Three Hours to Jemberrrrrrrr

            I’ve been in Jemberrrrrrrr (pronounce it without the trilled r and no one knows where I am), East Java for the past four days, attending first a creative writing workshop I weaseled myself into, one designed for English language teachers to work on creative writing in English, that lasted for three days, and is followed by a creative writing conference for English language teachers, that started today. It’s been an amazing event, in many ways, not least for the couple of comic characters that have been present.

            One of them is Iqbal, an English teacher from Pakistan, a rice farmer who is passionate about breakfast and about poetry. Every morning he sits at the table and eats buckets of rice and piece after piece of toast with jam. He is a tall man with a thick mustache and a thicker accent, and he fixes his gaze on you in a way that forces your involvement in conversation, and begins discoursing about food.

            “I eat a large breakfast, and a small brunch, and then I do not eat lunch. Later I will eat dinner,” he says, spreading pineapple jam on his toast. His pause demands a reply, but for the life of me I cannot think of anything to say, and I nod. I say something like “I can see why,” and he nods, staring and me, chewing and spreading, folding his bread in half, and eating it, and making another piece. Before him is spread out platters of fruit, which he eats his way through one by one. During the workshop he will interrupt the workshop leaders with strange comments, usually misusing the word ‘lecture.’

            “Professor, thank you for your lecture on the three word poem,” he will say to one of the leaders, who has just briefly suggested a writing exercise in which students write only three words. “I have been inspired by this lecture, and I would like to write some three word poems, and I think that I will have my students write some three word poems. I will ask them to write four words.” And he will stop, that fixated stare, impressed by his innovation on the form, as always demanding a response. Every time he uses the word lecture I have to look down at my paper or fuss around in my bag in an attempt to keep myself from giggling. In spite of all this, I find him charming.           

            The person most like a character from a comic novel, however, is our host for the conference. Before we came, he arranged transportation for all of us from the airport in Surabaya, the largest city in East Java. In his emails he began telling us that the drive to Jemberrrrrr was only three hours, which as the trip grew closer grew to four hours. In my car, the drive was five and a half hours. Another car took seven hours. When he greeted us for the conference he cheerfully acknowledged the deception, saying that he believed none of us would come to Jemberrrrr if we knew how long the drive was (I think this is true – the workshop leaders would not have scheduled the conference here). He is the quintessential yes man, more than anyone I have ever met. He reassures you with a yes as soon as he recognizes the intonation of a question, before the subject matter of the question has been broached. He says yes to everything, and at least half of the things he has said yes to this week have been no’s. No there is not a car to the hotel. “Yes yes, there is a car.” No he has not arranged a dinner. “Yes we have dinner arranged.” No there will be no internet service today because there has been a flood in the building with the server. “Yes it will be back immediately.”

            The other day, the workshop took a field trip to a beach south of Jemberrrrrr, which he said was a 45 minute drive, and when everyone teased him, he said, “no, no, it is only 45 minutes, I promise,” and we all laughed, reassured actually that it was so close, only it was 90 minutes away. Because one of the writing tasks we had been assigned for the day was a haiku, I wrote a haiku in honor of him:

I have written a Handoyo haiku.

Each of the lines contains a set number of syllables.

That second line had seven, this one five.

His desire to please without knowing whether he can actually follow through on the pleasing is something bordering on the pathological, and one of the leaders of the workshop, a very pleasant British teacher, is finding it especially irritating, although I find it more comic than anything.

            There is something schizophrenic about Indonesian teachers trying to come to terms with creative writing. In one session today, in which teachers described a fairly interesting narrative assignment where students collect local folklore from older people in the city, folklore that has not been adequately chronicled in any other place, many teachers became quite urgent as they questioned them about form. “You must give them a form of the story, so that they understand how stories are shaped,” one teacher said. “Here is the form of the story,” and she gave one, but another teacher said that this was not the proper way to guide students to write stories, because it was the wrong form for them to use, and she had a better one. I imagined people hundreds of years ago, on a beach, arguing about whether the story they had just heard had a proper resolution, or whether the character had been properly introduced before the conflict had been offered. Then, when the conversation turned to assessment, it became even funnier. One of the ways of assessing the story was how many different “chronologies” the story had: first this, then this, then this (that’s three chronologies, apparently) as if a story is better the more there are things that happen one after another. 

