Java Sea, Indonesia, December 2014
Humming above the warm equatorial waters of the Java Sea, a small commuter plane approaches the island of Java, Indonesia. Inside the plane, my eighty-three-year-old father hunches over the O of his window as the misted island comes into view after thirty hours of travel. He has grown quiet, his aging eyes focused on the world below as the plane drops altitude and the palm trees rise through the steam to meet us. I crane my neck to look over his shoulder while the Central Java city of Semarang fills the window. We have come here together, a journey of return for him, a journey of discovery for me.
Nearly seven decades earlier, my father stood on that soil below us, a skeletal fourteen-year-old kid in a loincloth who hadn’t seen his parents in years, watching an Allied military plane appear in a halo of sun to announce that the war was over and he would live. He had spent two years in a men’s forced-labor camp by that time, separated from his parents and siblings. In the country of his birth below, my father helped carry his friends out of that internment camp in bamboo coffins. He hallucinated during malarial fevers, and chewed banana leaves to settle the effects of dysentery. He tried to sleep on his stomach as the blood from a whip’s lashes formed into itchy scabs on his back. Sixty-nine years earlier, in that place below, my father was a kid who had nothing left, watching the news fall from that plane in a shower of tiny papers, like so many butterflies descending from the sky: To All Allied Prisoners of War: The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered Unconditionally and the War Is Over. Stay in your camp until you get further orders from us. Deus ex machina. He was saved. Over a third of his camp’s approximately fifteen hundred inhabitants had died of starvation and disease by that point. Standing in the center yard of his camp, my father raised his arms to his rescuers and lived to bring me into the world three decades later. And now he and I will stand together on that same ground.
The country we are approaching is my father’s memory, but it has been my mythology. On the other side of the planet, in a suburb of Los Angeles, my siblings and I grew up with muddled identities as the children of Dutch immigrants. We returned to Holland every summer to stay connected to our roots, and lived in hyphenation as Dutch-Americans. Yet there was always a third cultural layer complicating our heritage, one that we had less access to. Like a relative who had mysteriously died prior to my birth and was never spoken of, the ghost of Indonesia silently filled our home with inherited relics: carved furniture and batik pillows, Bahasa words mixed into our English and Dutch, nasi and bami goreng fragrant with Indonesian spices on the dinner table.
Despite its significant presence in my life, I have never set foot in Indonesia until now. I’ve spent months planning this visit with my parents, mapping out a trajectory that will take us to the sites of my father’s childhood.
We approach our starting point. We secure our tray tables. Flight attendants strap themselves in. Wheels touch asphalt. I look at my father, his hair an unkempt cloud of white, his hands spotted with age. He’s stronger and more persistent in life than men with half his years, a scientist who still works diligently toward a breakthrough in his laser isotope separation process for hours every day in the hopes of revolutionizing the world with safer and more efficient carbon-free energy. But there’s no denying that he’s moving into the twilight of his life. This may be his first and last visit to his home country. It’s a moment that takes hold of me in its poignancy. My heart rises into my throat. As the flight attendants take their places at the exit, we gather our belongings and prepare to disembark for a two-week journey through my father’s past. I hope to find answers. I hope to connect to my father’s war, and to better understand his wounds. I hope to find images to fill the empty spaces in my history.
Selamat datang di Semarang. Thank you for flying with us. Welcome to Java. Enjoy your stay.
In the arrivals terminal, my father’s duct-taped suitcase appears between the sleek spinner bags on the conveyer belt, and we pull its frayed heft from the belt in a team effort. It’s an unwieldy 1980s suitcase without wheels that he insists is still “perfectly good,” crammed full of sweaters and jeans that he won’t be able to use in this heat but brings along “just in case.” He also has two pairs of busted shoes he has brought along because he heard that they can be resoled inexpensively here. My mind momentarily flashes on a vision of the 1940s suitcase that my father took when leaving this country after the war, packed with the relative lightness of all of his worldly possessions at that time. I eye my dad’s double plastic bag, aka his carry-on luggage. “Maybe we can get you a duffel bag for that stuff while we’re here, Pop.” He grumbles, but the plastic handles have already ripped from the weight of everything he’s crammed into the bag, so even he concedes to this necessity. I place my hand on his back. “Don’t worry. It’s a good thing. It will be much easier to carry.”
