Some Southeast Asian Junk

Liwat != Liwet

I knew it was good that I learned what liwat means in Malay.  Because it is important not to confuse it with liwet, which in Indonesian is a type of Javanese rice dish.  So if I order nasi liwet I will get coconut rice served with squash and minced chicken.  Otherwise I shudder to think about what nasi liwat will get me.

(The other good examples of where a changing a single letter makes a big difference include when I asked if there were towels for the beef curry pool [rendang/beef curry != renang/swimming] and when I told someone that JMP's school has a nice love for her and the students to sleep in [asmara/love != asrama/dormitory].)

JM's Trip to the Hills

JMP has been working pretty hard over the past week and a half, and her music school had a day off yesterday.  They arranged for this day off a trip to the hills of West Java, to a place called Cipanas which serves as a sort of vacation station for many Jakartans.

JMP can better recount her trip than me, but from her description it sounded like a blast.  Up in the hills it is much much cooler than it is at sea level.  The highest pass that they drove over was about 4500 feet up, but she reports that the temperature there in the middle of the day was a pleasant 21 degrees C (compared to about 30 C when she returned to Tangerang in the evening).  With weather like that, it's no wonder that the Dutch used that area as one of their hill stations for colonial weekend retreats.  I am still confused as to how it can be consistently so cool at that relatively low altitude when we are so close to the equator, but I won't complain.

At any rate, JMP got to eat banana-cheese fritters while sipping tea at an tea plantation that was an old Dutch settlement and to poke around the nice houses up there.  She reports having a very nice time.  She also learned that the prefix ci- is an old way of saying "water," probably borrowed from the local language Sundanese.  That would explain why so many places around Jakarta have names that begin with Ci.  Like Cipanas, Cirebon, Cililitan, Cijangur, Cianjur, Cilandak, Cipete, Cikodok, Cikidang, Cimanggis, Ciledug, Ciputat, etc.

Interviews

I have not had particularly good luck over the past week with my interviews.  When they happen they are good and useful.  I am just having a particularly hard time making them happen.  We make a plan for 10, I arrive at 10, but the meeting starts (at the earliest) at 10:45.  Or, something that happens more frequently these days, the meeting doesn't happen at all and I am told to come back on some other day and time.  Given that it can take hours to get to some of these places, this does not inspire confidence.  Indonesians call their tendency to be late to things jam karet (rubber time), but this trip it's much more than just being late for things.  Yesterday I learned that a press meeting that I had been personally invited to attend was postponed for two days--only when I arrived at the place where it was to take place.  I'm having revenge fantasies in which I am holding meetings in which I have something that they want, and if they do not arrive precisely on time I tell them to come back later.  Unlikely.

So yesterday while consoling myself with some tasty West Sumatran food, I had an interesting experience.  The radio was playing a kroncong song that sounded strangely familiar.  (Kroncong is an Indonesian musical style that combines Western and Indonesian styles.  It frequently has a sort of reggae or Hawaiian feel to it, with heavy emphasis on the back beat.)  I thought and thought about why the song sounded so familiar, and then it came to me: it was a downbeat version of "Walk the Line."  Instead of Johnny Cash's rich bass, the melody was played by an Indonesian flute or whistle.  Cool.

NRL

When I am tired from interviewing people, it's good to sit back with a Bintang beer and watch some TV.  The Australia Network is great for this purpose, especially on the weekends when it shows rugby almost non-stop.  Australians take their rugby seriously.  Having spent a good portion of last night unwinding by watching the Roosters play the Bulldogs in a fiercely contested NRL game, I have learned a couple of things.

The first is that I really enjoy rugby league a lot more than rugby union.  JMP and I watched some rugby union when we traveled in New Zealand and again when we were in Australia, and my read is that rugby union is a lot slower with a lot less action.  Rugby league is in many ways like a faster, continuous, more brutal version of American football, with 6 downs instead of 4.

The second is that I have no doubt that the rugby league players are the fittest people that I have ever seen.  Simply massive shoulders, chests, and thighs, but not an ounce of fat on them.

