[June 1997] Indonesia is a complex archipelago with a level of diversity, arguably, found nowhere else in the world. The state owes its existence to Dutch colonialism yet it would never exist if the Indonesian people had never demanded their independence from that tiny nation state at the other end of the world. Though some argue that the modern Indonesian state's boundaries have historical foundations in the Majapahit kingdom of the 14th Century, there are few modern scholars who take this claim seriously for reasons that are too complex to cover here. Again, the complexity of the colonial takeover of the archipelago by the Dutch, a process initiated by a state-sanctioned monopolistic trade group known by its abbreviation, VOC (Vereenigde Osst-Indische Compagnie translated as the United East India Company), cannot be covered here, but the general methods of Dutch colonialism were quite simple. Rather than "dividing and conquering," the Dutch exploited preexisting divisions amongst the various nations that inhabited the archipelago that now consists of Indonesia. The enemies of the alliances that were formed with the Dutch were conquered into a submission that led to a consolidation of the area under Dutch control. This consolidation was a tireless one that touched five centuries, none of which were free of armed resistance. The legacy of colonial rule over the archipelago and the biases necessarily tied to domination of foreign peoples is most obvious in the root name of the nation, state, people, and language: Indonesia, the "Indian islands" or "the islands of indians" ("indo" is really more generic than "Indian" because it referred to a people that were "of India" in as much as they were not Chinese or European). It was not my aim, in the cultural travelogue which follows, to present the diversity of that archipelago or even to delve into the complex history of Indonesia. Rather, what I hoped to do was to present an initial exploration of a land and its people in a way that suggests the richness found there by looking at some of the more easily accessible doors to cultures found in Indonesia.

In our sojourn to Indonesia, my wife, Karen, and I traveled through Bandung, Cirebon, Yogyakarta, Borobudur, Prambanan, Solo, and Bali. The landscape of Java was covered with a lush green of terraced rice fields, and cassava and palm trees. "Civilization" had de-virginized the landscape with railway tracks and roads. The trains, with Dutch words here and there, were visible reminders of the Dutch colonial era. The roads were amazingly well maintained for a relatively poor country, but the automobiles which swarmed upon the surfaces measured their discontent with the roads' narrow width in an orchestra of near-misses every few seconds. The single greatest reason for these near misses were the drivers who, intent on passing slower traffic, drove on the wrong side of the road almost as much as the proper side. On Bali, you can rent bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles, and cars with or without drivers. On Java we utilized just about any form of transportation that we came across: train, bus, sub-minivan, taxi, becak, bullock-drawn wagon, and our own two feet, but becaks and angkotan kota (city sub-minivans) were the most common form of public transportation. In Bandung, the becaks, or trishaws, were painted with colorful designs and a popular style was to have a portrait of a personality painted on the back of the passenger's seat. An angkot is smaller than any van you would see in expansive U.S., but one we took from Cirebon to another coastal city, named Indramayu, managed to fit no less than twenty-six people on board, including children. People can be seen everywhere on the densely populated island of Java, but the simple villages give way to small towns and larger cities only infrequently. In all these communities, the houses are covered with reddish-orange tiled roofs which are then crowned with television antennas. It is these television antennas which remain in my mind's eye as the symbolic skyline of Indonesia.

Of course the best way to learn about a country is to visit it and speak with the people who live there. The expense and the time are the two biggest obstacles to doing this however. Fortunately, for those of us who find it practical to learn no more than the few words necessary to conduct the commerce of everyday life, English is truly an international language that helps bridge the gap between cultures. On the rare occasion that we were able to encounter someone who both spoke English and was interested in talking with us, I seized upon the opportunity to expand upon what I was learning about the places we journeyed through in Indonesia. Other times, we had simply to rely upon our eyes, ears, noses, stomachs and skin to observe our surroundings and interpret what we encountered the best we could...

Bandung

In search of a place to unload our luggage when we arrived in Bandung, we saw a young child walking in our direction down the street at a quick pace. At first I thought the child was a girl due to its mannerisms, but when I got closer I realized it was in fact a boy. He was only wearing a shirt and he didn't have any pants, underwear or shoes on, and looked as if he hadn't had a bath in some time. I didn't know what to do, but I couldn't speak the boy's language much less take him to some authorities in this foreign country. Others just walked past him too.

This was our introduction to Bandung, a city that at first glance looks dirtier than it really is. The city is dilapidated and the newer buildings have a look to them that they've been thrown up simply to offer efficient shelter. The sidewalks are incongruous whether the portion in front of one store is wider, higher, or nonexistent in relation to a portion in front of another. This lack of uniformity and interest in ascetics on the part of the local architects caused the city to look duller and even dirtier than it really was. Similar to other places in developing Southeast Asia though, there was an abundance of trash that seemingly had no where to go. We saw many workers sweeping the streets and some roadside trash was in a nice little pile. One man even took the time to cleanup garbage that was on the ground next to a trash bin though he didn't appear to be employed by anyone for the task.

One of our first experiences with food in Indonesia was with a meal we had in Bandung. I was a little concerned with the meat that was placed at my table after I had ordered chicken at one restaurant. The meat was of a bird that seemed far to small to be any chicken I had ever eaten so my imagination speculated that it might really be pigeon. Well, the next day we were walking through a market and we saw the miniature chickens of the variety that the restaurant had served me the night before so I began to feel a bit better.

On another occasion, a Sundanese meal laid out on our table in a simple restaurant suggested a feast. On this table was placed a small, tin bowl with water in it for rinsing our fingers, a plate with rice for each customer, a small communal bowl with spicy shrimp paste, and about a dozen dishes with such things as boiled fish - both large and smaller varieties, tofu, vegetables, three different meat dishes in delicious sauces, and pods of some kind of large pungent beans. Later, we learned from our Sundanese guest that this sort of restaurant provided all of these foods, but we were only charged for the items we ate.

Bandung was also our introduction to the Indonesian woman. I shouldn't over-generalize, but the young, above average looking Indonesian women, near or at marriageable age, typically bore an aristocratic look. I thought that it might be just something that I was reacting to, but my wife told me she had observed the same thing even before I mentioned it to her. We noticed it everywhere we visited in Java, but I can't recall noticing this snobbish attitude in Bali. I tried to ask some Javanese about this phenomenon, but it did not seem particularly unusual to the few men I asked. Somehow, girls don't have this attitude and we never saw a married woman act this way either. As near as I could determine, it was something that made these women seem more attractive in the eyes of the Sundanese and Javanese men.

We noticed that everywhere we saw school boys, they seemed to be smoking fragrant, clove cigarettes of some kind. A guesthouse owner in Bandung told us it was common for school boys to smoke. He didn't care if his boys smoked, after all he had begun smoking himself at the tender age of thirteen. The cigarettes weren't as offensive as most, they are made from a complex blend of several ingredients including tobacco, cloves, shells, and sometimes sugar to make them taste good and give them their fragrant smell. Women in this Muslim city don't smoke, but it seems to be a common practice amongst males. A couple of severe looking soldiers in Bandung asked me to have a smoke with them, but I declined with a motion that I don't smoke. Then they invited me to have a drink with them. I didn't want to be rude, but I was with my wife, they probably couldn't speak English much better than I could speak Indonesian, and I had just had a good meal so I declined, somewhat embarrassed, and raced off. A young man walking door to door in Cirebon selling cigarettes asked me if I cared for a smoke. After I told him "no" he told me that it was good that I don't smoke. The guesthouse owner had also told me that he believed smoking was bad for you, "I can tell by your face [complexion] and eyes that you don't smoke. People who smoke have yellow eyes and their face looks bad."

