Orang, Orang!

Alas, ‘the youth today’—that most coveted & elusive audience—seems to be losing interest in Javanese shadow puppets. Through the English language Jakarta Post this week, elders bemoans the loss: Our heritage! Where are our values? What's the matter with kids today!?

In Indonesia—as in all of south & southeast Asia—wayang puppetry has been the traditional form of telling stories from the Mahabharata, & the Ramayana (etc) since the first millennium.

Ten years ago I watched Balinese puppet makers carving & painting rawhide for jointed shadow puppets. Saw midnight performances in an open, stone temple: a large scrim back-lit with an oil lamp; the intricate puppets standing upright in the felled trunk of a banana tree, ready; the dalang—puppet-master—manipulates all the puppets himself & does all the voices, knocking time with a wooden knob held in his toes; an entire gamelan surrounds him, accompanying the story on xylophones & gongs. The performance can go all night. It can go for days.

These are massive Hindu epics, if you aren’t familiar, constantly told as bedtime stories, learned in schools, dramatized on the radio, stage & screen. Until mass media became easily accessible, wayang was like local access TV. With a simplicity surpassing absurd, I’ll say: The Ramayana is about an ogre king kidnapping Princess Sita, & Rama stealing her back with a monkey army (…The Illiad?). The Mahabharata, if you’ll forgive the very attempt to gloss its twenty volumes, is about the five Pandawa brothers traveling home through war & adventure to regain their kingdom from a usurping family (…The Odyssey?). They’re fabulous stories that I’d tell my own children one day.

The point is, puppet-show audiences are dwindling.

A local troupe is trying to conjure the youth back to their roots with wayang orang: that is, live actors dressed & acting like puppets. ( ORANG means “person”—orang-utan means “man of the forest”. )
It's announcements like this, however, that give me an odd, unexpected relief that Evan is studying modern theatre.

What DOES Evan Study?

I know where many of “the kids today" are. Built on the site of an old zoo, the Jakarta arts complex, TIM, has two giant stage theatres, a five-screen movie theatre, a fine arts school in back, & a theatre book store where Evan spent much time in previous visits, & where, he says, sooner or later, “You’ll meet all the artists in Jakarta.”

This week we attended two excellent productions: of the Swiss playwright Durrenmatt's "The Visit" and of Moliere's "The Miser". It's all in Indonesian, of course, but as I've seen these plays before & know the plots it's still a lot of fun. “The Miser” was fast-paced & full of incomprehensible slang, using flamboyant sexuality for its loudest laughs. One of the comic characters was cast as a waria—a 'lady-boy'—Jakarta’s trannie / sex-worker subculture. To listen to the audience, it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. The largely-student audience had no problem calling out to characters from the house or loudly echoing lines they liked.

The star of "The Visit" is on the front page of several papers & magazines this week. Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Theatre Koma, the play was adapted to be politically acerbic, citing current Indonesian politics. And THIS is what Evan is here to investigate: the current face of Indonesia—its history, culture, politics, nationhood—as it’s expressed through theatre. Four hours long, it was still well-staged, funny, astute. He went a second time & recorded it: to write a review, for future course material, & to include in his book. The houses were sold out.

Muezzin Mustn't

…5:30 AM (1. Fajir)…10 am…Noon (2. Duhir)…

If Christian churches across the US simultaneously broadcast beautifully-sung hymns (& sermons) five times a day from loud-speakers mounted on every steeple in town, I wonder if we would feel closer to God. Certainly I might pray more frequently for the separation of church & state. And maybe lobby for the enforcement of “quiet enjoyment” laws.

…1:15 pm…3:30 pm (3. Asr)…5:45 pm…6:15…6:30 (4. Maghrib)…

EGYPT
I’m not the only one. In Egypt (at least) there has been a public (if often anonymous) cry at least to unplug the god-damned loud-speakers for the pre-dawn (Fajir) call. Or, better yet, ban ALL loudspeakers & let’s hear the adhan as Muhammad did: simply called from the minarets. [from the Washington Post:] Even the Ministry of Religious Endowments agrees that in Cairo—which has about 4,000 mosques—the “different voices, starting at different times and volumes [have] an unattractive ‘randomness.’” So in May 2006, Egypt’s President Mubarak pushed “to centralize calls to prayer by transmitting the voice of a single muezzin to all city mosques.” Of alternating religious leaders, of course. Good luck with that.