A downpour begins as we emerge from the airport to meet our driver, Joko, with whom we have exchanged emails in the past months at the suggestion of my father’s younger brother, who has also made this journey of nostalgia through Java. Joko is a fixer who has driven hundreds of former Dutch colonial residents and their children around the country. He speaks a bit of Dutch and English, and knows all the Dutch colonial sites of interest. Joko-from-the-internet is finally revealed to us outside the Semarang airport as a middle-aged, mustached man wearing a striped polo shirt, a pair of khaki pants, and sandals. Joko stands at the exit smoking a cigarette with another man. He holds a sign that displays our last name, ready to drive us through this most populated island of Indonesia for two weeks, all the way from the north of Central Java, through the interior of the island, to Western Java. It’s a reverse journey of my father’s youth here, starting with the last city where he lived as a prisoner of war, passing through the places he lived and spent time in as a child, and ending in the city of his birth, Jakarta.
We run through the hammering rain and ankle-high water to Joko’s white van, and help him load the suitcases before ducking into the dry cab. After fifteen minutes, while we’re still sitting in the heavy traffic leaving the airport, the shower clears to blue sky. This pattern repeats itself several times during the day as we nudge up against the beginning of the rainy season in Indonesia. Between these short explosions of heavy rain, the tropical sun beats down to steam us into sticky, flushed messes in the ninety-degree heat. Or at least, it does so to my mother and me. My father, having been raised here, is entirely unbothered by the heat. In fact, he seems to enjoy it as he downs bottles of cold mango nectar, a favorite childhood treat. While my mother and I mutter Jesus, so hot and fan our flushed faces uselessly, my dad, like Joko, literally doesn’t break a sweat.
The locals seem to handle the erratic nature of the weather here with calm indifference. They haul their birdcages, bananas, puppets, or whatever wares they are selling to and from the side of the road multiple times a day, crank parasols up and down, and never complain. In a downpour, the throng of scooters in the road arches around deep puddles en masse, never ceasing its momentum. I watch from inside our van, relieved to surrender control to Joko, who navigates the swarming traffic with nonchalance. It’s a beautiful dance for which everyone but I seems to know the choreography. Amazed, I witness a man beside us calmly maneuver his tiny scooter through heavy rain and flooded potholes. A clear plastic tarp contraption covers him, a baby sitting on his handlebars, the bag-laden wife sitting behind him, and a standing toddler sandwiched between them. They are like a monsoon circus act, performing death-defying feats as they fly through this chaos of an Indonesian city. My father is fixated on the scooters. “Wow! My God! Mieke, take a photo of all those scooters waiting at the traffic light!” he exclaims. “We never had this when I lived here! All of our roads weren’t even paved yet back then.”
By the time my father was born, the Dutch had already been in Indonesia for centuries, and an enormous amount of infrastructure had been built. The Dutch had maintained a foothold in the country since the late sixteenth century with the spice trade. They dominated the trade route via the United East India Company, known in the Netherlands by its Dutch initials, VOC. The company—which imported nutmeg, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon, as well as coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, and tobacco, from all over Asia, but particularly from Indonesia—was hugely profitable for the Netherlands. For that reason, the Dutch government granted the United East India Company the rights to protect their commercial interests by waging war, taking over territory, and creating massive stone fortresses in the areas of production to protect the stolen land. For two hundred years, Dutch people working for the VOC infiltrated the Indonesian archipelago, expanding operations onto more islands, establishing plantations. However, on December 31, 1799, the VOC dissolved, and the Dutch government, reluctant to cede the territory back to Indonesia, took control over these areas in Java, Sumatra, and a number of Indonesia’s seventeen thousand smaller islands. More Dutch moved to Indonesia to start plantations and farms. The British seized control for five years, until the Dutch took the regions back in 1816. For decades, there was fighting with the British as the Netherlands conquered territory, including northern Bali and Lombok. Finally, around 1900, the entirety of Indonesia officially fell under Dutch colonial rule.