In general the people in this city did not seem particularly friendly, but it was a college town of sorts and their were some younger Indonesian youths in search of English speaking foreigners to practice their conversation skills with. Dadang is a twenty-one year old Sundanese man who works as an engraver for silkscreen printing at a factory and also attends school in this West Java city. He earns about US$80 a month so he can't afford to attend the more prestigious university to study English, but he was driven to improve his foreign language skills and approached us to do so.

Dadang's aspiration is to learn enough about English so that one day he may earn a living teaching it to others. From talking to Dadang, who is a conservative Muslim yet tolerant, it seems that his motivation is a practical one of survival rather than one based on any inherent interest in foreigners or language. Dadang was raised in a village outside of Bandung where the younger men traditionally farmed and the women and older men made songkok, Muslim kopiah (the Arabic term Dadang used for hats). The kebaya and sejong are no longer common even in his village, and the men there no longer wear loose fitting, black clothes similar in style to karate clothes, but it is village life that Dadang still prefers to the city. This village is also still home to his parents and his two sisters, who have married, and now live with their husbands in the houses next to their parents.

Indonesian Islam">

Specific religions are accorded a high level of respect by their individual devotees, though often much less so by others. To preface the following, few brief comments about our exposure to Indonesian Islam, I would like to remind you that the author comes from a nominally Christian state where mass media references to Muslims are made, almost exclusively, in stories focusing on terrorism. Most Americans would be surprised to learn that Indonesia is predominantly Muslim. So we are not so far removed from the colonial days when empires' representatives officially referred to this religious group as Mohammedans. This first exposure of an Islamic community for me, then, is just that and I apologize to Muslims for my shallow treatment of their expression of beliefs in advance.

One day while I was exploring a kampung in Cirebon, a young girl asked me if I was Islam [sic]. I was a bit surprised at her question because she wasn't one of the girls donning a tudung, and I told her I wasn't. I also told her that there weren't too many from where I had come. I don't know if she comprehended my English, but it seemed a surprise enough to her that I wasn't Muslim.

At 5:40 p.m. and other specified times during the day in that coastal city, the sounds of various Muslim calls prayer overlap each other in the air that blankets the residential neighborhoods. Some of the men go the the mesjid to pray others pray in prayer rooms or wherever a blanket can be laid down. When we were still in Bandung, our room was located next to an alcove where the Muslim family who owned the small hotel would pray and we would feel uncomfortable that we may interfere with someone's prayers just outside of our bathroom. Dadang explained that he prays five times a day, and that if he misses one of the scheduled prayers, he has to double up on the next scheduled prayer. He took our questions about Islam very seriously and was much more devout that some of the other Indonesians we later met. During our conversations with him, we asked why we never saw any dogs. He told us that Muslims belief that a malaikat (an angel) will not enter a house where there is a dog and give rakmat (I couldn't find a definition for this word, but recalled that Dadang explained it was something akin to a blessing). Indonesians begin learning Arabic at the mesjid (mosque) as early as six years old. After they begin general instruction, some boys and girls attend pasantrin, a term for Muslim instruction that is held at public schools after regular instruction is complete for the day. Dadang can write in Arabic because of this education.

There are three basic requirements for being Muslim: to believe that there is one God and Muhammed is his messenger, to be circumcised, and to bury your dead. Dadang explained to us that many Indonesians do not practice death ceremonies properly, according to the Qu'ran because they have a feast of sorts, a tradition that dates back to pre-Islamic days when Hinduism was the dominant religion. In Solo, sometime later, we learned that Muslim boys are circumcised when they are twelve or thirteen years old. After the circumcision, boys wear a steal stem, called a cendkalan, that juts out protectively from their waist and extends the sarung they also wear during this period, to protect their penis while it is healing.

Dadang's girlfriend wears a jilbab*, and he expects that whoever his wife will be someday, that she will also wear a jilbab (* a tudung, or scarf that Muslim women wear to conceal their hair--at the time we assumed that this was an Arabic or Indonesian word, but it doesn't appear to be so we think it may be a Sundanese word). Even though he doesn't wear a songkok, Dadang believes that women who wear jilbabs are more beautiful perhaps in part because they are more devout as Muslims and therefore make better wives. I asked Dadang about Islamic rules governing multiple wives and he explained that there is a limit of four wives, but the practice of having multiple wives is uncommon and he knows of no one who has more than one wife.

The Roadtrip On our way from Bandung to Cirebon, we passed through the town of Sumedang where there were numerous places selling tahu, fried tofu. Further along on the road, I noticed each kampung* was represented by a string of roadside, wooden stalls where specific foods that they seemed to specialize in were being sold such as melons, mangoes, and salak, a small fruit with a brown skin that has a pattern similar looking to a snakeskin. [* a kampung is literally a village, but also refers to residential communities within cities; a desa is a rural village]

Cirebon

In my mind, I try to balance out my desire to treat the hosts of wherever I visit with respect and my desire to explore. When exploring, this means being sensitive to and responding to the people that I encounter. Not satisfied with the rather monotonous sites offered in the center of Cirebon, I suggested to Karen that we explore a kampung on the perimeter of the business center. It was late enough in the day that the children had come home from school, but early enough that most of the men were gone working somewhere else. The narrow streets were lined with life: woman talking or purchasing some groceries from a vendor, grand parents resting in the porches in front of their houses, young girls with their babies, and children roaming the streets playing. The children were all smiles and everyone seemed pleased to have their photos taken. The were so pleased, in fact, that I was pressured to take pictures when I didn't want to. Sometimes I refused, and on one occasion, when I pretended to take a photo, I was found out and mildly criticized.

(caption from picture omitted from text-only version:Inai is henna, used to dye the fingers and hands of newly married women.)

I chose the words "young girls and their babies" above, because it was not uncommon to see girls in what appeared to be their mid-teens holding babies in their arms. That they were the mothers of these children, there was no doubt because their own mothers would take pride in the fact that I wanted to take a picture of their daughters holding their granddaughters (and as I later learned, the red dye on their fingers and sometimes feet was a Muslim sign that they were married). It is somewhat shocking at first to see something that is so disparaged in your own culture, yet a moment's reflection is enough to win your understanding and respect. Their husbands are but a year or two older and the extended families support the raising of the children.

Just before sunset in Cirebon, the skies become active with kites ascending into the sky above the tiled roofs capped with television antennas. This apparent favorite pastime of Cirebonese boys still dominates over other recreational activities, surprisingly, even television. Flying kites in Cirebon is not an activity solely between the kite and the navigator, it is a social activity shared by groups of boys. Noticing the vast number of kites flying through the sky and the broken and whole kites dangling from television antennas, telephone wires, trees and anywhere else you can imagine, I could only wonder how long this outdoor activity could keep hold over the youth of Cirebon in this developing country.