Even with thousands complaining of cacophony, institutionalizing a single muezzin’s voice is a controversial move. Prayer (salat) is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the 5 daily prayers a requirement of all Muslims. However far urban realities may have led them astray from the original intent, calls to prayer (adhan) are an ancient & revered custom. To mess with the muezzins borders, albeit in different ways, on blasphemy & tyranny. While many mosques around the world do already pipe in pre-recorded muezzin calls, to be a muezzin is a high honor. Some train for decades & all compete for the rare honor of being The Voice from a well-situated minaret. Mubarak’s plan would, if nothing else, put upwards of 100,000 muezzins out of work. [100,000 voices calling!] More, to legislate a single, state-regulated voice calling prayers within the city…well, to some that smacks of the government legislating religion. Which it is.
So far as I can tell, the jury’s still out on this plan.

…7:30 pm (5. Isha’a)…8:30 pm…9:45 pm…

SYRIA
Done well, the muezzin call is beautiful to the foreign ear. It lends a clockwork to the day &, to some, the spirit. In time, one probably doesn’t hear it at all. With the language barrier & specific intonation, it reminds me—distantly—of Latin Mass.

In Syria, the muezzin calls infuriated some of the secular literati we knew, who found them oppressive. The government’s rapid building of mosques, they told us, is often only a political move: across the world, religion is today’s language of power. Not here in Jakarta, not in the middle-east, not in the States will we elect a leader who does not openly submit to one God. A theatre director in Damascus, who’d spent time teaching in the States, found much to compare between the rise of the religious right in the US & the middle east. A Muslim herself, she stamped her foot on the sidewalk when I haplessly complimented the muezzin call & shook her fist at the minaret crying, I hate them, oh, how I hate them! All day, every day.
Who are they to enter my home?

…10 PM…11:30 PM…3:30 in the fraking morning!?!...

JAKARTA
Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim country, but it's not a Muslim state. The government is secular, though perhaps in the way that George Bush’s administration is technically secular. To read the headlines here, there is a keen awareness of the balances in play: a firm, national belief in one God; an awareness of religious diversity & commitment to secular rule; a varying enforcement of Sharia (Islamic) law; a wariness against fanaticism & vigilance against terrorism; family values…which, as in the US, is most clearly codified by religion.

I have only been in Jakarta a week: there’s everything for me to learn. The calls we hear from our balcony do sound different to me than those of Syria. For one thing, they are far more frequent than five times a day. And they seem competitive: different muezzins starting early or going late, as if to ensure their own voice is distinct from the cacophony. Sometimes, a person is just talking, as though musing aloud. Or practicing a few bars. One man delivered what sounded like an entire sermon over the loudspeakers yesterday, which in its conversational tones was intrusive & annoying, & in its fire-&-brimstone moments was a little scary…how very easily that flips.

There's a kind of aggression to this, though, as if the calls to prayer must occupy all notes of the scale, all frequencies, all public air space, all times of day. It's not hostility, but territoriality. Haranguing. Neither prayerful, nor distinct.

Imagine the parallel scenario again. You can already guess who would be joining an analogous set of Extra Very Faithful, God-fearing steeple-singers Stateside, together in a raucous round with your home-town chorus boys & true-hearted reverends: the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, Pat Robertsons, Ann Coulters…strident, divisive, pushing for action, greater volume & bandwidths. Listen to me, to me, to me! The churches of man so rarely seem like houses of God. Muhammad never had a microphone.

The Economy of Ghosts

Reuters tells us this morning that Bejing "police have arrested three men for killing two young women to sell their corpses as 'ghost brides' for dead single men."

And I'd wondered at the market for paper effigies. Do those dead women now require children? Sometimes I think it is the Living who haunt the Dead, and more viciously than they've ever haunted us.

But We Stayed for the Mariachi

Lonely Planet failed to mention that "Oasis" is a five-star restaurant with western prices. A deep gong rings at one's arrival & a smiling, mini gamelan plays. Our party's unsuspecting men in sandals & jeans. They hand yellow corsages to the women & serve a palate-cleansing raspberry sorbet after lobster bisque appetizers. It's one of the only places one can order Rijsttafel--a sort of Dutch-colonial feast fusing Javanese ritual banquetry with a massive smorgasbord sensibility.
We abstained.