It’s one of the thing that I have noticed about the teaching of writing in Indonesia: people cannot put pen to paper without a tightly defined structure that explains exactly what the form of whatever it is should be.  I presented at the conference today too, about my work with the National Writing Project, and many teachers were quite concerned that we did not tell the participating teachers the proper way to give feedback on writing. This became a very distracting and highly amusing series of conversational turns in which I reiterated one of my main points – that teachers are professionals who can determine such matters themselves, in collaboration with other writers – to which they replied that experts should tell them the things to look for in the writing. Still, many teachers heard what I was saying during the workshop, which I learned during the obligatory photo-photo session after the 45 minute presentation, during which I had my picture taken with every participant, while another participant tried to ask me a question about the presentation.

“Professor how do you,” someone asks, and I break eye contact with them to lean next to the person who is posing with me for a photo and smiling at the camera, “select teachers to be part of the project?”

“Well, first you have to,” break eye contact and stop for the next photo, “use the teachers you already know to nomi” – stop and photo –“to nominate other teachers.” This times 25.

Jemberrrrr is the most remote place I have been so far on Java, even though it is a city of several hundred thousand people. It is completely off the tourist track, and I had a brief Javanese food breakdown here, thinking I could not eat another bowl of rice, or shredded coconut thing, or drink another cup of highly oversugared coffee, or eat more sambal with too much fish sauce in it. But we had a good dinner tonight.

There was also a desperate search for wine that the workshop leaders, one from Malaysia and the other the Brit, engaged on determinedly since we arrived in Jemberrrrrr. (They had not brought wine with them because our host had said (no you cannot find wine in Jemberrrrr) “Yes we have already purchased the wine which we will serve at every meal.”) In our car with a driver we went, after dinners, to every grocery store in Jemberrrrr looking for wine, finding only beer and sparkling grape juice. I politely suggested from the very start that they were wasting their time, but one of the leaders finally found a nightclub where he bought a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Shiraz for US $75. I had a glass, and it was delicious, even so.

One more day, and then the slog drive to Surabaya tomorrow through the tortuous Javanese traffic, and then home – home to Salatiga. I have missed it this week, oddly, because it is where my family is, I think. Funny that I wrote home before I even noticed what I had done. Our time here is ticking quickly away, and this makes me excited and happy and sad and sorry, all at the same time.

What Graham Is Learning at School

Spring Break to End All Spring Breaks

Left Salatiga amidst a torrential downpour. Spent the first night in Yogya as our plane left at 7:00 in the morning. Arrived in Singapore mid-morning and were all a bit taken aback by the bright lights and startling efficiency of the city. All of the escalators were in working order, the bathrooms were clean, the trains came when they said they would, signs indicated where to go and what to do and how much to pay and there was no crowd of hawkers with promises of cheap taxis and gaudy trinkets to fend off. I will admit it was a bit shocking after seven months in the free-for-all of humanity that is Indonesia. Once we got used to it however, the creepy, bizarre quasi-fascist aspect of life in Singapore became more visible. There are signs everywhere to watch your belonging, throw out your trash, keep an eye on your neighbor. There is a super friendly ad campaign running which is aimed at reinforcing all of the rules on the public transit system. These three heavily made-up women in bright taffeta party dresses vamp their way through video reminders at every station platform to remind you to allow the passengers to disembark before you get on the train, not to litter or chew gum, etc. Backed up of course by the ever present transit police in serious uniforms, on patrol for anyone trying to sneak a sip out of their water bottle. It was a bit like being in movie Brazil and I found it oddly comforting. I don’t know what that says about me.