As the longest-held regions, Java and Sumatra had existed under colonial rule for 130 years by the time my father was born. Generations of Dutch families occupied sprawling plantation homes across the landscape, and Dutch society was firmly established within the colonial territory, with Dutch architecture, Dutch imports, and the Dutch language appearing alongside the Indonesian language on signs. Streets often had Dutch names, and the people even walked around in wooden shoes. This was mixed with Indonesian culture, with horse-drawn dokars and cycled becaks in the streets and Indonesian foods on every Dutch household’s table. Into this culture, my father was born.
We waste no time immersing ourselves in my father’s history. Jet-lagged and overwhelmed, we visit the Kalibanteng cemetery, maintained by the Dutch government for its war dead, on our very first day. This memorial cemetery is one of the last strips of land in postcolonial Indonesia that the Netherlands government still manages. Logically and emotionally, it may not be a great plan to visit it as a first destination. The visit constitutes a plunge into the smoldering remains of the war before we’ve even traced the buildup, similar to entering a theater during the final scene of Hamlet. This cemetery was created solely for civilian victims in the Semarang region during the war, and it is only one of many war cemeteries throughout the country, but even so, I am astonished by its size: thirty-one hundred people are buried here out of approximately thirty thousand Dutch civilian casualties, many of them women and children who died in the Japanese internment camps established for the Dutch in the area.
These dead were people who lived in this former colony of the Netherlands, some descended from hundreds of years of family history. These were not soldiers, who lay in other cemeteries. Nor were they all wealthy plantation owners, as one may imagine colonial inhabitants. These colonists were teachers and bus drivers and chefs. They were musicians and clockmakers and housepainters. They were twelve and they were seventy and they were twenty-five. They danced the Charleston and took their kids fishing on the weekend. They rode the train and did math homework and read bedtime stories. What they all had in common, from teacher to bank owner, was being herded into internment camps in the spring of 1942 by the Japanese forces that occupied the country during World War II.
Joko rings the buzzer at the huge wrought-iron gate spanned across the entrance, then drives down a short driveway. Joko is familiar with this place. He drives many Dutch people to these same monuments each year, former inhabitants or, more often lately, their surviving kin, on a similar mission of finding the past. Inside the cemetery gates, we are met by kind Indonesian employees with bottles of cold water. They invite us to sit down on the shaded patio, where we sign the guest log under the syrupy diplomatic smiles of the Dutch royal family, who look out at the cemetery from inside a frame hanging on the wall.
The clipped grass, a brilliant, unmarred green, stretches as far as I can see, dotted with white crosses. The cemetery employees give us parasols to protect us from the dogged sun. One of them is assigned to escort us through the cemetery. He looks up the number of my father’s “aunt” in a massive book, and walks us down a long path to her grave marker. “Aunt Lien,” one of my grandmother’s best friends, died in the camps two months before the end of the war, and in her final days, she asked my grandmother to take care of her two children. I have read the account my grandmother wrote about this death in her secret camp journal, comprised of letters to her husband that were saved until their reunion at the end of the war:
It is Sunday today. I just visited Lien. She is very ill. It looks like she is ready to give up the fight. My sister Ko is looking after her children, as I was recently quite ill myself and not so strong anymore … If only some food and medicine would come!
April 13, 1945. Lien passed away in the night, at 11:30. I visited and sat by her bed in the afternoon. She was short of breath but eating and drinking a little better than the day before. At 11 p.m. in the night I was called. Lien was already unconscious and died quietly a little later. Her troubles are all over now. But she was so young. I cannot write much more about it.
We stand quietly, staring down at the white cross that now represents Aunt Lien, just one in a row among hundreds of rows, neatly hammered into the shorn green grass. What is there to say now? We gather awkwardly around her grave, perhaps the only people who have ever done so. I’m not even sure if her bones are under there. I presume they were exhumed along with all the other bones in the camp graves when the war ended and moved here in a massive unidentified jumble. But were they? I realize that I don’t know where Aunt Lien’s body actually lies. There may be only dirt in this grave.