Yes, it was good. I only mention this at all because last night at "Oasis" I think I may have heard the world's most virtuosic MARIACHI band. A north Sumatran trio. They sang in 5 languages. The north Sumatran folk-singing style is this powerful, full-throated, troubadour / balladic voice that surely requires a third or fourth lung & puts Placido's deepest, longest, loudest notes to shame. EL, another ethno-musicologist Fulbrighter at our table, called out requests--"Sing-Sing!" (a Sumatran song) and "Anything Batak [a north Sumatran ethnicity]"--which made us very popular.

The Ketsup Room: Malaprops Abroad

The word for Water is AIR. Pronounced: eye-EAR
The Balinese word for Money is PISS…bringing oxymoron to the state of being ‘piss poor’.

I sat down eager to order stir-fried Morning Glory with Balacan (shrimp paste). Evan ordered AIR MINUM (bottled water); they brought us 2 plates of AYAM, sweet & sour chicken. We shrugged & ate it. Everyone laughed & the service became very attentive.
(It has been virtually impossible to remain a vegetarian here.)

I’ve tried to ask—casually, knowingly—Dimana kamar kecil? (Where’s the bathroom?), and instead (I’m told) carefully inquired: “In what era is the ketsup room?” The waitress pointed out the toilet.

Hoping to be polite, I parroted back the manly night guard’s, “Selamat malam, ibu” ("Good-evening, ma’am.") Which also made everyone snort into their sleeves. But hey: if it’s laughter that precedes understanding here, I’m comfortable with the learning curve.

Walking: Gringos Enter the Hood

Jakarta is not a city that wins you over with its beauty, but it's compelling in other ways. After nearly a week of serial visits to government agencies—think: tropical DMVs—interspersed with sessions in traffic, we decided one night to screw it all & WALK home.

People do walk here, of course, but it’s work. Even at 8 pm it’s warm. Sidewalks are puddled, heaved-up, sunk-in, over-grown, crowded with food carts, & the mice come out at night. Drop your vigilance & a foreigner’s apt to get hit by a bajaj. Still, it felt good to walk outside, to walk for an hour or more in the cool of night. As it happened, it was the best thing we could have done.

Evan has a good sense of direction & he’s been in Jakarta before. He didn’t know the exact route home, but he aims us well: follow the raised train tracks south. “You sure this is a good idea?” I ask, because the path is unevenly lit & between the basket makers & closed Kia repair shops, people are living under the tracks. Where I come from, this is unwise. “It’s a good idea,” he says easily, just as it becomes clear to me that we’re entering a slum.

And yet. The first parked motorcycle has a pink teddy bear on it. Two men centered on the dim path ahead are holding…babies, talking animatedly about fatherhood. Hunched figures off to the side, tucked under the concrete train lines…resolve into young couples staring at a chess board, sipping bottled tea. A little kid on a bicycle toodles by. A warung (food stall) seats a family, the 2 little daughters giggling over their straws. Far from scary or awkward, it felt...good to be there. Then our train-tracks path—none of this shows up on the map—funnels us directly into a kampung.

Kampung means "village", with contradictory connotations of slum & of home. It's where a majority of Indonesians actually live. What we entered was a long, narrow stretch of tenement housing knocked up on either side of a four-foot wide paved gang (walkway) running straight through it. Once you're in, it's either turn around or go all the way through. It has electricity (lights, TVs) &, judging by what I didn't smell: plumbing. Or something clever. But things are very rudimentary here. Very poor. This is where the people who sell fruit from carts & give motorcycle rides live. It's also a hidden bastion of village life & culture sustained within the metropolis. I never would have done this on purpose, & I don’t know that it would happen twice, but traveling through this really was, as Evan said, a good idea.

Everyone who lives there seems to be hanging out along the gang in the late evening, talking, playing guitars, smoking, eating, listening to music. Kids & babies everywhere. There’s so much to take in, but on either side are people’s homes & universal etiquette tells me to train my eyes away. I know who I’m not. We walk single file, answering everyone’s greetings in turn, pretty much on the verge of laughter the entire time.