Our fascination and appreciation for batik grew in our journey through Java, but there were times that Indonesians seemed to possess an equal fascination with my habit of wearing shorts in public. In Cirebon, some of the younger boys, I noticed, didn't seem to care that I wore shorts because they did too, but once they get to the age of puberty, when they stop wearing shorts, they began snickering or staring at my legs with some sort of amazement or disdain. Some of the more religiously conservative elderly people clearly had disdain for my wearing shorts, but in the eyes of many Indonesians, it was acceptable for me to do so most of the time because I was a foreigner. I wasn't about to give up wearing shorts because I had only brought one pair of long pants and besides I was bathing in sweat day-in and day-out as it was.

Of all the places we've visited, Indonesia seems to have been the one that was the most magical. This wasn't something that we realized while we were there. It was something that we realized shortly after we had left. When I try to remember what made it so magical I can come up with a long list of things. When I try to remember when the magic of this nation became apparent to me, I'm lost. Our experience, the complexity and beauty of it was something that grew, layer upon layer. The first layer was our meeting with Dadang and the insight he gave me into his character through his openness and his love for Islam. The second layer was our introduction to batik near Cirebon at Trusmi and Paoman, and further explorations of it in Yogyakarta and Solo.

Batik

In the Indonesian cities we visited, everyone except the elderly women seemed to have partially or wholly adopted western clothing styles as their own. There was one exception, the selendang. The selendang is a long scarf, designed with the batik process, and used to carry everything under the sun from babies to baskets of food. Although it is a woman's article of clothing, we did see a man carrying his baby with one.

The most exceptional characteristic of traditional Javanese fashion is batik. Batik refers to a process, but has grown in usage to commonly refer to cloth that has been decorated by the process. Simply put, the batik process involves the application of hot wax with a canting (a small copper container, at the end of a thick, stubby reed handle, that has a small hole at one end through which hot wax can flow onto cloth) or a canting cap (a metal stamp). Traditionally, batik processing was performed by village households. After the mid-Nineteenth Century when Dutch tax policies forced the Indonesian populace to enter the cash economy, batik processing was increasingly performed by individuals who subcontracted work from a retailer or worked in a factory. The performed on the village and household level.

The actual complexity of the process can be understood merely by looking at a section of fabric and realizing that colors are applied to areas where there has been no wax applied. Each color represents the application of wax, dying, and removal of that wax. As it can be imagined, this may take some time, but estimates of how long are exaggerated in the minds of foreigners who may think of a pace of work which is undoubtedly far faster than the pace with which we saw women working in these shops and factories. Since we were customers, the processing would often times only begin as we walked into a house, or shop area where processing was usually done. It's not that our visits were timed at unusual times, although they may have been by Indonesian standards, rather it seemed that the pace of production was relaxed. At times I would feel embarrassed that I caused someone to have to begin work with the simple question, "can I see the process?"

Markets and shops are packed with batik cloth and the prices, though negotiable, seem far to high for most Indonesians. When I asked one woman about this, she explained that the older women I see wearing batik sarongs are probably wearing cap (batik made with the stamp which itself is laborious, though comparatively less laborious than canting). Quality varies based on such considerations as the clothe, silk or cotton, its size, and its intricacy of the design; the number of colors used in the overall design; and whether or not the design has been applied to both sides.

In Solo, we learned that there is significance attached to least two traditional motifs which originate there: the lereng motif used to bring happiness, and the parang motif which is used for good fortune.

Traditionally, specific locales were known for specific colors. The batik we saw in Yogyakarta and Solo was overwhelmingly a shade of brown and black. Colors have significance associated with them too: blue is a symbol of water and the ocean, it symbolizes patience; black is the color for the ground, it symbolizes living; brown is the color for fire, it symbolizes desire; white is the color of the sky, it symbolizes freedom; and light brown, or modern yellow, are the colors of plants, they symbolize everything we are responsible for nurturing in this world.

Another Culinary Experience

The hygiene involved with cooking foods is rarely as strictly controlled, as it is in America where our government goes to great lengths to protect us from the unimaginable, As a result of having been lulled into complacency by this and our desire to eat after rigorous explorations, we usually forego scrutinizing the conditions under which our meat is killed and cooked. Besides, sometimes more attention to details such as these would make adapting to differences nearly impossible.

After taking a pre-dawn bus ride from Yogyakarta to Borobudur, we ate at a small, covered eating area in the bus station. Our breakfast of nasi goreng (fried rice) and mie goreng (fried noodles) was so good we decided to return to the same stall later for lunch. This second time, Karen ordered mie goreng again and I thought I would try something else new so I ordered gado-gado, which was a cold vegetable salad with some cut up hard-boiled egg. It too was a very good dish until I had almost finished the meal when one particular spoon-full of food uncovered a large cockroach, but only after my stomach was nearly full and Karen had had a few bites herself.

BOROBUDUR: a memorial to a forgotten Buddhist Age in Indonesia

When visiting Indonesia, there are two places above all that everyone has some image of before they actually see them: Bali and Borobudur. It is because of Western man's interest in these two places, perhaps above all else in Indonesia, that they have changed the most in this last century. One, arguably, for the worse, and the other, unquestionably, for the better. Further along we will discuss Bali, but for now, let's touch upon that place that was consciously hidden because it represented an age and religion that had been replaced centuries earlier by other religious dynasties.

Southeast Asia has three dominant religions, Islam, Buddhism, and Catholicism: Buddhism is the dominant religion on the mainland of Southeast Asia, with the major exception of Peninsular Malaysia; Islam is the dominant religion in Insular Southeast Asia with the exception of the third dominant religion in the region; and that third religion, Catholicism, reigns all but supreme in the Philippines (again the exception is the southern islands of that archipelago where Islam dominates). Because Islam is so omnipresent on Java, it is a surprise to find Borobudur, one of the greatest monuments to Buddhism that exists, there.

Borobudur, which has been described as a three-dimensional mandala, was constructed sometime during the 8th and 9th Centuries under the Buddhist, Sailendra Dynasty. As historical events unfolded, it was abandoned and all but forgotten until it was revealed to the colonial rulers during Stamford Raffles interregnum of rule in Indonesia during the early part of the 19th Century. Excavation commenced during this period and a full restoration project was carried out two centuries later, between 1973 and 1984. Little else is presently known about the site.

Borobudur, like nearby Prambanan, is a wonderful place to visit because it is one of those few ancient monuments that rests in its natural setting. It's an honor to walk through such a three-dimensional, open air museum, but you find yourself wondering if the centuries of obscurity might have been better off left undisturbed because the throngs of visitors will no doubt hasten its continued decay.

Because my understanding of that monument is so limited, the best I have to offer here are a few photographs that I hope will give you a bit of an understanding of the beauty which can be found there, even in its broken, worn, and decaying state. In the end, it is truly a monument to a civilization that has long since vanished.