Our cemetery escort waits for us at a distance, and I walk past the rows, reading the names of the deceased. The separate area of smaller crosses for the children who died in the camps moves me the most, followed by the sole Jewish star, which catches my eye amid the acres of crosses. The irony of a Dutch Jew escaping the Holocaust by living in Indonesia, only to be interned in a camp and killed by the Japanese, sends chills up the back of my neck. There is also a section of Islamic tablets marking the graves of Indonesian-Dutch Muslims, those whose families merged with the Dutch families over centuries of colonialist communities, those who allied themselves with the Dutch. I had not expected to see these tablets, carved to resemble the tops of mosques. It complicates the narrative of colonialism and history. I appreciate that it muddles conceptions.
My mother has brought the ashes of a friend’s recently deceased husband, Jongk, whose mother’s grave happens to be in this cemetery. Jongk’s mother died one day before the liberation of the camps. He was a young boy at the time, and had been in Holland on vacation when the Japanese invaded Indonesia; he never saw his mother again. Escorted by the man with the big book, we find his mother’s grave. My mother produces a ziplock bag, carried from California inside a sock in her luggage, and sprinkles Jongk’s ashes over his mother’s grave while I videotape so Jongk’s wife can see that he finally made it back to his mother. This too feels anticlimactic. It’s breathlessly still in the moments that follow, and we wander quietly back to the path under the cover of our parasols.
I recognize in that moment what is so disquieting about this place, besides the obvious presence of the war and the specter of death. Ironically, it’s that there’s no sign of life in this cemetery. In cemeteries in Holland or the United States, people stroll the pathways, lay flowers, visit the graves of those they love. Car tires roll slowly over gravel. Lawn mowers buzz. There is movement, the signs of involvement, people engaged in the pursuit of remembering. Here, the stagnation is palpable. In the yawning green vastness of this meticulously groomed memorial cemetery, under the spotlight of the sun, we are the only visitors.
We walk to the end of the cemetery to see the monuments. There, I am surprised to find the original bronze statue of a miniature replica that sits on the mantel in my parents’ house in California. It is called The Patjoler, named after the boys who went into the fields to do farmwork for the Japanese officers every day. The life-size statue depicts an emaciated boy in a loincloth with a hoe (patjol) over his shoulder. The plaque dedicates the statue to the boys imprisoned in my father’s camp, all of them patjolers. My mother and I swallow our tears, but my father is stoic. “Pop, did you know this was here?” I ask him. “Oh sure,” he says. This fits with the father I have always known, the father who responded to family deaths with quiet contemplation and pragmatism, who responded to every sobbing tragedy I had growing up with “It will get better, sweetheart; you just have to keep trying” and a pat on the back, regardless of the circumstances. Still, I don’t believe he isn’t moved. I know emotion is threatening just below the surface. I suspect he learned during the war to shut down his feelings. This man was once a boy who watched a friend die from grief in the internment camp, who learned that the boys who cried were punished by the Japanese officers, who had strict beliefs about men and emotion. I make my father stand next to the statue and take his photograph as he smiles uncomfortably.
My emotion is enough for us both. Walking back to the car past row after row of white crosses in this deserted place, I am moved in a way I haven’t been before when hearing stories about the war or reading statistics back in the United States. Seeing markers for the dead here is overwhelming and makes the war real to me. Mothers, fathers, children, aunts, uncles. Their graves are still here in Indonesia, reduced to rows of white sticks in the middle of an oblivious city that has moved on, out of context in a place that doesn’t exist anymore, thousands of miles from their families.
Bengkulu, Sumatra, Dutch East Indies, 1933
“Doctor Eerkens!” Two men my grandfather recognizes from the village hurry up the banana tree–lined drive to his grand colonial home. A hornbill in a tree is startled by the men and takes wing with a shriek. The peacocks in the garden fan their tails and high-step toward the visitors. My grandfather, Dr. Jozef Eerkens, stands on the porch in his linen suit, squinting, wondering what the trouble might be this time.