Because everyone who saw us was either astonished, intrigued or both, seeming to find us...I'm trying to describe these bemused expressions...it was as if we’d suddenly walked up wearing rabbit suits. Because we’re just these gigantic, white, rich (bearded) foreigners—bule: gringos—who can return pleasantries in Bahasa Indonesian & Arabic, & don’t appear lost.

The next morning we learned there's a popular TV drama called "Bule Masuk Kampung" –Gringos Enter the Hood—a comedy about an American boy who’s come to Jakarta to learn about Islam & falls in love with a girl from the kampung. So our arrival was an inadvertent performance of a popular joke. Kids would go saucer-eyed, barely restraining hysterics (squeeze my arm: her first white person), experimentally shout "Hello Mister!" & dissolve into laughter when we said 'Hello' back. They'd crowd us for high fives & formal hand shakes. Along the sidelines of a mini soccer court, a 5 year old kicked a soccer ball at me & when I passed it directly back to him, to assist a running goal, all the mothers sitting behind me cheered. I turned & curtsied; they cracked up.

Suddenly: we're out the other side at last & into the street where traffic is flowing again; a freeway overpass; packs of teenagers cross in jeans & heels gossiping with friends on their way to the cinema. Village life recedes & disappears: from here it only looks like the mouth of a dark alley. It is. We caught a taxi the rest of the way home.

Traffic

Jakarta is not a walking city. Nor a tourist destination. This is a relaxed,10-million person sprawl pulsing with Range Rovers, taxies, motorcycles & bajaj. Compared with tiny Hong Kong’s hills & vertical efficiency, this island metropolis is flat, immense, & badly in need of public transportation.

Today—as for the last two days, & probably for the next two—we sat in traffic. Traffic, between bureaucratic stops (the police, immigration, American/Indonesian Exchange, Fulbright, the Foreign Researchers institute…) to make ourselves ever more officially documented. TRAFFIC. Which can be its own cultural exchange.
Be where you are.

It may be a while before I get my bearings. What looks like 2 easy turns on the map gets mazed with U-turns, one-ways, special lanes, & flow. Or…no flow. Asongan sell roadside snacks to idling drivers, also newspapers, cigarettes, & seasonal fruit—the red sycamore balls of rambutan, yellow star-fruit—from heavy carts.
Road rage? The collective calm is preternatural.

Given the sheer congestion, you’d think this would be the land of Minis, but I’ve yet to see a compact vehicle. Not a ‘green’ city, Jakarta. All them spotless & most brand new, the cars are 4-door sedans, like Camrys, and SUVs: Hondas, Chevy Blazers, Toyota Highlanders. Big’uns.

Bajaj—pronounced BAH Jai—are 3-wheeled, smoke-belching, bright orange rickshaws. They drive like roaches run. Are said to be like saunas inside. Though they seem only to annoy other drivers, they’re tolerated (it seems to me) out of a sense of nostalgia. What would the streets be without bajaj? Better, sure, but unfamiliar.

The rest are motorcycles. I’d estimate that a third to half of traffic are 175 cc motorcycles. They school & dart like minnows. Rain & shine, some carry 4-person families. Babies. Bushels of bamboo. Women in polyester skirt-suits sitting side-saddle. Most riders (men & women) wear jackets & pants, flip-flops & helmets—nearly 100% helmet compliance—some smashed on over lacey jilbab (Muslim headscarf).

There are lane lines, but these are decorative. JP, an ethnomusicologist Fulbrighter who sat in traffic with us, can’t wait to get to Bali: he’ll be there for a year, riding his own motorbike around the island. Driving here—especially a motorcycle—requires a degree of physical bravery I simply do not possess. But JP enthuses: the traffic has its own music, rhythm & flow. Road rules, he says, would only mess it up: this is cooperative & organic. And I see that, sure. I see the flow. It works. Then I ask, “What happens when someone gets hit? Do you think anyone has insurance?” But no one appreciates this unromantic question. Or answers it.

In 4 days I’ve seen only two bumper stickers. They read, in English:
I [heart] Humpbacks and I see dead people.

