contrast to the genteel streets of Northwest Washington, D.C.—which I, as a New Yorker, had found a little too tame. Well, I thought, at least Jakarta won’t be too tame.
. . .
Up until a few months earlier, we had assumed we would be sent to Malaya. John and I had met as freshmen and married just after our junior year at college—he at Harvard and I at Radcliffe (which had all its classes except freshman gym with and at Harvard). John had dreamed of being an American diplomat, ideally in Asia, since he was a child; he had dedicated his senior honors thesis, “The Independence Movement in Malaya,” “To my wife Judy who will share the world with me.”
John started his diplomatic orientation course at the State Department the day after we graduated from college. After that, he had volunteered for nine months of Indonesian language training because he knew that the same language was spoken in Malaya. Malaya in those days was a relatively safe, comfortable place where English was widely used. It was a good place, he must have thought, to introduce his wife to living abroad.
Then word came that we were going instead to Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, a disease-ridden, uncomfortable country where little English was spoken and several bloody rebellions were going on. I tried to soften John’s possible disappointment by saying cheerily: “That will be great. I can learn to speak decent French there,” having somehow got Indonesia and French Indochina mixed up in my head. I saw John’s face grow pale. Although he used to joke about the limited horizons of English majors like me, I think it was only at that moment that he realized how truly ignorant of the outside world I was.
Now we were in Indonesia, and John was sitting beside me in the backseat as we were driven in from Kemayoran Airport; he seemed to be taking in everything he saw. I guessed that Jakarta, with its many Chinese shop signs, reminded him of the Shanghai he had known as an eight-year-old in 1940–41, a time when that part of China was not yet in Japanese hands. By now I knew that John’s Shanghai year included the happiest memories of his life with his mother.
His mother, Doris Olsen, was the daughter of a Danish immigrant civil engineer and a no-nonsense Yankee housewife who stayed at home, cooked, sewed, and raised her three girls—of whom Doris was the parents’ favorite. But Doris had scandalized her family by marrying a New York Jew. This was almost as bad as a cousin who married a Boston Irish Catholic. So nobody was terribly shocked when in 1940, nearly a decade later, Doris again threw convention aside. This time it was to accept the invitation from a Chinese actor named Yao, who was her lover at the time, to go back to Shanghai with him and teach English there for a year. She left John’s physician father, Harry Heimann, at home in New York City and took their only child, seven-year-old John, with her.
John had loved his time in China, especially the food. To the end of his life, he preferred a meal based on a bowl of rice to anything else. He also loved having the sense of being inside a brand new world, which Shanghai was in those days—thanks in part to his mother’s dashing friend Yao. Yao was one of the pioneers in bringing Western theater there.
Most of all, I guess, John had loved that, during that time, his mother had seemed happy and fulfilled as he had never seen her before or since. Yao and his modernist friends treated her like a grown-up person and a smart one. But when the Japanese moved to take over Shanghai in 1941, his mother took John home again, on the last American President Line passenger ship not to be torpedoed by the Japanese Imperial Navy.
They returned to John’s patiently waiting father. He loved this brilliant, adventurous woman but did not know how to make her happy. Doris had been one of the first women to pass the Massachusetts bar exam in the early 1930s. But she could not get a law firm to treat her other than as what would now be called a “paralegal.” Fed up, she had quit her job at the law firm and married John’s handsome father Harry. Harry was the son of poor East European immigrants, and had started out at a Hebrew Yeshiva and gone on to do brilliantly at New York City College’s tuition-free medical school. Doris had met him when he was starting his residency at Mass General in Boston. A pioneering scientist of occupational health, but awkward socially, Harry never figured out how to help his wife fulfill her potential in that sexist era.
Unlike me, John was not one to parade his feelings, but it was clear—from the bits of information about his mother he provided me during three years of courtship and two of marriage thus far—that he worshipped her. His worldliness, his sense of what was done and not done in fashionable circles, which served him well at Harvard and beyond, evidently came from things Doris had told him or showed him, even though she was not herself a member of that world. I deduced that she must have been an acute outside observer, a trait her son had inherited. But it would take me decades to realize how much John’s life with his mother would influence his life with me.
Fresh out of the army at age nineteen, John had been spending a year in India with his parents before starting college, when his mother died in Delhi of the long-term effects of alcoholism. His father by then was a Public Health Service officer on loan to the American Embassy to advise the Indian government on health risks to mica miners. Harry had then married a nice widow, the sister of a diplomat at the embassy. In the summer of 1953, John, his father, and his stepmother had sailed back home, crossing the Atlantic on the United States. John (age twenty) and I (seventeen) would meet a month or so later during our first week at college—and fall in love.
. . .
Now, in 1958, five years after that first meeting, the street scene around us after we left Jakarta’s Kemayoran Airport may have reminded John of China and India, but it was brand new to me. We inched along potholed streets that were jammed with vehicles of every description, from oxcarts and horse-drawn carriages to shiny black limousines with license plates showing they were embassy vehicles, such as the car that had collected us. There seemed to be dozens of bicycle rickshaws that John called becaks (pronounced bechaks), with the passenger seated on a bench facing forward, sometimes under a shabby but garishly colored awning, while the barefoot driver sat on a bicycle seat behind, and pedaled.
Slowed to a snail’s pace as they approached the city, all the car drivers were leaning on their horns while the becak drivers rang their tinkling bells. Workmen and peddlers walked calmly down the middle of the crowded street with a long pole balanced on a shoulder or across the back. Each end of the pole was bent down by the weight of a load of rice or fish or raw rubber or small electrical appliances or lumber or firewood.
John’s experience of life overseas and his diplomatic aspirations fascinated me. By age sixteen, I had already known I wanted to be part of a bigger world than I could find within my own country. It must have been already obvious to my New York City high school classmates, who chose for my senior yearbook a verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay to go under my picture: “The world is mine. A gateless garden, and an open path / My feet to follow and my heart to hold.” And then, during my first week at Radcliffe, I met John, fresh from India.
Until the plane trip that brought us to Jakarta by way of Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore, I had never been on a ship or an airplane, much less abroad. But I had lived in Poe’s and Hemingway’s Paris and Conrad’s Africa, Dickens’s England, Eric Ambler’s Eastern Europe and Levant, Somerset Maugham’s Southeast Asia, and Kipling’s India. Those places were as real to me as anything I had seen myself. Looking back on our contemporaries in the Foreign Service of those days, I think we were typical: the husband long interested in a career in diplomacy or foreign policy, the wife ready to go where her husband took her, both of them well-educated and eager for adventure.
When we finally got to the middle of town, the view out the window changed: we were now among nineteenth-century colonial houses in a scene straight out of the stories of Somerset Maugham. I began to be intrigued.
That first day, we were given lunch and much good advice by John’s boss, John Henderson, and his wife, Hester, in their lovely old Dutch colonial
