the club’s postal bank account without bribing the clerk—which John wisely discouraged me from attempting, so I had to resign. Eventually Hester found for me a class of Indonesian women who spoke English and were looking for a native English speaker to help them learn how to give public speeches, since they were seeking to participate in international conferences. Teaching that weekly class of a dozen enterprising women soon became my favorite activity.
Looking back on my introduction to being a diplomat’s wife, I am struck by the almost infinite effort made by the wife of my husband’s boss to help me fit in and find satisfying ways to occupy my time. In those days in our Foreign Service, the boss’s wife was often regarded as a dragon needing to be placated for fear she might breathe fire and destroy one’s husband’s career. Hester probably was a dragon in the sense that she wanted me to learn to do things “the right way,” but I thank her for taking the trouble to teach me what I needed to know.
Note
1. For more about this failed attempt at regime change, read Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, by Indonesia scholars Audrey Kahin and George McT. Kahin, published by New Press in 1995 and based on declassified official US government sources.
Chapter 3
Party Magic
DURING THOSE EARLY DIPLOMATIC days in Jakarta, there was one job I was assigned by my dragon lady boss’s wife that I bet few other wives were ever asked to do. And yet, in that time and context, somebody had to do it.
As the lowest-ranking officer in the political section, John’s duties included being the embassy’s protocol officer. The protocol job came to an annual crescendo of activity in preparation for the Fourth of July reception at the ambassador’s residence, the biggest diplomatic reception of the year. John and a cast of thousands—or so it seemed—prepared guest lists, kept track of how many people would attend, and figured out the logistics for such a big event. I was not involved until about a week before the party, when Hester told me that I was responsible for making sure that it did not rain during the reception. How I did it was up to me.
I had reason to take the assignment seriously. By then I knew that Billy Palmer, our Shangri-La weekend host, had been obliged to host a full-blown selamatan (a big feast with lots of food, gamelan music, costumed dance and puppet shows, and featuring the efforts of a local sorcerer to placate mischievous spirits) after the third attempt to pour cement for his swimming pool in the hills had failed. As his domestic staff boasted afterward, the fourth pouring went without a hitch.
I went to Chi-chi, our astute one-eyed cook, to get advice on how to prevent rain at the residence on July Fourth. She first suggested a selamatan, but I said that even if we could ignore the ambassador and his wife’s strong Christian Science beliefs, I could never get the money for such an enterprise. Nor did we have time to arrange it; the Fourth was just days away.
In that case, her second-best suggestion was for me to do precisely what she now would tell me, at the residence on the day of the party. I nodded. I knew I would have to be at the residence four hours ahead, to handle the receipt of flowers and other gifts, recording who sent what for later thankyou notes (to be drafted by guess who?). I would also be expected to deal with any emergencies that needed to be handled by someone with a better command of Indonesian than Mrs. Jones had.
First, Chi-chi said, I should ask Mrs. Jones for a pair of her underpants, preferably ones that she had worn and that had not yet been laundered.
Gulping, I nodded again.
“Then turn the panties inside out and get them put up on the roof.”
Eyes wide, I nodded again.
“Then take four ordinary hot red chili peppers and get the gardener to bury them in the four corners of the part of the lawn where most of the guests will be.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “That should do it.”
Midmorning of July Fourth found me already dressed in my best reception-going dress, carrying out my peculiar errand. I had wondered for days how to approach Mrs. Jones with my weird request for her underwear, and finally decided to just play it straight. I need not have worried. She burst out laughing and, with a shrug, asked her babu cuci (laundress) to comply, including carrying the item up to the roof and leaving it there while I watched. There followed a quick trip to the kitchen for four red chilies, and to the garden to get them planted in the four corners of the lawn, where a clearly inadequate awning was being installed that might temporarily protect half the expected turnout in case of a quick, light shower. (There were no light showers at that time of year.) Without hesitation, the gardener planted the chilies.
From then on, I had merely to help receive the flowers and the gifts and, during the party, join the officer and spouse workforce whose job was, more or less politely, to move the reception along, through and past the receiving line and into the garden. If I could spot VIPs who needed to be plucked from the line and brought directly to Ambassador and Mrs. Jones, so much the better.
It was only after the last straggling guest had downed his last gimlet that I took notice of the fact that it had NOT rained on our parade. I asked around, and it turned out—as usual at this time of year—there had been heavy tropical cloudbursts all over town before, during, and after our reception, but none at the residence until well after the awning had been taken down and carted away and our embassy colleagues had started to depart.
When John and I reached home, I burst through the kitchen door to say (in Indonesian), “Chi-chi! You really are wonderful. I did what you said and it worked!”
Looking up at me balefully through her one good eye, she said, “What are you talking about? I have been praying to Allah all afternoon!”
. . .
That was my first inkling of how complicated religion in Java was. Chi-chi’s seamless switch from animistic magic to orthodox Islam rocked me on my heels. Was she joking with me? And if so, which was the joke: The ritual she had me carry out? Or was she joking when she said she had prayed all afternoon? I knew by then that she (like most Javanese in those days) occasionally ate pork, sometimes drank beer, never wore a headscarf, rarely went to the mosque, and did not fast during the fasting month. Clifford Geertz, an American who was the best anthropologist ever to work on Java, would answer those questions a few years later in his seminal book, The Religion of Java.
Until then, much of what John and I knew of the subject was taught us one memorable afternoon shortly after July Fourth. We were picnicking near an emerald-green rice paddy along the north coast road between Central and East Java, and a peasant farmer—upon whose field we were probably trespassing—came up to greet us.
John invited him to join us and, at some point, seeking to try out my still imperfect Indonesian, I asked him a question I almost never ask anyone: “Pak [father], what is your religion?”
“I am Javanese,” he said.
“Yes, but what I had asked was: ‘What is your religion?’”
“I am Javanese; that means I am Muslim.”
His words hung in the air until he took pity on me and expanded his answer a bit: “The Javanese are Muslim—but, of course, we have not been Muslim long.”
I nodded for him to continue, while absorbing the fact that five centuries did not seem as long to him as it would to a Westerner like me.
“And”—making hand gestures to indicate descending layers—“before that we were Hindu-Buddhist—or our kings were—but before that, and always, and still now, we are Javanese.”
What a country, I thought, where even a subsistence farmer could gracefully take you through a thousand years of religious history in a few sentences: Islam on top from about 1400 CE on; Hindu-Buddhism from the third or fourth to the sixteenth century on Java and still the religion of Bali. And, going back at least as far as the first