EPILOGUE to TRAFFIC:
Stumbling out of the taxi the other day, I spied a giant snail along the manicured lawn. In my bureaucratic coma, this was completely captivating: An escargot snail, wide & neat, with a pretty pointed shell and large enough to seem a charismatic animal, not just a slug. As moving vehicles go, it was just so...easy going. Its nautilus shell & undulating gait made me think of fairy-tale sailing ships rolling along a green sea. After hours in unmuffled traffic, I fell into a sort of trance with this creature: how peaceful it seemed, how elegantly trimmed. I would sail with you, I thought. A childhood wish: ‘The Never-Ending Story’ made a vessel of snails. Dr. Doolittle, too.
We might get there just as fast.

Entering Jakarta: God or God?

In order to enter the country as an official visitor—indeed to be a documented citizen in Indonesia at all—everyone must declare a religion. Understanding this to be a question of direct practical significance, we squinted at the form as though puzzling over a menu and asked our guide, “Which would you recommend?”

With an ecumenical shrug she answered, “Either one.”

What she really meant was “any one” of the 5 accepted monotheistic religions: Islam, Buddhism, Hindu, Protestant, & Catholic. No blanks allowed. Atheism is not an option. (Neither is Cylon) For this is much less a declaration of creed than an instance of politics: note that while Hinduism with its myriad gods makes the list, Judaism—arguably the oldest monotheistic religion of the bunch—is not an option at all. Jews may be a little like leprechauns here: while the average person may know legends from the Arab news, by and large most people have never actually met a Jew.

So what’s the deal with declaring yourself for God or God? Back in 1945, Indonesia was struggling for independence from the Dutch. And to be its own coherent country. Then, as now, Islam was a huge force rivaling that nationalist movement. Indonesia includes an enormous range of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious groups, so the founding principles needed to be inclusive and general, uniting rich & poor, Muslim & Christian…while paying respects to the powers that be. So the new leader, Soekarno, created Panca Sila: the Five Pillars (its language echoing the Five Pillars of Islam). These are, in order: nationalism, internationalism, government by consent, social justice, and belief in one God. One nation under God.

As I write this, the muezzins are calling evening prayers across the city. On some evenings this is lovely: a true call, lilting and layered, leading one inward and upward; other times the voices seem to compete, their vibrato flights up and down scales broadcast over a thousand loudspeakers from mosque towers in every direction: a cacophony of haunted-house ghosts.

What if the Christians rang their bells here, too, and broadcast (as is done) the Liturgy of the Hours? Lauds & Vespers (& Terce & Sext & None: the other five daily calls to prayer). And what if the Buddhists, and the Hindu, and the lonely Jew added their own calls to God, and all the gods (and the shrill silence of the Atheist) all at once? All at once, in a free, inclusive, just society. Heaven help us! Would we ever find God through our cries for Him?

HK: 'Lucky Book'

19 January

The ancient Chinese on this 'chop' reads Lime Tree. The man who carved it told me this: 'kat', the word for lime, is also the word for lucky. 'Soo', the word for tree, is also (nearly) the word for book.

Auspicious.

(21 Jan: We have arrived in Jakarta. All is well)

HK: Harmonious Canons

18 January

A local legend: The Bank of China commissioned I.M.Pei to build them a marvelous skyscraper. He did. It's a nice building: slim, glass, and cross-gartered with lines that light up at night (many prominent buildings down town display colorful, nightly light shows). The criss-crossing lines, however, form diamond shapes and diamonds, I'm told, run starkly counter to the principles of harmonious architecture; that is, they're a serious fung shui faux pas.

Counter-measures must be taken! To combat the Bad Energy effluviating from the bank's offending diamonds, the adjacent HSBC building has mounted stylized CANONS on its rooftop and aimed them at the Bank of China. We have a good view of this energetic stand-off from our hotel room. Is this now...harmonious enough? HSBC is hedging its bets; their building is also designed to be modular: in case things go south in HK, the building can (in theory) be taken apart and reassembled on more harmonious ground.

In further superstition: 8 is said to be a lucky number (because the word for 8 is similar to the word for "money"). The number 4 is considered unlucky (because the word for 4 is similar to the word for "death"). Many buildings, P's building included, do not have 4th, 14th or 24th floors. (Nor, 13th floors: offend no one's superstition.) That said, I can't help but notice that my hotel room is on the 4th floor, and that I am in room 409. But as the hotel is of Catholic origin, perhaps in here 4 is just a number.

