Javanese houses have, as part of their standard architecture, a small room in the front the house right after the front door. It’s usually filled with chairs and perhaps a small table, and other decorations, separated from the rest of the house by a doorway or some other marker. It’s there because in Java, it is customary to just drop by people’s houses and say hello, and when you do, people invite you in and ask you sit and offer you tea and several different types of extremely sweet and/or deep-fried snacks. And you sit in that room for as long as you like, making small conversation, drinking your tea, in my case butchering the language, and then you say, “Permisi dulu” – which literally means “excuse me once” but means in this context – “Okay, that’s enough. I’m leaving.”
For the record, I love this part of Javanese culture. I love the idea that you just show up, and people invite you in whether they expected you or not, and chat with you as long as you like. We have a few Javanese friends now who do the same with us, though not as many as I’d like, and I’ve come to be quite fond of their appearances at our back door, where we sit them (in a very unJavanese way) at our dining table and serve them tea and whatever we have, which is not the bounty of aforementioned snacks. I have always wished that people would stop by my house more, and I have wished for more friends who welcome me stopping by unannounced (shout out to Michael). I like it – it feels communal to me, and friendly, and focuses on hospitality. But, with one exception, we’ve never made it past that entryway. That’s what it’s there for, and the rest of the house is private.
The flip side of this visiting custom is that inviting people over to dinner is not at all an Indonesian custom. People find it weird and uncomfortable and will only come to your house if you are having a large party of some sort. I hadn’t expected this – certainly, I figured we’d meet lots of Indonesian people and invite them to dinner as a way of engendering a friendship, as of course we love to do in the United States. But you don’t do this, and however much I like the custom of stopping by people’s houses unannounced, I’m just too damn American to do it very often. I read too many Dear Abby columns, perhaps, though it didn’t rub off well enough with thank you notes. And so trying to figure out a way to foster and develop friendships, well, it’s just difficult. It’s happening, a little more all the time, but slowly.
We’ve met wonderful people here, and been welcomed into several houses graciously and open-heartedly, and we have several people that we’ve become very fond of. But for whatever reason – my limited language skills, my cultural ignorance, my lack of persistence (I’m personalizing this, because I don’t want it to come across as a judgment about Javanese people or Indonesia – it’s not) – we haven’t made very many deep friendships. This is augmented somewhat because the community of ex-pats here are all missionary people, some of them quite nice and wonderful, but, sadly for me, not really our people. (When we visited Bandung a few weeks ago, a big city in West Java, we went to an ex-pat party there, and we realized that if we lived there [which we are glad we do not], we would have more ex-pat friends than we have here.)
Which is to say: as great as this year continues to be, as amazing and crazy and unpredictable, I miss my friends, and I miss those places in those houses, and with those people, that I can’t get to in Indonesia – the kitchen where we polished off our friend’s expensive bourbon last year, the backyard where I play croquet and poker, the basements where I’ve watched the football games. We’ll be sad when we leave here, but we’ll have something back too, something that is missing here. So hello. I remember all of you.
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