A desa near Borobudur

We were walking through a desa* east of Borobudur so I could take some photographs of country life when we heard an animal complaining. When we saw a couple of women, we communicated that we would like follow a pathway that led in between some homes and asked if it was okay. They said it was, so we walked on. There was a hard, dirt path linking the homes on the side of the street we walked on. It had been swept clean that morning and there was a beautiful grove of large, thick bamboo along a portion of the walk we had. Some of the houses had walls of woven leaves and clay roofs. Many of the houses were built on foundations of cut stone. There were lots of roosters, goats, and many of the houses had a cow in their barn. When we arrived near to the place where we had heard an animal crying out, another lady and several children, who apparently just finished school for the day, greeted us. I asked the woman, who had just come out of a barn that was attached to her house (the livestock were kept in barns like this throughout the desa), if I could take some pictures. After I had taken a few pictures, an old lady who had joined the crowd that was forming came up to me and handed out her hand while saying something in Indonesian. When the Cirebon to Yogyakarta train had made its intermittent stops, children would come out of nowhere and asked the mostly Indonesian passengers for money. It was obvious to me that this woman was doing the same. I said, "no," and turned my back to her to walk away. She responded by hitting me hard (it didn't hurt because I'm fairly big, but it was enough to make me notice) and she said something angrily to me so I hurried away. [*a rural village; desa also refers to the countryside]

The Cultural Center of Java: Solo & Yogyakarta

The first cultural lesson for English speaking visitors to the Javanese traditional centers of Yogyakarta or Solo should be that there is no "v" in the Javanese language. As a result, the island and the people are called "Jawa" by the inhabitants themselves, but the romanized spelling of the name, I presume is a historical legacy of the Dutch who lack the English "w" sound in their alphabet. The spelling of the city name, Yogyakarta, can be explained in the same way. Though the name is pronounced "Jogyakarta", there is no English "j" sound in the Dutch alphabet. A "j" in the Dutch alphabet is pronounced the same as a "y" in the English alphabet. I hope this makes sense to you, because I'm still not sure that it does to me and it took me a couple of months to figure this out.

A more simple lesson is that Bahasa Indonesia and Malay have no English "c", this letter in those two languages is pronounced as an English "ch".

The Perfect JAVA MAN

We learned from a woman in Solo that the perfect, traditional Javanese man possesses five things in life: (1) a house for living; (2) a horse, though in modern Indonesia it is more appropriate to own a motorcycle; (3) a wife, so that he may have children, (4) birds, for entertainment; and (5) a weapon, for protection.

The first three are commonly sought after by men in all cultures, but birds and weapons are worth taking a particularly close look at. We've seen a fondness for birds amongst Chinese in China, but the love for birds in parts of Indonesia seemed unparalleled. It was common to see birdcages hung from the roof in front of small shops and homes. Sometimes birdcages were hung from poles some thirty feet high in the air. Later in Java, we learned that birds were supposed to bring the owners a long life, and we could see why. It would be hard to doubt that these birds which were both beautiful and pleasant to listen too, did indeed lengthen their owners' lives.

The traditional weapon in Malay communities, of which Indonesia is the most populous, is the kris or keris. A kris is a long knife that is roughly half as long as swords you may have seen. The blades are distinguished by the waves in them, but have straight blades have also been used since the 12th Century. A cundri is a small kris that some women might conceal in their hair and use for protection. The kris was believed to have special powers and treated with great respect, but since sometime around World War II, the kris disappeared along with traditional clothes for men. Today it is a relic found only in ceremonial dances, tourist productions, and antique shops.

Propriety

When we travel abroad, some of us are attracted to differences from our own homes. The difficulty of relating what we observe, then, arises from the fact that my interpretation and judgement of what I experienced might be completely different from someone else. With this in mind, I remind the reader once again that I was born and raised in America where the rules of public decorum in regard to this next issue are more rigid and perhaps more ridiculous than most places. In explanation, I would like to preface this next section with two news stories I encountered shortly after my return to America. First I read how some particular jurisdiction deemed it necessary to legalize breast-feeding in public. It seems that, as one commentator suggested, the sexual identity of a woman's breast had reached a height of preeminence overshadowing the maternal identity of the mother's breast. The other story was from a beach community near San Francisco. The city council of this community had decided to impose stiff fines for exposure of genitals or the area between the buttocks (!?) which became progressively more severe for repeat offenders. This measure came about in response to complaints from the local residents that the surfers were revealing themselves when they changed into and out of their wetsuits when they go to the beach to surf (surfers don't wear anything underneath their wetsuits). While these particular laws are aimed at opposing concerns, the concerns themselves are what are the most relevant here.

For Balinese ceremonies, women commonly wear a colorful, lace kebaya with a bra distinctly visible underneath. Walking through some kampungs in Java or Bali, I would see older women wearing either just a bra or a bra with an open shirt. More than once, when they saw me they would begin to cover up, but it was clearly only because I was a foreigner that they did so. Women breast-feeding their children do it quite openly. I saw some women that had their shirts wide open while the baby or young child either suckled or just looked away. One time, while walking through a kampung in Cirebon, I saw a young woman bathing in an open-air alcove. She was taking a shower and her back was to me, but I could still see her breast because she was turned slightly. Other times I would see women, young and old, bathing in rice canals or rivers. When driving over a bridge above a river in Yogyakarta, we saw a man bathing with out any concern for the heavy traffic goers seeing his genitals.

Indonesian women dress conservatively with many of them using a tudung to cover their hair. It is considered improper for men to show their legs by wearing shorts, though some becak drivers may wear shorts in some areas. On Bali, where Hinduism predominates, the women dress and act equally conservative. When we were on the beach in Kuta, the Balinese gawked at the western tourists in their bikinis, especially those without any bathing suit tops at all.

Yogyakarta

Often times, people in the West equate dignity in public with a certain level of formality and rigidity as if these are only attainable by those with knowledge of high culture. I guess I was presently surprised then, when after arriving at Jakarta's airport I noticed how several of the Indonesians, waiting for transportation, casually slipped out of their sandals and put their feet up on the common bench. They were all very clean people and you could be assured that the feet that they put up on seats had not touched a dirty floor. Sure it was a simple enough occurrence, but it evoked a sense of inoffensive comfort in public that I have rarely seen.

For those of you who might suggest that I was enamored with something that was simply exotic to me, I might add that some of the older women I saw in and around Yogyakarta were probably the most dignified women I've ever seen in my life. Their posture was straight as a board, their sarung, kebaya, and selendang were all well cared for, and their hair was tightly pulled back and clipped on their head in a bun. These particular women that I speak of didn't look at all tired with age. They possessed a bearing of strength, exuded a humble knowledge of a lifetime, and yet still had that alertness that comes with curiosity.

Nuri, the Exceptional becak Driver

The typical becak driver spends most of his time sleeping in his becak, the second most significant portion of his time haggling with would-be customers, and the least portion of his time driving customers from one place to the other for a fare. We found an exception to this rule in Yogyakarta - a becak driver named Nuri.

