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 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
