You’ll hear a heck of a lot about a concept called jam karet in Indonesia. It’s a very well-worn cliché—something that longtime expats discourse on as if delivering the ultimate cultural insight, and that Indonesians themselves mention with a certain dash of self-parodying irony, like Irish people going on about their national love of “the craic”. But there’s definitely something in it!
Jam karet means “rubber time”, and it refers to Indonesia’s supposedly innate sense of flexibility when it comes to deadlines and fixed schedules. If the bus is an hour late, or your co-worker fails to turn up for that important meeting, it’s allegedly all down to jam karet, and you’ll never be able to do anything about it. Jam karet is intimately connected with another common Indonesian phrase: nanti saja, which means “just later”. And if the reply to a question about when something’s going to get done is “nanti saja”, you know you’ve just become a victim of jam karet!
One thing that has always struck me about Indonesian workplaces, is the importance of food! In the office of the school where I first worked in Indonesia the office boys (and they’re another feature of Indonesian offices—poorly paid but very obliging men who double as cleaners, runners, general skivvies and tea-makers) were continually coming in and out with take-out orders for the teachers and admin staff, and I’d find myself constantly assailed with offers of oily snacks and sweet treats from every side. Even when I was working in a tiny newspaper office with no more than half-a-dozen coworkers, someone was always eating.
Traveling to Work
Climb aboard any long-haul bus or interisland ferry towards the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, and you’ll meet them: Indonesia’s millions of working class economic migrants, making what is often their only annual trip back to their home region. Economic pressures have long prompted people from all over the Indonesian archipelago to leave home in search of employment, and many regions have their own particular traditions of migration. The small towns of East Java provide many of the domestic staff for wealthy families in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Middle East; people from the eastern regencies of Bali have been staffing cruise ships for decades; and the hard-grafting folks of Madura pop up selling sate or doing whatever else will pay in just about every corner of the country.
But there’s one part of Indonesia that raises migration from an economic necessity to a rite of passage, and that’s the Minangkabau region of Sumatra. Minangkabau culture is matrilineal: the women get the inheritance, so unmarried young men have always found themselves disenfranchised, and have always gone out into the world to seek their fortune. The Minangkabau word merantau—which literally means something along the lines of “to go into non-Minangkabau territory”—has entered the Indonesian language as a term for migration. But the idea of merantau conveys more than just migrating for work; it invokes a sense of honorable wandering in search of wisdom as well as wealth. The reality might well be a construction site in Kuala Lumpur, but merantau is still very much a respected tradition.
YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE: THE SUPER SOCIABLE NATION
Apart from “Hello mister”, the phrase I hear most frequently as I make my way around Indonesia is “Kok sendiri?” It’s hard to give a direct translation of what’s really implied by the question but it basically means something along the lines of “You’re on your own??? What the hell are you doing on your own??? No, seriously, mister, what is wrong with you??? Don’t you have any friends???” Because in this most social of countries, wanting to be alone is a downright deviant act.
Big-name brands and icy air-con—the irresistible lure of the mall!
In Indonesia life itself is a social affair, and although this is what makes it one of the friendliest places on earth, it can cause difficulties for those who do relish a little quiet time. If I want to enjoy a peaceful Sunday afternoon on my own, I’ve learnt to lie when Indonesian friends message and ask what I’m up to, and more importantly, sama siapa?—who with? If I answer truthfully, well, you can guess the response: kok sendiri??? And then they’ll probably jump in the car and drive over to rescue me from this terrible fate…
Social life in Indonesia is a simple matter of grabbing any passing excuse to be social, to hang out. Foreigners coming to Indonesia for work sometimes complain that what is supposed to be a business meeting often turns into little more than a group hang-out, with absolutely no discussion of the matter in hand. That’s partly down to a key element of business etiquette in Indonesia: an importance placed on developing personal relationships ahead of the nitty-gritty. But it’s also about the irresistible social inclination.
Hanging out at shopping malls is a full-time occupation for some.
MALLRATS
When I first worked as a teacher in Indonesia I used to ask my Monday classes what they’d been up to over the weekend. But I soon gave up, because the answer was almost always the same: “Went to the mall…”
For many urban Indonesians of the aspiring or actual middle classes, hanging out at the mall is the major weekend activity. I used to think it was an expression of mindless consumerism, until a colleague pointed out that most people don’t actually buy anything at the mall. All those glitzy boutiques and brand outlets are really just a backdrop for the important business of being in the company of your buddies—and in a pleasantly air-conditioned setting.
Clubbing Together
Indonesia’s inclination towards social interaction is behind the country’s great galaxy of clubs and “communities”. There are communities for everything from fishing to heavy metal, and from mountaineering to vintage vehicles, in just about every city in the country. Some amount to little more than a Facebook page and a few bumper stickers, but many are major social organizations—albeit usually organized organically without much of a formal structure—with regular meet-ups and road-trips. On a Saturday night the streets of downtown Surabaya are often clogged with the city’s myriad motorbike “communities”, groups bonded only by ownership of a single type of bike, be that Vespa or Vario, Harley or Honda, but using that connection as an excuse to hang out together.
CAFÉ CULTURE, INDO STYLE
I have a suspicion that Indonesia invented café culture, long before the people of the Mediterranean took to sipping espressos on shady terraces. After all, Java is a place quite literally synonymous with coffee, and a cup of the black stuff is a staple from one end of Indonesia to the other. And the cornerstone of Indonesian social life, ngobrol (“chatting”) is always best when you combine it with ngopi—a lovely bit of Indonesian slang which simply means “to coffee”.
Starbucks opened its first outlet in Jakarta in 2002, but local caffeine-heads quickly realized that they could do better themselves, and in the last decade independent coffee shops with serious hipster cred have become a boom industry. The best ones in Jakarta, Surabaya, and Yogyakarta could easily give their New York rivals a run for their money.
But still, my own preferred places for ngopi and ngobrol would have to be the ones that were already a part of life in Indonesia long before anyone knew what a