We had wanted to see "batik process", the process by which batiks are made, so we went to Jalan Tirtodipuran which is known for its batik shops, antique shops, and curios. Typically if a street anywhere is known for anything this means it is going to be one of the most expensive places you can find for such goods and Tirtodipuran was no exception. We knew this in advance, yet we were not prepared for the onslaught of Javanese seeking commission for delivering tourists to the storefronts of particular batik shops. First our becak driver tried to steer us to a particular shop. When I saw that he was about to go into the shop, I realized that he was going to get a commission for delivering us. I had nothing in particular against him earning a living this way, it's just that these are typically shops priced specifically for tourists. At the same time a teenaged boy approached us and tried to give us a business card of another batik shop. particular Then a third man approached us to take us to his favorite shop. After we went in to a shop of our own choosing, we broke down and decided to go ask the becak driver where we could see batik being made. He had been hovering outside the store we had gone into and was only too happy to show us to his favorite shop. This time, though, he kept telling us that we need not buy anything at the shop - apparently his commission was not contingent on this - and we could leave the shop as soon as we saw the "process".

After we took a self-guided tour of the batik being made, I wanted to go search for a kris. After unsuccessfully attempting to get the shop owner to lower his price for a certain kris, I left the shop only to be approached by a fourth person concerned about where we were going and what I was hoping to purchase. His face was pockmarked, and he was thicker than most becak drivers - he later told us his stomach was big, but not from beer drinking. He asked me if I was looking to buy a kris. I don't know if he had spied me in the shop we had just exited or expected me as a male tourist to be interested in such a thing. I listened to him and asked him a few questions as he told me he could direct me to his favorite place. He told me he could show me new or old kris and when I asked him if he would be receiving a commission for taking us there he replied, "no, that's why I'll charge you RP1,000. If I took you to one of these shops [referring to the tourist shops on Tirtodipuran] I'd charge you RP500 because they'd give me a commission." He was offering to take us to the Kraton Yogyakarta where the money we spent would be given back to the Kraton. We finally agreed and he actually took us to the compound which enclosed the Kraton museum.

There he introduced us to a man who welcomed us into his humble home to view several incredibly well cared-for kris. Each one was wrapped in a custom made clothe and all the blades smelled of a fragrant oil. Just the way this guardian of these kris handled these treasures made us honor the experience, but the detail work of the blades is what impressed us most (in fact we would see only blades in museums that compared though we did later see some craftsmanship in the handles and scabbards of kris in Malaysia that was unparalleled in its own way). Nuri sat back and at times helped translate at crucial moments, but kept quiet much of the time (except when he advised us that we could negotiate any of the prices we were given). At the time, I thought I was paying a great deal for the kris I left with, but I later found out that it was priced very reasonably. It seemed to both me and Karen that the visit and experience with this man, who treated these cultural icons with such care, was worth much of the price we had spent on a unique cultural souvenir.

Nuri, was a father of three boys aged 4, 8 and 12, we later learned. He didn't consider himself to be a devout Muslim, but he blamed his job in part saying, "we [becak drivers] have no time for prayers because we work from morning to night." We liked Nuri, because he seemed to be the most honest person we had met amongst anyone that we had a money transaction with in Yogyakarta.

Bali

Leaving the airport at Denpasar in our over priced taxi, I was reminded of Las Vegas: a large, showy statue of horses and carriage with some mythical creatures fighting upon them decorated one corner. Further along the road, a brightly lit, colorful complex and buildings adorned with facades of overly elaborate carvings. As we entered Ubud that evening, the pedestrians on the streets all seemed to be fair-skinned people from the West. When we got out of the taxi, the sounds of crickets, lizards and other small creatures were disturbed in my mind by someone singing Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night." Needless to say , our arrival in Bali had me worried that we had traveled so far only to land in another Hawaii.

From the perspective of tourist saturation and tourist culture, the difference between Hawaii and Bali has a lot to do with who controls the commercialization of the islands. In America, several mainland commercial interests went to Hawaii and developed restaurants, hotels, and the ancillary tourist industry without any real concern for the indigenous culture which had been subverted for several decades prior to the rise in tourism there. In Bali, perhaps less so in Kuta than Ubud, the commercialization seemed to benefit the local population more. The Balinese outside of Kuta, for their part, seem intent on building a psychological wall between their culture and tourism. Whether they can avoid the process of commercialization that one author, in reference to an entirely different country, said leads to a "museum culture" remains to be seen.

Perhaps it is just human nature that people in Bali strive to become more like us in the West in spite of the fact that we in the West consider many aspects of Bali paradise.

Some Notable Differences Between Java and Bali

They were both once part of the Majapahit kingdom, but when the Hindu Majapahit fell to the Muslim sultans, many of its followers fled to Bali. Centuries have past, the Dutch forcibly and brutally reintegrated them into a colonial empire, and as a result they both fell within the new Indonesian Republic with independence. The Javanese have a unique way of pronouncing an "r" with a short, rolling "rrrrr". Balinese people also do this owing, I suppose, to their ancestral roots in Java. What distinguishes the two peoples though is their respective religions: Islam and Hinduism. Hinduism can still be seen on Java. In the wayang productions of the Mahabarata and the Ramayana, and in death ceremonies for example, Hinduism still has a presence on Java. A Muslim Sundanese man told us that many Muslim Indonesians do not follow the proper way of Islam because they have a feast when someone dies. He said this was a holdover from pre-Islamic Hindu Java and that it is contrary to the teachings of the Qu'ran.

A Taste of Balinese (Balinis) Hinduism

On the predominantly Hindu island of Bali, whose cultural antecedents date back to the Majapahit dynasty and whose inhabitants may count their ancestors amongst those who migrated to this island from Java when the dynasty fell to Muslims, names are an identity of caste. The four castes of Bali are, in order from the most revered caste, the Brahmana, the Ksatria, the Wesya, and the Sudra. The population of Bali is predominantly Sudra and the children of Sudra parents are typically given two names. The first name indicates their place in the order of family births and is limited to one of four different names:

The fifth born child will use the name "Wayan" and the names will be recycled with each successive birth. A man will be distinguished from a woman by the title of "Ni" for women and "I" for men. As a result, if a Sudra-Balinese couple's second born was a male and third born was a female, their names would be: I Made and Ni Nyoman.

Names for the other castes are even more limited as with the Ksatria caste, the names Gusti Ngurah (male) and Gusti Ayu (female) are typical. In the Wesya caste, the names are Dewa (male) and Desak (female). Ida Bagus (male) and Ida Ayu (female) are typical names for the priestly caste, the Brahmana. Family names are rare in Bali, though sometimes Brahmana will carry on a family name as in this name, Ida Bagus Kamang Trijata, where the family name is Trijata. One Balinese man told us that the Sudras are expected to speak to Brahmana in a more formal dialect than they use with members of their own caste.

Other than in the ways already mentioned, caste identity is really of little relevance to daily life in Bali. It's importance is relegated more to the spiritual life of Balinese. I Made, a young Balinese man from the Sudra caste explained that it is highly desirable that Brahmana, the caste of priests, officiate over temple ceremonies. When we asked a Balinese woman we met, Ni Nyoman, to help us understand more about castes and village ceremonies, she began by explaining that villages may have different types of religious officials, but Brahmanas preside over the more important festivals. For example, Brahmana Podandas typically officiate at the ceremony for babies which is held six months after their birth, at weddings, and at cremations for the dead. The Sudra Pemangku may officiate at lesser ceremonies such as the baby's first year birthday (according to the Balinese calendar which has 35 days in a month), rice planting and harvesting ceremonies, and the Tilem (half moon) and Purnama (full moon) celebrations. White clothing predominates in temple ceremonies, black at funerals, and a variety of colors are worn at weddings.

