Lolo left Hawaii quite suddenly after that, and my mother and I spent months in preparation-passports, visas, plane
tickets, hotel reservations, an endless series of shots. While we packed, my grandfather pulled out an atlas and ticked
off the names in Indonesia’s island chain: Java, Borneo, Sumatra, Bali. He remembered some of the names, he said,
from reading Joseph Conrad as a boy. The Spice Islands, they were called back then, enchanted names, shrouded in
mystery. “Says here they still got tigers over there,” he said. “And orangutangs.” He looked up from the book and his
eyes widened. “Says here they even got headhunters!” Meanwhile, Toot called the State Department to find out if the
country was stable. Whoever she spoke to there informed her that the situation was under control. Still, she insisted that
we pack several trunks full of foodstuffs: Tang, powdered milk, cans of sardines. “You never know what these people
will eat,” she said firmly. My mother sighed, but Toot tossed in several boxes of candy to win me over to her side.
Finally, we boarded a Pan Am jet for our flight around the globe. I wore a long-sleeved white shirt and a gray clip-on
tie, and the stewardesses plied me with puzzles and extra peanuts and a set of metal pilot’s wings that I wore over my
breast pocket. On a three-day stopover in Japan, we walked through bone-chilling rains to see the great bronze Buddha
at Kamakura and ate green tea ice cream on a ferry that passed through high mountain lakes. In the evenings my mother
studied flash cards. Walking off the plane in Djakarta, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace, I
clutched her hand, determined to protect her from whatever might come.
Lolo was there to greet us, a few pounds heavier, a bushy mustache now hovering over his smile. He hugged my
mother, hoisted me up into the air, and told us to follow a small, wiry man who was carrying our luggage straight past
the long line at customs and into an awaiting car. The man smiled cheerfully as he lifted the bags into the trunk, and my
mother tried to say something to him but the man just laughed and nodded his head. People swirled around us, speaking
rapidly in a language I didn’t know, smelling unfamiliar. For a long time we watched Lolo talk to a group of brown-
uniformed soldiers. The soldiers had guns in their holsters, but they appeared to be in a jovial mood, laughing at
something that Lolo had said. When Lolo finally joined us, my mother asked if the soldiers needed to check through
our bags.
“Don’t worry...that’s been all taken care of,” Lolo said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Those are friends of mine.”
The car was borrowed, he told us, but he had bought a brand-new motorcycle-a Japanese make, but good enough for
now. The new house was finished; just a few touch-ups remained to be done. I was already enrolled in a nearby school,
and the relatives were anxious to meet us. As he and my mother talked, I stuck my head out the backseat window and
stared at the passing landscape, brown and green uninterrupted, villages falling back into forest, the smell of diesel oil
and wood smoke. Men and women stepped like cranes through the rice paddies, their faces hidden by their wide straw
hats. A boy, wet and slick as an otter, sat on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick
of bamboo. The streets became more congested, small stores and markets and men pulling carts loaded with gravel and
timber, then the buildings grew taller, like buildings in Hawaii-Hotel Indonesia, very modern, Lolo said, and the new
shopping center, white and gleaming-but only a few were higher than the trees that now cooled the road. When we
passed a row of big houses with high hedges and sentry posts, my mother said something I couldn’t entirely make out,
something about the government and a man named Sukarno.
barré
(Barré)
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