shop) across the street and explained that "this new minority" is very different from the "old minority." They sell gold because "they just wait and see." He was critical of the "new minority" and said that they need to build relationships. He explained that the type of organizing his great-grandfather had done with the "old minority" was directed at assimilation. He advised me, and this was surely the motivation behind his talkativeness, that I should build relationships - perhaps a "secure" business relationship with him?! - through language and knowledge of the culture of a place.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