Ni Nyoman

Ni Nyoman works in a restaurant in Bali's upland tourist area of Ubud. She works there for the money she would never be capable of earning in her village where her father works as a farmer. She hopes to earn even more money by improving her ability to speak English through dealing with the many tourists her job brings her into contact with. She works six days a week and returns home on the seventh. Ni Nyoman rents a room (presumably in a boarding house) with another woman who works in the kitchen at the restaurant where she works.

I Made: Where Village Life meets international tourism

Made had worked in Kuta for seven years, but moved back to his village in the interior of Bali so he could live with his family. He also likes the village and nearby Ubud better because there are "less" tourists, prices are cheaper, and life is less busy. His house is on the family house complex which he shares with his parents; wife and child; and brothers and sister. The complex contains a pen for three small pigs; a small fenced-in area for a cow (to be sold, they are Hindu so they do not eat beef); a temple yard; a permanent outhouse; a rice storage house; a storeroom/fire-kitchen and village store; a ceremony structure which has a roof but only one wall - this is where Made's father sleeps; a small one-room house; and a newly constructed, larger house. Made's maternal cousins live in the house complex contiguous to his.

Made's father is a farmer who takes pleasure in drinking tuak, a liquor distilled from palm tree juice. He also raises cocks for fighting, but rarely gambles (much of the prize in a cockfight in this poor village is winning the losing bird for a meal afterwards). As I talked with Made at the family compound, his father looked at me with a great urge to talk. There wasn't anything he needed to tell me or ask me, because he could have had his son translate. I suspect he just wanted to chat.

Made met his wife while they were both working in the tourist area of Kuta. She had lived in a small village on the outskirts of Denpasar and had been working in Kuta for about a year before they decided to get married and she moved to his village. It appeared to be important to Made that his wife was from a village, because he wanted her to live in his village and he believed it would be difficult for a woman who had not lived in a village before to adapt to the lifestyle. As an example, he explained that non-village people may have difficulty bathing in the cold water of a river (though they have a bathroom in their complex) and he also commented that village people are used to carrying heavy loads on their heads when they need to carry things such as laundry to the river or foods to or from the market. Since I knew that Made had lived in Denpasar for several years, I asked him if his wife seemed content living in a village. In response, he told me that she probably would have preferred to have lived in a city for a while longer since she had only been there for a brief time.

The rice fields in Made's village symbolize development in Bali. Made said that the rice fields are usually managed by the older men in the village and by those who can't get employment in the cash economy. When he told me this, I thought that rice farming was looked down upon by the younger villagers, but moments later, Made seemed to contradict himself. Because there is a shortage of field space for each family to hand down to their sons, they have to compete for the rights to the family field. Made explained that he had decided to earn a living outside of the village so that he wouldn't have to fight with his brothers over the rice field they owned.

Our meeting with Made was far to brief to understand how he had dealt with the two worlds he lived in: the village and the world of international tourism, but at many points in our conversations he seemed to have contradictory ways of living life brought on by the conflicts of these two worlds.

Made, who has a high school-level education, would like to be a tour guide, but these positions are strictly controlled by the government. Those who solicit employment as tour guides without government approval are subject to a severe fine. In order for Made to obtain government approval to become a tour guide, he would first have to complete a three year program consisting of two years English language instruction followed by one year of tour guide instruction. The cost for Made, who you'll remember is now a father and as the sole member of his family to be employed in the cash economy, is prohibitive. His decision not to invest in the three year program was also affected by his concern for the possibility that he would have to sacrifice so much and there would still be no guarantee that he could get a job when he was finished. When we visited his village, Made was in the process of enlarging his newly built house so that he could use it as a guesthouse for tourists, like some Australian tourists who had previously stayed with him. Made and some members of his family seem to have boundless entrepreneurial skills. He was also trying to obtain contracts for handmade products. One item he showed us was a small scrubber that he had contracted to make in bulk for a businessman from Canada. His family runs a small village store; his wife crotchets table clothes; and his mother makes rice cakes with rice, brown sugar, and coconut. Before we parted, he tried to offer us his services just one more time by proposing he act as our guide to see a volcano on the island. Earlier on, I mentioned that traveling through Indonesia, we experienced layers of magic that unfolded before us. Another layer then, was the various Indonesian cultural performances we were privileged to see. Tourism has helped keep traditional art forms alive in Indonesia. The ancient, pre-Islamic art forms of wayang golek (three-dimensional wood puppets of the Sundanese), wayang kulit (leather shadow puppets of the Central Javanese), and numerous dances we saw at kratons, temples, and other locations were performed before almost exclusively foreign audiences. The few Indonesians on Java to whom I inquired about these performances had little or no interest in them. This is not the case on Bali, though, where art and traditional performances are interwoven into desa, or village-culture often times with a clear line between these performances and commercial performances put on for tourists.

When traveling, I have a revulsion for being led around to see what others expect I want to see. Sometimes I like to look around a corner, behind the facade, and at the dust beneath the nicely polished curio. Sometimes this is easier than others, and when visiting areas of interest revolving around traditional arts in Yogya and Solo this can be nearly impossible. Simply put, cultural performances here are a tourist industry. I wonder if some of the Central Javanese traditional arts would disappear if tourists lost interest. All but gone, it seems, are the days of the Bedoyo Srimpi, the "Holy Dance" performed at wedding and coronations in the Mankunegaran Palace in Solo by virgin girls ranging in age from 7-9 years old who have fasted for 3-4 days. It's not simply that I have a taste for the exotic it's just that I have a thirst for authenticity. I live in a place where a multitude of peoples have converged only to have their diverse cultures subverted by the desires of these immigrants to assimilate. In spite of this penchant of mine, the performances we viewed were for the most part exceptional.

Solo

In Solo, we decided to visit the Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia (STSI), a college for the instruction of traditional Indonesia dances. Our visit coincided with the final exam period, and we were permitted to watch the students as they demonstrated for their instructors what they had learned. We saw dances such as the Surakarta style, Srikandi-Cakil ("woman warrior-monster") and Eko Prawiro; Jawa Timur (East Java) style, Ngremo Jombang; Minangkabau style, Tari Piring ("Plate Dance"); and Yogya style, Srikandi Bisma or Beksan Tandingan Putri-Alus ("Fight between man and woman"). The dance styles were noticeably unique and a tribute as such to the diversity of Indonesians. In only one dance we saw during our visit to Indonesia, can I remember seeing a man and a woman dancing in a complimentary way with each other. Invariably, they either danced separately or in combat with each other. Men dancing with each other usually were in combat as well. The Yogyakarta style dance we saw is known for its "soft" characters denoted by hand movements and facial gestures. The Surakarta style dances were more firm in nature - one represented a man with a sword and shield as he moved about in what resembled a martial arts display. The second Surakarta style dance we viewed was unique because we saw many female dance styles and this particular one was not characterized by the typically feminine movements given to Indonesian women, yet it was beautiful in its own right. The position of the dancer throughout much of the dance was with legs apart and knees bent at nearly a 90° angle. The movement, for the most part, was limited to the dancer's ankles which moved up and down to jingle bells wrapped around their ankles much like Southern Indian dance, and their arms and hands moved about as in martial arts. The Tari Piring was executed by a woman dancer, who held in each hand, a plate with a lit candle on it. The dance was fluid and rhythmical with the dancer swinging around in an upright position, then kneeling and moving all the while as if she were elegantly serving something to an honored guest.