We stayed in Little India which was great fun, super lively and very much a neighborhood. The weekend we were there was the World Cricket Championships and every night the cafes were packed to overflowing with cricket fans all cheering to a single television over the bar. Ate some of the most amazing food imaginable. And cheap! Singapore has these hawker markets which are a bit like food courts except that they are in neighborhoods and the food there is fresh and clean and so good – lots of great Indian, curry puffs, biryani, probably the best butter chicken I’ve ever had, traditional Chinese with roast duck, chili crab, fish head soup and this thing called carrot cake that did not resemble a cake in any way shape or form, nor did it appear to contain carrots but it was really good.

And we did do other things besides eat – we walked all over the city which is really wonderful -- new, funky architecture mixed in seamlessly with colonial British buildings, went to a couple museums and about a dozen different malls which isn’t hard because everything is a mall, saw the Lion King (finally!), spent an entire day at the Universal Studio’s theme park, and another with our friend Ash in Chinatown. We met Ash over Christmas on our boat trip from Flores to Lombok. He was traveling with his friend Peter with whom he plays in a band in London. Both are young and hip and were incredibly lovely to Seamus in particular who was by that time pretty much done with his parents and all of the other middle aged Europeans on the trip. Ash spent his high school years in Singapore at boarding school and was a wonderful tour guide and companion for the afternoon.

We loved Singapore but four days was about right. While it is fun to explore, the essence of it seems to be the transfer of wealth. Every mall had a Gucci and Louis Vuitton. Boutique restaurants are on every corner and the common pastime is shopping. It is a lovely city, wonderfully laid out with lots of green space and public parks, but the action is in the malls which for our family had a limited appeal. We did our best but even Seamus wore out on it after a bit and that is saying something.

Left Singapore for Phuket where we hopped a cab to the southernmost tip of the peninsula. The resort we stayed at was great – at the end of a dead end road with neat, simple Thai style cabins that went up the hillside into the jungle. We were put at the tippy-top (I think to distance us the noisy family from the honeymooners) but it was great and felt much like sleeping in a tree house surrounded by jungle and vines and wild birds. Great fun for mom and dad who needed a little R & R after Singapore and thoroughly enjoyed drinking white wine on the deck and reading their books, not so exciting for Seamus and Graham who could have used a little more action. Still we swam in the ocean every day, rented bikes, the place had a great pool, and we worked on our tans which in all honesty are mostly pink and peely. Ate dinner every night at the beach side café about 100 yards down the road with no complaints. Fresh fruit juices, pad thai, great seafood and curries every night. The place we stayed was great but it may be, from what we saw, the only not grotesquely overly developed place left in Phuket. As long as we stayed at our hotel, we were fine, but to wander too far was to surround yourself with large sun-burnt Australian men with tiny Thai ‘girlfriends’, tattoo parlors, trinket shops and happy-hour specials. We got what we needed which was a respite between cities but to see the area properly, one would need to expend considerably more energy than we did.

Next destination: Bangkok and it did not disappoint. I remember loving when Kirk and I spent a week there 20 years ago and found it as fabulous as ever although our accommodations were much nicer this time. For some reason which I still don’t understand we were upgraded to the most gorgeous suite at our hotel, complete with espresso machine, soak tub, three television sets, teak panels and silk walls throughout and a lovely view of the park and city scape. Kirk was occupied with his conference most of the time so the kids and I took our little sky train maps and set off to explore the city. Visited 9 temples in three days, the Grand Palace, countless markets, rode the water taxis, and (you should sense a theme developing here) ate the most amazing food!!! Bangkok has the best street food of any place I have ever visited and we tried it all. We learned that pad thai is best when cooked over charcoal and that if you can say hello and thank you in the local language, you will get better service.