Hong Kong: The Peak

18 January

With 7 million people, HK is densely packed: 50 story skyscrapers sprouting from the jungle. Apartments are small, streets narrow; mirrors play large roles in interior design. In part because of its sheer density there is a special concern for hygiene here. Hand sanitizers stand at the entrances to many buildings & restaurants. John jokes that the "3 Second Rule" of dropped food is actually 15 seconds here, because floors are 3 times cleaner.

After a walk through the botanical and zoological gardens, we rode up the Peak Tram to HK's highest vista point: Lung Fu Shan mountain (familiarly aka: Victoria Peak). Northward toward China, sky scrapers coral the entire shoreline. Kids play basketball on netted school rooftops. Industrial barges fill the harbor--with the exception of a single, red-sailed junk preserved for tourists. The warmer southern side of the island is comparatively undeveloped, thickly green all the way down to real beaches and open ocean. During the Japanese invasion, the British internment camps were there; now it's an ex-patriot glamour-hood.

Over dim sum and this grand view, P & I talked about The Lime Tree for a long while. Such a good experience, that. P, who has known TLT since its first word, even (finally) convinced me to kill a character whose final fate has too long hung in the balance. It's odd thing to be grateful for (but I am): thankful she has convinced me to kill a beloved character and further traumatize one of my principles. But this is what we do for each other.

We hiked down from the mountain along the steep, winding Lugar Road, singing an old Girl Scout song, "Barges", to the baby. Ancient rubber trees make the jungle thick (thinned by the occasional jack hammer through the trees). Along the way, parts of the hillside have been carved out for the road and lathed over, bumps & all, with concrete--presumably so that it doesn't slide into the city below. Each of these man-made slopes sports its own registry number and plaque--a degree of thoroughness approaching quaint. I met a Brit making a mildly serious survey of one slope in consultation with a booklet: it was the Registry of Slopes.

That night we saw (another) pyrotechnic performance of "Journey to the West" in Cantonese (supra-titled in Mandarin and English) at the HK Academy of Performing Arts. If you're not familiar, these stories follow the ancient adventures of the monk Tripitaka and his disciple Monkey on their mad-cap adventures toward Buddhist enlightenment. That's the short version anyway. Evan described this particular performance as "The Wizard of Oz meets Cats."

The weather has been a pleasant mid-60sF the entire week. Very soon: heat.

Hong Kong: China Town

17 January

You might think that Hong Kong--China's "Special Administrative Region"--would not have a China Town per se, but it does. Anecdotally, this was the last hold-out against colonial (English) influence. Preparations for Chinese New Year fill many shops and walkways with celebratory RED. Markets swim with live fish, buckets of flipping shrimp, cages of frogs, platters of stomach lining, chicken feet, squid and bright stacks of vegetables. Apothecary-Tea Masters mix & pour special draughts for nearly any woe that ails you (my stuffy nose cleared at once). The ceilings of Man Mo temple (on Hollywood Road) are hung with great conical spirals of incense. On Sundays, we're told, the streets fill with the bird-chatter voices of HK's 300,000 Philippina nannies on their common day off, catching up over picnics outside.

My favorite market items were paper effigies for the dead. These are replicas of everything departed loved ones might crave in the afterlife: food, clothing, electronics, cash (called 'Hell money'), which you burn in ritual stoves on birthdays, death days, Grave Sweeping Day or during the month of Hungry Ghosts. They fill entire sections of shops: paper suits & gold watches, paper fried eggs, paper iPods complete with Nano. To look at the selection of effigies for sale, ghosts are not only ravenous, but discerning and finicky.

Hong Kong: arrival

A Year Without Winter...
...begins with a day without night--as we chase the sun across the Pacific.

(And a week without sleep)

We started the morning with Duke Ellington's "Far East Suites". Through the sliding windows of Phoebe & John's tidy wood-and -mirrors apartment on the 19th floor, we see the foggy city and industrial harbor, neighborhood folk practicing Tai Chi on the soccer field below, and the green mountains of China to the north. A pair of kites (hawks) circle in the air off the balcony. In typhoons, this apartment is in the middle of the clouds.

Phoebe & 8-mo Hattie Mae have just returned from their first "happy-clappy" KinderMusic class. There's a Chinese theatre festival on deck for the evening. And dim sum to be had.
The year begins.