Читать книгу Paying Calls in Shangri-La - Judith M. Heimann - Страница 14

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 1950s Indonesia. And, indeed, the wives often learned more 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. A servant could be dismissed on the mere suspicion (sometimes fed by a rival servant looking to find a job for a cousin) that he or she had stolen an item that had merely been mislaid. The dismissed domestic had no recourse. And without a letter of recommendation from previous employers, few former servants could get another job.

John and I felt very lucky in our domestic staff in Jakarta, and when it came time to leave for Surabaya, I realized I would miss the servants more than any other people I knew there; I knew them better. And they all had been so patient with us and ready to help us cope with life in this very foreign place. Where they lived, the walls and fences plastered everywhere with anti-US slogans, it could not have been comfortable to be known as working for American embassy people. They had sympathized with us when our running water stopped flowing or the electricity gave out, without reminding us that they had neither at home.

Hassim, the driver, would be coming to help us out briefly at our next post, Surabaya, at the eastern end of Java, so at least I did not have to think about saying good-bye to him yet. Of those remaining in Jakarta, I knew I would find it especially hard to say good-bye to Iam, our tall, lovely laundress. I remembered that when I had been staying home, anxious about our baby Paul who was born nine weeks early and had spent a month in an incubator in Jakarta’s best hospital, Iam would often arrive at siesta time, bringing me a flower arrangement she had just made. She could throw a flowering branch of mauve bougainvillea into a bamboo basket and it became a work of art.

I asked her one afternoon, as I lay there sick with worry, waiting for Paul to come home, where she came from, and she said Cilacap—a town notorious for being at the center of Java’s poorest farm district. Most of our servants were very short in stature, indicative (I thought) of poor nutrition in their younger years, and so I asked Iam how she had managed to grow so tall and lovely. She said, “We were so poor that we could find to eat only the roots and the rice husks and vegetable peelings that others threw away. And from those roots”—she added, smiling—“I grew.”

. . .

Our Jakarta driver, Hassim, after driving our car east to Surabaya, stayed on the first month to help us find a new set of servants. We soon had the usual seven or eight, none of whom spoke English. They spoke the lingua franca, Indonesian/Malay, to foreigners such as John and me and Paul, and Javanese to each other. (To make sure we were all dealing with Paul from the same script, John and I also spoke Indonesian to Paul, so that the servants could overhear what we said to him.)

The Surabaya servant I remember best is our baby amah (Asian pidgin for maid). Her name was Mina, and she was small and dainty, with a round face and a husky voice. She had never worked as a domestic servant before, but I could see that her heart went out immediately to Paul. She was visibly intelligent and seemed determined to do whatever the job entailed to be with this beautiful child. Paul returned her affection, though he also loved to spend time with Buawi, our wonderful houseboy. Paul also adored being carried around in the late afternoons by our new driver, so that he could follow the meanderings along the upper walls of the house of our resident wall lizards—coral-colored chameleons that ate any mosquito or other flying insect foolish enough to venture onto the walls, outdoors or indoors.

I enjoyed sharing Paul with Mina and the others. To fully understand this, you have to know that I had been brought up—both before and after my parents’ divorce when I was eight—by my mother (who had to go off to work after the divorce) and my nanny, Louise, whom my mother hired when I was two and who stayed with her for the next fifty years. Louise remained like another parent to me all her life.

In addition, I acquired a charming stepmother, Jean, when my father remarried in 1948 when I was twelve. Jean survived my father and was present at our little ceremony when we were scattering my nanny Louise’s ashes in the East River a few years ago and I sang, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” Jean corrected me afterward, pointing out that “nobody ever had as many mothers as you did.”

Mina and I had a mutual understanding on how to handle Paul from the first day. But I did not know she had children of her own until she had worked for us more than a month. One day she told me that she had two children, and asked if she could bring them to work the next day, so that I could see them.

Intrigued, I agreed, and the next morning she appeared with one little boy who looked to be four or near it and a babe in arms with huge eyes in a head almost as big as his shriveled body. Puzzled and alarmed, I said, “How old is this little one?” “Nearly two,” she answered, “but I had to stop nursing him to go look for work, and there was no other food for him.”

Rather shaken, I asked our houseboy Buawi to bring coffee for Mina and me, and she told me her story. Her husband had left her while she was pregnant with the younger child. Although she lived with her parents, they were poor too, and had recently moved to town. There was not enough money or other resources to feed the family. Mina had calculated that if she tried to feed both children, she would risk being too weak herself to find a job and then they would all die. The only logical solution seemed to be to feed herself and the older boy, who had a better chance of surviving than did the baby. Now, with this job, she could also feed the baby, but maybe it was too late? Unspoken was the fact that she had waited weeks before telling me about the problem for fear of losing her job with us.