Fulbright was very generous with us and included the kids and me in the dinners and evening activities where we met some great people. This was particularly satisfying as Seamus and Graham got a crash course in Southeast Asian politics and geography because everyone they met was doing amazing work and very happy to share -- from water purifiers in Cambodia to tics in the northern Thailand to Burmese refugees on the Malasian border. To a one, they were incredibly patient and welcoming to the myriad of questions Seamus and Graham were throwing at them. At one point, I went to check on Seamus who was discussing with two grantees whether, when the time comes, he should take his Fulbright in Vietnam or Cambodia. Totally made me laugh. The final night of the conference, Fulbright hosted a dinner at the Grand Palace where, under a full moon, we were treated to traditional Thai dancing, food, and hands-on art activities.

Both kids have become really great travellers. They are never worried about being lost or confused. The sorts of travel problems that would have sent our family into a full-fledged tailspin at the start of this year just don’t seem to bother them anymore. They can hold their own in a nice restaurant (ok barely, but they can) or chow down on street food with ease. Seamus never seems to have any hesitation in meeting new people and making new friends, even if they don’t speak the same language. Our friend Katie once described this as the ‘VIP room that is Seamus’ life’ and apparently it recognizes no borders. The day we went the market in Bangkok’s Chinatown was particularly impressive. The place was packed so we agreed on a meeting place since we knew we would inevitably get separated. Every time I came upon Seamus he would be chatting it up with some shop keeper, two or three locals trying to translate his questions, little old ladies foisting tastes of this or that on him, one guy giving him his family history, another serenading him with Elvis tunes once he learned Seamus was from the US!



The year has been long for the kids, both of them, it has. And they both claim to be homesick for Bozeman and their friends and they hate Indonesia and they hate their school and they can’t wait to get back, but when I see them in action, when they are in their element, I know that this year is making a difference in their lives, even if I don’t know how just quite yet.

Ended the trip with a one-day transit lay-over in Kuala Lumpur. Because of the flight schedule, we could not get home in one day so we were going to have to stay overnight in either Jakarta or KL. Kids chose KL to add another stamp to their passports. KL was a bit of a disappointment. Reminds me a bit of downtown Denver, lots of tall buildings and lots of splash but when you get up close, there’s really not much to it. We were mercifully saved by Colleen and Ken, another great Fulbright family spending the year in Malaysia with their three kids. They are living in a high-rise in KL and provided some badly needed normalcy time after a very high energy 10 days. Have not decided what to do with Spring Break 2012 but this one is going to be tough to top.

Checking in

A blog is kind of like a sick family member whom you feel obliged to check in with every now and then just out of filial obligation. I'm not even sure if anyone looks at it anymore. In any case, I hope you're okay, blog. I brought you some flowers. I'll stand with my legs parted, swaying back and forth, and make conversation for a little bit. I don't want to give you the impression I'm in a hurry to leave.
      We've just returned from a little junket, attached to a Fulbright meeting in Bangkok, where they assembled all the scholars and students from Southeast Asia for a conference about People-to-People contacts regarding Southeast Asia and America. I learned about water treatment in Cambodia and Jakarta, about Vietnamese film, about teacher training in Cambodia, Arabic use in Indonesia. I was stimulated, and bored, by scholars from places all over Southeast Asia. Mostly, it was in Bangkok, paid for by the American taxpayer, who was in this wonderfully generous, though please don't tell Sarah Palin.
    The conference coincided with Spring break here (I use the word Spring out of old ethnocentric habit, by which I associate school holidays in March with the Northern hemisphere concept of Spring, which is essentially meaningless here). We went to Singapore, Phuket (Thailand), Bangkok, and an overnight in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, returning today. Here is a random list of what I learned:

