of local spirits, which is what I had been doing at the ambassador’s residence on the Fourth of July.
. . .
We Western diplomats would have been ill advised to laugh at the natives’ “superstition.” We were constantly being confronted with evidence that all three religious belief systems still had a hold on the same people—up and down the Indonesian social and educational scale—depending on the circumstance. All Javanese little boys were circumcised according to Muslim rites, and almost all marriages involved dances and puppet shows that were visibly derived from the Hindu-Buddhist court traditions prevailing on Java until the spread of Islam chased the courts eastward to Bali where, for the first time, the court religion became the popular religion too.
In daily life, however, it was animism—called agama jawa (Javanese religion)—that seemed to have the most direct hold on the island of Java’s more than sixty million people. Westernized Indonesian friends of ours were always holding selamatans or calling in a dukun (shaman/sorcerer) to deal with problems attributed to spirits. A young Javanese friend who went on to study international law at Yale was one of the many to warn me, seriously, not to wear green on the southern beaches of Java, for fear that the goddess of the sea there might get jealous and drown me.
Even the embassy had to pay attention when word spread through the politically active community that President Sukarno’s mystic invisible bird, which by the 1950s was widely believed to sit on the president’s shoulder, a symbol of his divine authority to rule, had not been seen lately. I remember there being rumors sometime in late 1959 or early 1960 that the bird had turned up on the shoulder of Sukarno’s most widely respected potential rival, the Sultan of Yogyakarta. John and, no doubt, other junior officers in other embassies in town were assigned to track down where the mystic bird had been sighted most recently. Within a week, John told me it was back on Sukarno’s shoulder, and the panicky rumors died down.
. . .
Learning how modern Javanese men and women thought at that time about religion was perhaps the most useful knowledge I acquired during three years in my first foreign country. It taught me that people of other cultures who seem to think like us actually have all sorts of different thoughts, beliefs, and reactions that are utterly foreign. That discovery would not have come to John and me if we had not been able to communicate with local people in a local language and if we had not had the chance to get to know, at least slightly, a wide variety of local people. Nowadays, for security and other reasons, the United States has reduced the number of diplomats it sends to posts abroad, and fewer still are comfortable speaking the local language. And with reduced staffing at our missions, our diplomats—though they keep on trying—have fewer opportunities to travel about the country where they might get a better sense of how the local people approach their own history, their religion(s), and their national identity.
I find this trend worrisome. I remember reading long ago that the 1857 Indian Sepoy Mutiny, India’s first war of independence, was caused by the Indian enlisted men working for the British East India Company believing a rumor that the paper cartridges for their rifles that they would have to bite off before firing their weapons were greased with pork or beef fat. A crucial lesson drawn from that event was that it did not matter if the rumor were true or not, so long as the soldiers and their supporters believed that the company’s armed forces were led by men who were so ignorant of Indian religious beliefs that such a gaffe was conceivable.
Chapter 4
Domestic Dramas
AMERICAN DIPLOMATS IN THE Third World often have the help of domestic servants. Those of us unused to having such helpers find them a mixed blessing. Imagine my amazement when I found that at our first overseas home, John and I had been handed a domestic staff of seven: a cook, houseboy (butler), laundress, gardener, day and night watchmen, and a driver! When I protested to Hester that two adults should not need so many helpers, she explained that any Javanese who had a job had at least one relative dependent on him or her and so was anxious to divide the work so that the cousin or sibling could earn a living too. Though there was barely room for John and me to turn around in our little prefab bungalow, there was, under these circumstances, no way we could get by with fewer servants.
Their salaries were negligible at the rate at which we exchanged our dollars at the embassy for rupiahs, but it was a real challenge to supervise so many employees. And, thanks to the State Department in those days banning spouses’ access to the nine-month Indonesian language course John was taking, I arrived in Jakarta unable to speak a word of Indonesian. The servants, of course, spoke no English.
This was before two-way radios, much less mobile phones or the Internet, and our home phone (note the singular) was of the old brass and Bakelite type now sold as antiques; it had no dial. You just picked up the big black receiver and prayed for an operator to come on the line. Then, aided by a handwritten glossary of the Indonesian words for zero through nine, you asked the operator to connect you to your party. You could spend half a day trying to make a call before you succeeded or gave up.
That was the main reason for needing a driver. Despite the traffic jams between our suburb and town, our driver Hassim could usually deliver a message far faster than I could reach somebody in town by phone, that is, unless Hassim was waiting in line for hours to get gas for the car or kerosene for the stove and the fridge. The cook and the butler (or “houseboy”) shared the honors of standing in line at Chinese shops for soap, rice, flour, sugar, and other rationed or scarce commodities. We had no washing machine or dishwasher, which was just as well since we often went for weeks without electricity, and sometimes without running water.
By now, you have an idea why it was not such a bad idea to have so many helpers. The problem was how to deal with them. My immediate plan was to learn enough Indonesian to be able to address the staff, and most especially Chi-chi, the leader of the pack. She was our petite, middle-aged, one-eyed but clearly intelligent cook, who had previously worked for a series of American embassy people.
Indonesian, fortunately, is one of the world’s easiest languages to learn at a basic level, it being perfectly phonetic. It also has no articles, genders, cases, or tenses, and forms the plural by doubling the singular. From my first days and for many months, I spent the hottest part of each weekday being driven in a car with no air-conditioning to and from the embassy for a noon-hour lesson. When I got back home, Chi-chi would be there, waiting to hear what I would say. With the first words out of my mouth, you could almost hear the gears in her brain turn as she reasoned: “She said berangkat [to leave]. That’s Lesson Three, so she probably also knows the word berikut [to follow], which is in one of the sentences in that lesson that she is supposed to learn by heart.”
When I finally felt up to talking seriously to the cook and perhaps understanding her replies, I said, “Chi-chi, you no doubt realize I have never had so many people work for me before. Can you help me figure out the best way to do it? Should I put you in charge?”
I have never forgotten Chi-chi’s answer: “I am sorry, Madam, but with seven of us, you are just at the limit of how many you must direct yourself. I could try to do it, but they would come to you anyway. If we were nine or ten or more, then everybody would know you cannot be dealing with each alone. But you will have to handle this many by yourself. Keep me informed, and I will help as much as I can.”
I later came to realize how right she had been. When I had to supervise embassy or consular colleagues, I found that I could be the head (as I once was) of a staff of a couple of hundred more easily than I could direct the efforts of a group of seven or eight subordinates. With a big staff, they know that you have to delegate. They realize you need to keep free from the day-to-day business to devote your energies to “putting out fires” as necessary. You cannot be in a position where dealing with an emergency means that the ordinary work of the office is neglected or delayed by your absence. With a small staff, however, you simply have to make face time for all of your subordinates, or they will think you don’t respect or care about them.
Domestic servants were nearly the only ordinary people of the host country that the wives of diplomats got to see regularly. This was especially true in a Third World country like