The teachers we spoke with at STSI were extremely friendly and were willing to answer any questions posed them. They told us that it costs a student RP210,000 (a bit less than US$100) to attend one semester at STSI. Students study for five years and the dances they study come from Yogyakarta, Sunda, Jawa Timur, Bali, and Sumatra (Minangkabau). They have foreign students and one young woman from Japan performed her final exam while we were there. I asked these instructors about the students' chances for using their education for careers upon graduation. They told me that the jobs were found primarily in the tourist industry, and that getting one depended greatly on connections and nepotism.

Bali

We experienced a range of Balinese dance performances. I say "experienced" because the sound of the gamelan and the sights of the dancers often combined for an aural and visual splendor. Some of the best performances were presented by the Panca Artha Troupe and the Sekaa Gong Jaya Swara of Ubud. The Panyembrana, or welcome dance, was performed by a group of young girls dressed in tightly wrapped costumes and was similar to signature Balinese dances advertised around the world. If you've ever seen children dance, I suspect you can't truly imagine how these girls danced. They danced as only children could which is a compliment of the highest degree when one considers that American children are constantly pushed to dance as if they were adults. Children move differently than adults and the choreographers of these girls seemed to be quiet uniquely aware of this fact. I'm sure Balinese performers find the word "professionalism" and any translation of it foreign, but the professionalism of these girls was astounding. Their heart and soul appeared to be in their performance with a level of concentration even adults seem to have difficulty obtaining.

A Baris dancer we saw perform at the Ubud palace stands out in my mind from all the other performers we saw. Balinese dancers perform tricks* with the way they position their hands and fingers and he was a master of hand and facial gestures (*I say tricks because my wife has double jointed fingers and still she had difficulty mimicking the hand positions of Balinese dancers). His eyes in particular, provided an animation that you rarely see in a close-up picture of a face on a television screen yet he was on a stage which was large enough to accommodate a group of performers at any given time.

When you are accustomed to seeing traditional dances, it is easy to detect, with disappointment, weaknesses in dances which have been choreographed for traditional dancers yet without the brilliance that supports the longevity of a traditional dance. The Kijang Kencana was a "newly choreographed" dance that did anything but disappoint. It was danced by a small group of women whose costumes were the most obvious point of departure from tradition, but whose movements as a herd of deer were beautiful in their quiet evocation of animals without being whimsical.

Music

Before you view the galleries linked below (omitted from this text-only version), I would like to make a couple of comments about music. Gamelan music as it is performed in the Kraton Yogyakarta and as it is performed on Bali couldn't be different. Yogya style is slower, and depending on your taste, either more refined or duller. Balinese style gamelan, the more familiar of the two outside of Indonesia, is louder, faster and somewhat similar to the difference of Rock 'n Roll to Classical music. As I mentioned before, there is a gap between that which is shown to tourists and that which interests Indonesians themselves. Time and again, when passing music shops or in restaurants whether on Java or Bali, I would hear a similar tune and it wasn't the typical gamelan music you associate with Indonesia. Perhaps more interesting is that it wasn't Western style music either. It was traditional Sundanese instrumental music from Western Java and it was wildly popular amongst Indonesians.

A Kecak Dance in Jungjungan

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.

KUTA

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.

Ethnic and Religious Relations in Indonesia

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.

Indonesian POLITICS

When I asked the ethnic Chinese shop owner in Yogyakarta about corruption he said that it proliferated in Jakarta. When I asked about corruption in Yogyakarta, he responded with "you have to try and start somewhere."

There is a tendency to categorize a polity by a country's historical setting as if all countries are moving towards one reference point. Americans use the political model of the United States, in its most ideal sense as that reference point. While I believe this is fallacious, it is a tendency I am in danger of adopting though not consciously and I make this remark to warn the reader to be more critical of what I have to say. The paramount leader of Indonesia for a quarter century was Suharto. Indonesia has only had two leaders in its brief existence as a newly independent country and Suharto's predecessor was Sukarno.

To grossly simplify Indonesia's recent political history, Sukarno can be identified as a charismatic nationalist who, as other nationalists of the period did, often used Marxism-Leninism as a vehicle for his nationalism. His charisma provided a focal point for nationalism for a nation that was becoming increasingly educated about the injustices of Dutch colonialism. As a leader of a sovereign nation, he was ineffective and his policies, based in large part on alliances with communist countries, was disastrous. His rule came to a close in violence that rocked Indonesia in the mid-1960s, the source of which is still debated. Chinese-Indonesians were the focus of the violence, but it might be more accurate to say that Sukarno's policies created a national crisis which eventually was vented in the direction of historical ethnic tensions and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, Indonesians, mostly ethnic Chinese.

At the time of our visit, much of the debate of these events centered around how much Indonesia's leader, Suharto, orchestrated events or merely exploited opportunities which lead to his eventual accession to power. Under Suharto, Indonesia had begun to economically develop, but the wealth of the nation was overwhelmingly tied to ethnic Chinese and nepotism radiating from Suharto himself. This development had occurred under tight political control. Suharto was often referred to as the Dalang, or puppet master, of events in Indonesia. His power was gauged by how he exerted it; if he quietly maneuvered or seemingly not at all, he was most potent. As a result, detentions and imprisonment of dissenters were not made at his behest, but by the "state" under such laws as the one stipulating a six year jail term for insulting the president or his deputy. The "state" was comprised of those who had curried favor with a national machine, Golkar (Golongan Karya, or Functional Groups), for anything affected by government policy including permits to operate businesses. Suharto also controled the military through appointments though it is often quizzically remarked that he rules in concert with the military. Because of this design, Suharto, who turned 75 years old in 1997, ruled as strongly as any dictator and his actions had only been slightly more benign (many have died because of his policies, but sheer numbers pale in comparison to other dictators in the 20th Century).

Ed Aspinall has written an excellent essay about the 1997 elections in Indonesia and their ramifications, both materially and psychologically. I would direct readers to that essay for a better understanding of some of the issues raised below. What follows here, are stories of some discussions I had with people living in Indonesia about contemporaneous political issues.

I had the privilege of speaking with a man who was born and raised in a foreign country. He has traveled throughout the world while working for the United Nations and has for the last several years lived with his wife and child in Indonesia. His wife is Indonesian, but has lived for a few years in Los Angeles. They are both Muslim and have a small boy whose age perhaps corresponds to the years his "foreign" father has spent in Indonesia.