• It's not very hard to get caned in Singapore. (None of my family were caned, not even by me.)
• Singapore is a very clean city. (See above.)
• You can spend $155,000 on a Mont Blanc pen (but bear in mind that this is Singapore $, so it's only about $130,000 American). I bought several for my really good friends who comment on the blog.
• Laura really wishes she could ride roller coasters, but she cannot. 
• It's easy to find a sexy Thai girlfriend if you are a 60 year old European man. Phuket was lousy with these couples.
• Russians love Phuket. (See above.)
• Being upgraded is great, especially into the fanciest suite at one of the luxury hotels in Bangkok.
• Southeast Asia has a traffic problem, but it is strong on food and fancy golden ornaments.
• Breakfast is sometimes the best part of the day, even a really really good day.
• Power point is a miserable addition to the academic community, but one person I liked had his Power Point presentation timed, so that every slide only lasted 20 seconds, and it made the medium ok. 
• Plenary speeches are like aural chloroform.
• Air Asia is cheap, but they make up for it by their extra charges, even though we managed to sneak on overweight luggage on four out of five flights.
• Always make the cabbie turn on the meter.
• Thai food really is just goddamn incredible and I could eat it forever without getting tired of it. I cannot say this of Indonesian cuisine, sadly, though I do like it.
• I wandered around a giant Bangkok street protest for about two hours on Saturday, where I learned that the Thai government has some persecution issues, and I bought some delicious food, and a bright red protest hat. Truth today!
• I could never in 500 years learn how to speak Thai, a language in which the word "mai" has five different meanings, depending on the intonation of the "ai" part.
• One must be careful about where one wanders with one's 14 year old son late at night in Bangkok.
• You should never book a 7:15 AM flight out of the Bangkok airport.

I learned some other stuff, but I have to run. I'm glad you're feeling better. I'll try to stop by later this week.

Sociolinguistics in Indonesia

                I’m teaching sociolinguistics this semester, along with American literature. At first I was a little disappointed about teaching sociolinguistics; I had hoped to work more directly with preparing teachers, but those classes were not available. So I took the sociolinguistics class, and it has been one of the most interesting classes I have ever taught.

            It’s not the subject itself that makes it interesting, although no doubt sociolinguistics is interesting. Or I should say, I’ve always found sociolinguistics interesting, but when I’ve taught it to a group of students in Montana, everything has seemed to come off as abstract. Dialects, pidgins, language change, code-switching – in a monolingual community, with dialect differences not immediately apparent, sociolinguistics can sometimes feel like an anthropology class about a place far far away, at least to the students.

            But in my class here, every student speaks at least three languages fluently. Everyone speaks Indonesian and English, and then they speak a variety of the hundreds of local languages spoken in Indonesia – for most of them that is Javanese (Javanese is the native language of about 75 million people). Many students speak two or three of these local languages fluently, and most of them shift between three languages – Javanese at home and with friends, Indonesian at the university, English in their English classes. They gossip in Javanese, and talk about politics in Indonesian; they meet with their teachers in English, and shift to Javanese as soon as the teacher has stepped away. They cram two or more languages into one sentence. Moreover, Javanese has three distinct levels (with more gradations), in which there are separate vocabulary and grammar depending whom you are speaking to. If with equals, there is one form, with strangers of uncertain status, another, with superiors, still another – each one with a different word for, say, eat (as well as I and you) and a different grammar as well. In other words, it is a language that requires a complex understanding of social position at every utterance. (I think in this regard it is not unlike any language, but that understanding is more deeply embedded into the grammar and vocabulary than in most.) Moreover, there are almost 20 distinct dialects of Javanese, most of them in Central Java, where Semarang, Salatiga, and Solo (Salatiga is between Semarang and Solo, which are about 45 miles apart) each have a different dialect of Javanese.

            Which is to say, my students in this classroom are teaching me sociolinguistics this semester in one of the richest teaching experiences I could imagine. Each week student groups put together a presentation about the chapter – though the book rarely uses Indonesian or Javanese as examples, I have encouraged them whenever possible to use those languages, or other local languages, as their examples, and so far I have learned about the colonial and revolutionary history of Indonesian, the politeness levels in Javanese, the dialects of Javanese, the array of languages on the archipelago, the official state policy toward Chinese language (bad) and so forth. It’s been amazing. I hope I can capture some of that energy in the United States, when I teach a similar class the next time.