When people talk about poverty and how smart people can work their way out of it, I think of Mina. Fortunately, we had found for Paul a fine Indonesian pediatrician in Surabaya, and I took Mina and her children to him the next day. Over the next months, the little one was nursed back to something like health, though I do not know to what extent his later physical and mental development was affected.

Before we left Surabaya, we racked our brains for months trying to come up with gifts for the servants that would not melt away with inflation or risk being stolen by the unpaid soldiers or police who wandered about the city’s streets, fully armed but underfed. John finally had a brain wave: dental care for our staff and their families. At least their teeth could not be stolen from them!

. . .

Our most memorable domestic servant, Ah Fong, did not enter our lives until some years later when we were living in Kuching, in the state of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo. Getting to know Ah Fong and her situation taught me a lot about what it was like to be an overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia.

Bob Duemling, John’s predecessor as consul for East Malaysia and Brunei, resident in Kuching, had brought Ah Fong over from Kuala Lumpur; she was what was known as a “black-and-white” amah and was said to be a pearl beyond price. I had written Bob to ask him to ask Ah Fong if she would be willing to stay on in Borneo to work for us. I promised that if either side was not happy by the end of the first month, we would pay her trip back home to Kuala Lumpur. She had agreed.

I already knew that black-and-white amahs (named for their long white starched cotton tunics over wide-legged black satin trousers) were famous throughout Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia for being the best domestic servants you could hope to hire. They were unattached Cantonese women (often widows or runaway wives, escaping from life as near-slaves to their in-laws) who, upon leaving China, had joined together in what in Chinese coastal pidgin was called a kong-si and is best described as an organization halfway between a sorority and a trade union. At their kong-si headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong (under the British), and Singapore, these women honed their skills as cooks and housekeepers and found jobs for one another, looked after each other, and set up group homes where they could retire in old age.

Our new black-and-white amah, Ah Fong, was tiny and neat as a pin. With her still black hair coiled tightly in a bun and a single jade circlet around her dainty wrist, she was as lovely as a costume doll. And, though probably about sixty, she had lots of energy and verve. A wonderful cook and cleaner and a gracious greeter of guests, she had the kind of personal authority I associate with Mary Poppins. Our six-year-old boy and four-year-old girl had fallen immediately under her spell, and she gave every impression of enjoying their company and being pleased to work for us.

The month’s trial I had set in motion by writing to her former boss was almost up when we received word that President Johnson was coming to West Malaysia and that not only John but I as well would be required to help with the presidential visit.

I liked the idea of going back, all expenses paid, to Kuala Lumpur for a brief visit, although it was a little soon to be leaving the children with a stranger, even one they liked as well as they did Ah Fong. I was sure, though, that she was equal to the task. And so, when I told her that I needed to leave her in charge of the children while John and I went back to West Malaysia for a week—to which she readily agreed—I also mentioned that our month’s trial was approaching its end. I said I hoped that she was as happy to stay on in Kuching as we were to have her.

There was a longish pause that set me back on my heels before she said, “Madam, would it be all right if I gave you my answer when you return?” Feeling a bit like a lover afraid of being jilted, I could hardly say anything but yes.

An hour or so later, Ah Fong reappeared with a box wrapped in brown paper and string—the Mary Poppins touch. She looked up into my face very earnestly and asked (in pidgin English), “Madam, would you take this package to a house in downtown Kuala Lumpur? I mean would YOU bring it yourself?”

Once again, there was no way I felt I could say no. I wondered fleetingly if this box could contain drugs or other contraband. But then I said to myself that she came highly recommended and John’s and my instinct told us to trust her with our children, so it was highly unlikely that there would be anything wrong with the contents of the package.

John and I flew back to Kuala Lumpur, where it seemed as if the entire city were involved in what seemed to be an imperial visit by President Johnson. John was assigned to develop a “rainy day alternative” at the prestigious Rubber Research Institute. His program came to involve hundreds of Malaysian schoolchildren with little American and Malaysian flags lining the route to a building Johnson never entered—because it did not rain on the preferred site. (I shudder to think of how many families Johnson offended by not turning up after all these children had stood for hours under the hot sun waiting for him.) My job was to help set up and run a souvenir stand at the ambassador’s residence, on the off chance that our president or members of his party might want to buy examples of Malaysian art or crafts. (To the best of my knowledge, there were no sales.)