The third is that Australian football, which is yet another sport, is weird.  Apparently the technical term for a referee is a "white maggot."

Real Indonesian

I watched a TV program the other day called Binar, which is a compression of the words Bahasa Indonesia Benar, meaning "True Indonesian Language."  It's sponsored by the Ministry of Education here, and it is aimed at helping Indonesians to learn how to speak their language properly.  It seems to be aimed primarily at teenagers.  It features a very common device in Indonesian cultural propaganda: a well-dressed 50-something woman who speaks slowly, calmly, and knowledgeably as sort of a fountain of information and a symbol of Javanese propriety.  (This is the image that former President Megawati Sukarnoputri presents.)  I don't know what the program normally deals with, but this time it was about the use of foreign words in common parlance--and how this is a bad thing. 

Indonesian is a language which, like English, is well known for its propensity through history for borrowing words from other languages.  Sanskrit, Arabic (and thereby Turkish and Persian), Chinese (mostly Hokkien, some Cantonese), Portuguese, and Dutch have contributed hundreds (if not thousands) of words each to Indonesian.  Currently Indonesian is borrowing words from English, and the program was focused on trying to stop this practice by reminding people of the "proper" Indonesian words for things commonly referred to using English.  It was funny because these proper Indonesian replacements are very transparently recent borrowings from other European languages.

Some examples, drawn from a mock dialog on planning a wedding:

email should be pos el (pos was borrowed from the English "post," and el is a short form of "electric")
calling should be  menelpon (the root of this word is telpon, from "telephone," and the prefix me- has been added as the Indonesian way of turning nouns into verbs)
by faks should be  melalui faksimile (faksimile from French is distinguished from faks and faksimali from English)
client should be  klien (the same word borrowed from Dutch a hundred years earlier)
wedding organizer should be  pengelola pesta pernikahan (pesta was borrowed from the Portuguese fiesta, and means "party"; pernikahan is a abstract noun constructed from the Arabic root nikah, or "wedding")
office should be  kantor (borrowed from Dutch)

There were of course a couple of examples of English borrowing that have entirely Indonesian replacements (exhibition = pameran, visitor = tamu, print = cetak, invitation = undangan).  But it was very interesting that the characters on the show kept saying "OK" to signal agreement or understanding.  And they saying that people using English words were attempting to put on airs (gengsi, from the Arabic ghinsi).  In my view, Indonesian, like French or any other language, has no hope of resisting English linguistic imperialism.

"I Don't Feel Like I'm In A Poor Country"

After our lunch yesterday, my colleague S, his wife, and I were walking through the mall on the way to Starbucks before we headed to his BMW SUV, when S looked around us and said "I don't feel like I'm in a poor country."

It's true--anyone who visits Jakarta's nicer areas would have no idea that Indonesia's GDP per capita is about $4,000 US a year.  The clothes in the fancy stores cost as much as they do in the US.  The new mall I visited yesterday is approximately the size of King of Prussia, simply huge.  People dress well and have nice cars, their kids go abroad for college, it's really quite comfortable.  But of course it's not that way for the vast majority of Indonesians.  Most are quite poor by Western standards, and about 40% or so live on less than $2 per day.

This is interesting because over lunch, S and I were discussing the state of Indonesia's economy, and the fact that so many Indonesians are concerned with inflation of basic goods' prices.  The Indonesian media certainly conveys a sense that people are fed up with the economy, but my own sense is that things are still rather good in Indonesia.  The economy will grow by about 6% this year, which isn't China-level growth but still is very good.  A large part of popular frustration with the economy stems from the fact that the Indonesian government, like other governments around the world, has had to cut the subsidies that its has long provided for gasoline and some basic goods.  This has resulted in mass protests and widespread criticism of the incumbent regime for forgetting the interests of the people (kepentingan rakyat).