Pacitan, kota yang sepi dan indah

            At times, in an effort to display my competence, I do something like pass a large truck on a narrow and narrowing road, the green side of the truck looming on my left and a rice paddy coming closer to the frayed tarmac on my right and when I hear the hard fast smack of metal against metal my only reaction is to accelerate and hope the tarmac stays under the wheel and the car remains on the road and does not sail into the paddy. When I am performing for the eyes of people I do not know, cannot identify, people who do not exist that assess my actions from some unseen perch with interest and judgment, my desire to demonstrate to those phantoms my competence is more likely to send me catapulting into a rice paddy.

            As it is, I am happy to see only the folded in remains of the passenger side mirror on the car we rented for my first self-drive on Java and the truck receding in my still intact rear-view mirror. Here we were on the quieter side road, an escape from the swirling chaos of the Javanese highway and its busses and trucks and swarming motorcycles, motorcycles everywhere on those roads, passing in droves on the left and right, zipping in front after they pass on the left to better pass the bus in front on the right. But we survived, and the rest of the trip, I was indeed competent, the mirror just a recurring topic of good-natured jibes from the rest of my family.

            Javanese highways are asphalt evidence that free will is just a useful fiction, because caught in that stream of traffic one must move with it and as it moves. In the United States, even in heavy fast traffic, one can often lodge in the slow lane and just accept the speed, but in Java, there is no slow lane, only spaces that exist to be filled, and if you do not pass the truck in front of you, all the other cars and motorcycles behind you will pass you and create a space in front of you, where there is none. When you sense that the bus behind you is going to try to create a space in the two feet of space between you and the slow truck, it is strong impetus to pass first, and you pull out into the oncoming stream of traffic at those moments when it is only a stream of motorcycles, trusting that they will pull to the side and let you make their lane yours, which they do. Honestly, there is no choice but to drive like that, and once the rhythm becomes clear, the expectations of the road obvious, it stops feeling stressful.

            Pacitan, though, a small city at the bottom of a steep winding hill, perched against a bay on the Indian Ocean, did not feel like Java. There was no swirling traffic, no bustling crowds. There were lush unharvested forests, and the ocean was clean, and clear. We found a home-stay about 200 meters from the beach (I think in meters now, but not Celsius, and what need to think about temperature anyway, when the temperature is always the same?), and ate fresh fish, barbecued; Seamus resigned himself to an Indonesian bathroom, with the squattie toilet he has been avoiding for seven months. Across from us a rice paddy, inhabited by a raucous congress of frogs.

            Something about this three day trip was right, somehow, though I can’t pin down what it was. I loved driving ourselves around, the sense of independence. I loved the beach. We learned to surf, or at least we took surfing lessons, or at least we paid a couple of Indonesians to come out into the ocean with us and say “Go” and push our boards from behind to help us with momentum. I stood up once, finally, at the end, on a small surge of leftover wave, not all the way up, but up enough to convince myself, finally, that with time I could in fact stand up better. I left, then, with the possibility of surfing, which was enough for me. Graham, to no one’s surprise, spent most of the time, after about an hour, on his feet. Though we lathered up with sunscreen, we all got terrific sunburns, and as I write this our flaking skin is making little trails of decaying humanity all over the house. The kids weren’t much different than they have been, alternately crabby and fun to be with, whiny and then enthusiastic, fighting over the line in the car, and then playing together in the waves, but their fluctuations bothered me less, or stayed with me not as long. We saw one of the most beautiful caves I have ever visited, and spent part of an afternoon crouched under a plastic sheeting drawn over an improbable concrete deck with colonnaded railings built randomly on an overhang over the most gorgeous stretch of coastline I have ever seen, with two fisherman, avoiding the rain. There were nets pulled between tall wooden stakes all over the rugged hills surrounding us, like props for extreme volleyball courts, used to catch the gargantuan bats that flew every night from the coastal caves, and which apparently are good eating. (I would eat bat.) We drove home in a torrential downpour, most of the drive on the crowded highway.  Even with the extra money I have to pay to replace the shell of the passenger side mirror, it was cheaper, and more fun, than hiring a car with a driver.