about what local people were thinking and feeling and enduring from their servants than did their husbands, who spent much of every workday in an American, English-speaking office or dealing with very Westernized, English-speaking Indonesian diplomats.
The island of Java, with 1,500 inhabitants per square mile, was then the most densely populated, primarily rural, place for its size on earth. Even with three bountiful rice crops a year (thanks to its soil being enriched by the eruptions of numerous active volcanoes), Java’s 50,000 square miles could not produce enough food for the more than sixty million people living there. Now that the Dutch colonial government was no longer around to forbid them leaving the countryside, young job-seeking Javanese were pouring into a handful of cities, such as Jakarta and Surabaya, tripling the island’s urban population compared to before World War II, but with no increase in health care facilities, plumbing, electricity, or permanent housing.
On Java, even privileged foreigners like John and me suffered the kind of hardship that friends at home would hardly believe. Our day-to-day existence certainly did not fit our American friends’ image of diplomats as cookie pushers who went from one glamorous party to another. Short on foreign exchange, Indonesia could import very few goods. We had no US military commissary or Post Exchange shop. Goods ordered from Singapore were often stolen after arriving at the docks near Jakarta.
We rich foreigners had to manage without fresh pasteurized milk, butter, onions (though there were local shallots), apples, oranges, lemons (though there were less satisfactory tropical citrus fruits), or any nontropical fruits except sometimes strawberries grown in the hills. These berries, unfortunately, were kept fresh en route to market by being sprinkled with parasite-laden water.
By the time we had been in Jakarta a year or so, granulated sugar had disappeared (it now came only as a solid brown mass inside a half coconut shell), as had granulated salt; salt now came in brick-sized gray hunks. Word of toilet paper in one of the half-empty Chinese shops would spread through the foreign community like wildfire.
Meat—other than poultry, which was sold live at the open market, as was fish—came to the door in a tepid tin box on the back of a peddler’s bicycle. Chiefly from water buffalo or goat, it was boneless and without fat, making it hard to guess what part of the animal it came from, or how long to cook it. That mattered, because eventually kerosene got very scarce and was saved to run our fridge (electricity being too unreliable), whereas the kerosene stove stood idle and cooking was done on a charcoal hibachi, with little Chi-chi climbing up on a ladder every rainy evening to wipe the black smoke stains off the kitchen ceiling.
There was also galloping inflation. We American embassy people were lucky that we could legally exchange our dollars at the black-market rate. We used the rupiahs the embassy held as “counterpart funds” (the virtually worthless local currency provided by the Indonesian government to “pay” for our gifts of surplus agricultural products). Other foreigners were forced to use the black market, and ordinary Indonesians, lacking foreign currency, had to go outside the law just to survive. One morning we heard that the lawn of one of our neighboring prefab houses had been stolen overnight. We thought the story must be a joke. It wasn’t.
When we had been in Jakarta less than a year, President Sukarno, in an anti-hoarding effort, moved the decimal point on the value of all large bills and froze the assets in all bank accounts. From then on, people went shopping carrying heavy, greasy bundles of one rupiah bills, each bill worth a diminishing fraction of a US cent. Barter became more prevalent. You could not buy local beer (one of the few local goods that still maintained some of its previous quality) without giving the seller an equivalent number of empty bottles, because the ingredients to make the bottles were now so scarce.
This gave rise to a popular story we heard about the good brother and the bad brother. The good brother worked hard and saved his money and put it in the bank, while the other one spent his money on beer and sat on his front porch drinking, and throwing the empties over his shoulder into the back. Eventually, the good brother went bankrupt, but the bad brother had a fortune in empty bottles in his back yard.
. . .
Indonesia lacked many things we were used to and yearned for. I remember frequently complaining about the things it didn’t have when talking with American and expat friends. Yet it had some things no other place did.
“Nyonya mau?” (Madam would like?), our driver Hassim asked me, when he turned up one afternoon at the kitchen door with a little fuzzy ball lying on his open hand. I peered down into the face of a little feline creature with tawny, spotted fur, round ears and big, round, pale green eyes set close to its little nose. Except for its tiny size, it could have been a leopard—and who knows?—it might be one. I had never seen a newborn leopard and this creature was probably only a day or two old.
“Yes,” I said, “Madam WOULD like!”
Hassim said its mother had been killed inadvertently by his brother, driving down a road through a jungle west of Jakarta. His brother had then stopped the car and, seeing that the dead mother had enlarged teats, had looked for and found this infant by the roadside. Hassim said that it was a kucing hutan (jungle cat) but was also known as a macan tutul (spotted panther). He set it down on my open palm and it stayed where its body could feel the warmth from mine for the next several days. Hassim guessed it was male, and so I called it Mathew—from its spotted panther name (ma-can tu-tul)—and John and I became besotted by its beauty.
I asked Chi-chi if it would be all right for us to keep Mathew and confessed that I did not know how big he might get. She said we could worry about that when it happened, but clearly Mathew charmed her and the other servants, too.
At first, Mathew slept in the crook of my arm at night and would wake me with a sound rather like a bird chirp. That was to tell me he wanted another eyedropper or two full of a mixture I made up for him of canned milk mixed with a raw egg. Nobody at the Jakarta zoo knew what to feed such a creature; their efforts to raise them had always ended badly. For a time, though, Mathew thrived. I loved to watch him teach himself the things his mother should have taught him. For example, he would spend hours leaping up onto ever higher rungs of our dining chairs, to practice climbing.
John had always loved cats and usually they loved him too, but this creature had an increasing aversion to all males, though Mathew treated me as his mother and would allow other women to stroke him. I recall one day walking home from around the corner, and hearing a sound like a roaring lion. I got home to find our houseboy standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, leaning forward and saying, “Bagus, bagus” (good, beautiful). From the far side of the room, Mathew—now almost his full size (that of a slender domestic cat)—roared at him not to take another step into his domain.
By then Mathew was starting to have digestion problems as we tried, under the vet’s instructions, one diet after another. The little cat also got feline distemper or something similar which temporarily paralyzed his hind quarters, but we nursed him successfully back to health. One day, Mathew went for a daylong checkup to see if he was completely cured of his distemper. When the vet was finished, some mindless assistant put the animal in a plastic Pan Am bag and zipped the zipper all the way closed. When I went to fetch Mathew, his body was still warm, but stiff and dead from asphyxiation.
I could not stop sobbing for days and gave as my excuse that I was thinking that, if this could happen at the vet’s, what could happen to my baby when it came? Because by then I knew a baby was on the way.
Meanwhile, I kept looking for worthwhile things to do that would fill my days. This would remain an off and on problem for me for many years, and it is perhaps the biggest hardship a Foreign Service spouse endures. I spent three gratifying months as a substitute teacher of seventh graders at the international school, until they got a permanent teacher; I was sorry to give it up.
. . .
For the young people streaming out of the Javanese countryside trying to earn enough money to obtain minimal food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their families, getting a job at a diplomat’s home was like winning the lottery. It was, however, a situation that placed a frightening amount of power in the hands of inexperienced housewives like me.