This man, whose name we never had the opportunity to know, was a traveler at heart who seemed a little bit at odds with his length of stay in Indonesia. He didn't directly fault the people. He said Indonesians treated him as if he was Indonesian in large part because the color of his skin is similar to their own. Life didn't appear to be that difficult for him either. He was a consultant and had a small business he ran with his wife. His discontent, though, seemed to go beyond that of a traveler's heart restrained.

As I've mentioned, his wife is Indonesian and he said that he had Indonesian friends, but he still seemed to have contempt for Indonesians in general. He commented that they always have silly smiles on their faces and are lazy. An old woman who, seeing me from outside this man's business, mumbled something in Indonesian, came inside, walked over to me and grabbed my arm to feel it. Then she went over to my wife and did the same thing, but for a longer time. Puzzled, Karen asked our friend what this woman was up to. He replied that he didn't know, but that she would probably ask for RP1000 after a few minutes.

In the course of our conversation, he also commented on becak drivers, who he believed spent more time lounging on their becaks than plying a trade.

This is not to say that Indonesians may not be "lazy" compared to other nationals, that the old woman would not have asked for RP1000 - she probably would have. I offer this brief story of a man's opinions with all the known biases, as one perspective of Indonesia and to reveal some acquired biases that may have affected his comments about Indonesian politics which follow. His comments are of value precisely because he is a foreigner who, by virtue of the fact that his wife and child are Indonesian, is not a casual observer.

Our friend, who lives on Java, lamented the fact that the Italian-born wife of the late Rajiv Gandhi had a credible chance of being Prime Minister of India while it is impossible for him to become an Indonesian, even if he lives in Indonesia for twenty years and has an Indonesian son. He was also critical of Indonesia's lack of political freedom. He didn't criticize the absurdity of the system, his complaint was more basic. He was angered by the lack of free speech. He said that despite the fact that restrictions were placed on campaigning for PPP (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, or United Development Party) which weren't placed on Golkar, you could only see green (the color of the PPP) in his town before the election. Despite this, the election results were miraculously and overwhelmingly in favor of Golkar, the longstanding, ruling party. He was also annoyed by the censorship imposed on the newspapers.

The column to the left (picture omitted from text-only version) refers to five political parties, two of which had been banned at the time of the 1997 elections. A third party, PDI (Partai Demokrasi Indonesi), had been commandeered by the government who replaced the party's leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of former Indonesian leader Sukarno, with a former Golkar leader. Leaders of one of the banned opposition parties were jailed the same year for taking part in demonstrations which followed the forceful takeover of Sukarnoputri's party office by her government/military sponsored replacement.

As we walked in the direction of a historical site in Yogyakarta, we came across some columns at the entrance to one small street where some boys were playing soccer. I noticed that the columns had painted on them the symbols for the five parties, including the three parties that were involved in the "election" that had ended the week before. I was amazed at how aware the boys were when I asked them about the parties. One boy even picked up an old Indonesian newspaper page from the ground and showed me a photo with a caption that said something about Mega Bintang ("Mega Bintang" grew out of popular support for an unofficial alliance between Megawati Sukarnoputri, after she was ousted as the leader of the PDI, and the PPP whose symbol is a bintang, or star). They told me what the other party symbols represented parties that no longer existed. When I asked them about the karabau picture (a silhouette of a water buffalo head which is the symbol for the PDI) a couple of boys raised up their thumbs to declare their enthusiastic support.

Children, generally speaking, are politically unaware and parrot the sentiments of their parents. Governments attempt to control information through censorship aims to keep the political involvement of the populace from rising above that of children while the government plays the role of symbolic parents. This may be possible on some level in Indonesia, but even here disquietude exists if for no other reason than because Suharto and his party must attempt to hold the country together in all its multiplicity of cultures. One Indonesian told us he beleives Suharto is wise, but he likes the PPP because they are the Muslim party and the leader is a Muslim from Aceh were the people live more according to the ways of Islam.

Where Made lives, Bali, the populace is overwhelmingly Hindu so appeals to Islam have no affect. There the PDI is more popular. Made doesn't have strident political leanings, he merely wants a choice. He would like to see what solutions a party other than Golkar would offer to Indonesia's problems and give them a chance.

During the campaign that had just preceded our visit, Made became a statistic of the campaign violence. He was riding his small motorbike to work when he saw a Golkar campaign caravan blocking most of the road ahead of him. He needed to get to work so he began to slowly pass them so as not to upset the campaigners through disrespect. He wasn't wearing one of the widely distributed T-shirts that supporters of Golkar were given and when he tried to pass the caravan somebody hit him in the head with a large wood stick that was used to display the party's flag. Luckily Made had been wearing a helmet, but the blow still left him with a bloody nose and a bruised face.

In a previous election, Made had learned the hard way that it is a mistake to vote for an opposition party. The vote was held in his village and Made had to sign a sheet verifying it was him who had cast a ballot. By doing so, he revealed to the village head, who was presiding over the balloting, who he had voted for. After that election, Made had gone to a government official to obtain a certificate for his brother who needed to submit such a form with a job application. The bureaucrat refused the certificate after some delays, stating that he had learned from the village headman that Made had voted for the PDI.

Made is also critical of Suharto because, in his eyes, Suharto's family represents corruption of the leader himself. All of Suharto's children are rich, owning lots of businesses, some of which are monopolistic*. In example, Made told me the Suharto family owns a hotel in Bali and the government has coincidentally decided to help develop the vicinity by building educational facilities from kindergarten through university levels, a large grocery store, and a hospital. [* one of Suharto's son "won" the exclusive right to produce the Indonesian national car which entailed some tax breaks because it would be manufactured in Indonesia. It was later decided that it was impossible to build the car in Indonesia, so this son "won" the right to produce the national car in Korea without losing his right to the advantageous tax breaks.]

One day, Made was informed that he owed RP6,000 for the fourteen inch color television he owned. He also pointed out that there were taxes on radios (RP50 per month), hotels, restaurants, residential property, and rice fields. Made wonders where the money from all these taxes goes. There are only rare occasions that he sees where the tax monies are going. Election campaigns are one of those occasions. Only just prior to the recent elections, the government had deemed it fortuitous to supply his village with the materials to pave a new road (the villagers actually performed the work themselves).

There is historical precedence for Javanese rulers having such control over their domains and expecting tribute from their dominions. If Suharto is different, it is only because he has to present a semblance of Western Democracy to avoid international pressures which could detrimentally affect Indonesia's economy. Indonesians who have come in contact with foreign tourists and their ideas are bound to question what has existed in Indonesia for centuries and is a part of their political culture, but which is considered corrupt in other countries.

At the beginning of our sojourn to Indonesia, the guesthouse owner in Bandung had commented that business was slow. He blamed the violence revolving around the political campaign. It is difficult to see how Indonesia, such a diverse country of several nations can be held together for long without a shared vision independent of an aging leader and the coercive power of his military. It seems to me that this land of smiles with all its beauty is headed for a collision course with its own destiny. Suharto has moved the country forward, but has left much unresolved for the Indonesian people. As foreign travelers, it is often easiest to take a superficial look at the place you are visiting and forget the people you left behind. Cultural Bridge Productions would like to dedicate this location to the Indonesian people, and to the hope for peace and prosperity in their home.