Looking around the world, we see that everyone criticizes subsidy cuts.  I feel like a downright regime apologist by saying that governments the world over have little choice but to withdraw from interference in gasoline prices.  The amount of money that governments have to spend is fixed--maintaining subsidies in conditions of skyrocketing demand means that spending something else will have to be cut.  (The other way to go, simply declaring that prices will not rise by administrative fiat, is a great way to turn your country into a disaster; think Zimbabwe.)  Right now, it's just an easy cheap shot for opposition politicians to challenge governments on subsidies.

At the same time, inflation in Indonesia is tangible.  Just in the past 6 months, I can confirm that the price for basic street food has doubled (10 tasty fried things used to cost 50 cents, now they cost 1 dollar).  Regular people in Indonesia certainly feel this, and certainly suffer from this inflation.  But with petroleum prices rising, it's pretty much impossible to think of a good way to avoid this.  From what I can tell, this is just the bitter pill that the 40% of Indonesians living under $2 a day will have to face. One thing that is good to remember, though, is that it's easy to forget this when you can afford to eat nice meals at fancy malls.

JISMF

JMP was successfully delivered yesterday afternoon to JISMF, the Jakarta International Summer Music Festival at which she will be teaching for the next couple of weeks.  It is located in Tangerang, a satellite city that is roughly to Jakarta as Queens is to Manhattan.  The voyage there is long: it was about an hour and a half drive there, a bit quicker on the way home.  Fortunately JISMF has a driver, who picked us up.  Driving that far out from central Jakarta really allowed us to see just how phenomenally big the Jakarta metro area is.  It just keeps going and going.

JISMF is in a very neat place, from what I saw of it before returning back.  The building is on the newish side, and is being expanded further as we speak.  It has a bunch of pianos and things, along with nice practice areas and performance spaces.  It is located near a new development called BSD City, which stands for Bumi Serpong Damai, which means something along the lines of Peaceful Serpong Land or something impenetrable like that. 

(Incidentally, BSD is all over the news trying to bill itself as the hip new place for Jakarta's nouveaux riches to live.  The development has things like a water park, biking trails, fancy malls, office parks, its own water treatment plant, and all those things that a swanky new development should have.  The ads on the TV close with someone climbing into a helicopter, which raises the possibility to me that Jakarta will turn into Sao Paulo, where everyone who's anyone travels via helicopter rather than sitting in traffic.)

At any rate, JMP does not have internet access right now, but she reports that she had a nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant last night and that she is sharing a room with another faculty member, a young woman from Poland.  The have a staff meeting over lunch and their program starts at 4:30, so we will keep you posted on how things go.  My schedule is less exciting, but I am meeting a colleague at central Jakarta's swankiest mall for what will probably be a very nice lunch.

Greetings from Jakarta Again

We're back (JMP and TP) in Jakarta and will be updating almost daily for the next five weeks or so.  We are blogging currently from the Sheraton Bandara, the only true airport hotel in Jakarta.  It is stunningly nice for an airport hotel--almost like a resort and way nicer than the place we stayed at JFK which cost quite a bit more money.  TP is here for more research, while JMP (the former JM) is here to teach at the Jakarta International Summer Music Festival.  We will be dropping her off there shortly, after which TP will return to central Jakarta.

We flew Cathay Pacific.  It is not as nice as Singapore Airlines, but the seats are more roomy (although less comfortable).  The service was not as good either.  The food was about as good, and the entertainment on demand is great.  The music selection was quite expansive, and while it was not as good as Qatar Airways in the rock and pop department, the classical music selection exists (which made JMP quite happy).

A few quick initial observations:

1.  We arrived at 8:00 PM and slept from 10:00 PM till about 8:00 AM without much trouble.  For anyone who travels regularly, you know how hard this is.  Arriving at 8:00 PM is infinitely superior than arriving at 10:00 AM.

2. It is also infinitely better to travel with a companion than to travel alone.

3.  JMP agrees that Jakarta seems cleaner and more lively than it did when we first started traveling about 4 years ago.

4.  The exception is the pollution.  It's really smoggy here today, and we believe this is probably due to forest fires in Sumatra and Borneo.  One thing that keeps us amazed is that while Jakarta is really polluted, our friends who know both Jakarta and Beijing assure us that Beijing is unambiguously far worse in the pollution department than Jakarta.  We just can't imagine what that must be like.  Jakarta is already dirty enough that you can't dry your clothes outside without them getting dirty again.

Signing off from Doha

Last post for a couple of months.  I'll be back again this summer, maybe with JM again.  I'll close with some final thoughts, with no common connection among them.

1. I like all fruits in Indonesia except for durian and papaya.  Many people like papaya, but many people do not.  It's too cloying.  I think it tastes like dirty rotten trash.
2. Qatar Airways has great on-demand music.   I mentioned this previously, but I did some more exploring and it's much better than I thought.  In addition to the previous ones I mentioned, I found Pet Sounds, Who's Next, loads of Beatles/Stones/Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Parklife, Different Class, Joy Division (the second one), Massive Attack (the first one), Doolittle, Odelay, the "big three" of 90s grunge (Nevermind, Ten, Badmotorfinger), and tons more that escape me now.  If the list of albums that Qatar Airways had was my entire collection of albums for the rest of my life, I wouldn't be too upset.  I wonder if the Qatari government knows what Lou Reed is actually talking about on Transformer.
3. It's raining here.  Didn't think that happened.
4. When Soeharto dies, I'll write an obituary here, even if I'm in the states.
5. It actually is difficult to tell what parties are Islamic parties, even if you use the simple metric we use (do they say that their basis is Islam?).  Is a party whose basis is officially Pancasila, but which is a political organization based on a moderate Muslim organization of about 30 million people called "The Awakening of the Ulama," an Islamic party or not?  We'll let the respondents tell us what they think. This summer, I'll ask the leaders what they think themselves.

Last Day in Jakarta

This is my last day in Jakarta, and I must admit that I have nothing new to report, as my co-authors and I have been crushed to try to put our survey instrument together before we leave.  I'll sign off again from Doha.  I'm sure that after 11 hours on a plane, I'll have thought of something more substantial to say.
UPDATE:  I had forgotten how silly Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport is. First off, they do not open counters until 2 hours before your flight leaves, so if you mindlessly assume that you need to be there three hours before your flight, you're in for a long wait in the lobby.  But, the lobby has free wifi.

It occurs to me that there is a very Indolaysia themed bit of new going around these parts, and that is that the President of Indonesia and the Prime Minister of Malaysia have agreed to form a standing committee to investigate cases of cultural theft.  Some background: Malaysia is more developed than Indonesia, and for that reason is nicer to visit.  However, the creeping Arabization of Malaysian society means that much of the local "Malay" culture has been lost.  So, the Malaysian government has been borrowing aspects of Indonesian culture, like folk songs and old stories and the like, for itself.  Well, the Indonesian people are none too happy about that.  Many of my friends say things along the lines of "they don't have their own culture so they steal ours" or "it's not our fault that they all want to be Arabs."

Now.  At a basic level this is a dumb argument, because the borders between Indonesia and Malaysia are artificial.  It would make more sense probably to group Sumatra with Malaya, and Kalimantan with Sabah and Sarawak, and Java by itself, as this is how the old kingdoms used to be.  So when Malaysia borrows stories and histories, these are all Sumatran stories and histories (until the founding of Malacca by a Sumatran king in the 14th century, all the kingdoms of any note were Sumatra-based).  Nevertheless, people do have nationalist feelings associated with colonial borders.  If you were really forced to choose, just about all of the old stories like the Kisah Kelana Sakti are originally Sumatran, and therefore Indonesian.  Too bad there's nothing that Indonesia can do about it.  The only thing left for Indonesia, really, is to trade on the fact that most of the really interesting stuff in the two countries that is of any historical significance is in Indonesia (Bali, Borobudur, and so on), most of the beautiful scenery and nature is in Indonesia (Lake Toba, Manado, Papua, etc.), and all Malaysia really excels in is the architecture in Kuala Lumpur and the history in Malacca.