Having studied in the Netherlands during the 1920s, my grandfather has been assigned as the doctor to the Bengkulu area during his period of service to the Dutch military to work off his medical school costs, just as his father did before him in the Dutch East Indies. Now he is back in the country of his birth, stationed in this coastal jungle region of Sumatra, to service the health needs of the province. It has become quite clear to my grandfather by this point that to many of the rural inhabitants, “doctor” is a catchall term. The garden features adopted geese and peacocks that were left on his doorstep. A few weeks earlier, an orphaned sun bear cub had been brought to him after its mother was killed in a hunting expedition. Reluctantly, my grandfather took the cub in, and my grandmother began to bottle-feed it. Now, as the men rush up the driveway, the bear cub sleeps in my father Sjeffie’s playpen on the porch.
Jozef Jr., or Sjeffie, pronounced “Sheffie,” is a two-year-old archetypal Dutch boy with white-blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in a nautical bobby suit typical of the era. He is carried onto the porch by his babu, who is curious about the commotion. The nanny sets my father down in his playpen with the bear cub, which wakes and ambles over. It begins climbing on my father, who laughs in delight at his playmate’s antics. The men reach the porch and hold out a bundle of blankets to my grandfather. “Doctor Eerkens, you must help it.” A mewling can be heard from within. My grandfather unwraps the bundle. Inside is a Sumatran tiger. A tiny version, to be sure, but yes, it is definitely a tiger. “No, no. I am not an animal doctor,” he tells the men, but it’s of no use.
The relief has already settled into their faces. They explain that the cub’s mother killed two people in the village, so they shot her because a tiger with a taste of human blood will keep returning to kill again. They noticed afterward that the mother was nursing, and have brought her cub to my grandfather to raise, just like the bear cub. My grandmother, a plump and pleasant schoolteacher, emerges onto the veranda. She takes the tiger cub in her arms. Hungry and frightened, it cries. She sets it down in the playpen as she goes inside for a bottle, and my father is beside himself with glee at this development. Months later, my father will run through the garden with this same tiger, now grown to the size of a small dog. When the tiger grows too large to live safely with the family, it is sent to a zoo in the Netherlands, a sort of reverse colonization, but it dies from stress in a crate on a ship somewhere in the middle of the journey on the roiling sea.
My father and his siblings are doted on in this culture, and their early childhood is as idyllic and privileged as a childhood can get, the most colonial of colonial stereotypes. In old black-and-white family films, my father rides around in a cart being pulled by a goat, his face lit up with laughter. A house staff member dressed in a white Nehru jacket leads the goat around the tropical garden. Later in the film, this man serves the children drinks from a tray.
Every family in the Dutch East Indies has many household employees, and my father’s family is no different. At the head of the staff is the djongos, the house manager, who oversees all the other staff. He lives at the house with the family, in the servants’ quarters. There are also two babus who live there, the head babu and the assistant babu, who do the washing and cleaning and watch the children. The rest of the servants have their own homes and come in to work. The kokkie, or cook, prepares the evening meals. To manage the lush, flowered grounds, there is a kebon, or gardener, and his assistant. Some of the staff become close with the family. For example, Suwardjo, their djongos, chooses to move with them each time my grandfather is relocated to a new city. Yet despite the appearance of harmony in this whole system, there are undercurrents of tension between the staff and their employers. When my father plays in the garden, the teenage assistant to the gardener sometimes is tasked with watching him, and corners him under the trumpet flower trees. “You better behave, totok,” he hisses. Totok is the word for “white person,” and it’s clear to Sjeffie that the gardener’s assistant doesn’t mean it in a friendly way. “I might just have to kill your mother if you don’t mind me.” Sjeffie avoids the assistant kebon as much as he can thereafter, racing for the safety of the house or hiding behind the babu’s skirts when he sees the boy approach. But he doesn’t tell the adults.
My grandfather has a stately car, a sleek black Terraplane, and the tjoper, or chauffeur, drives him to make house calls, sometimes hours into the jungle. On short holidays, the family piles into the backseat and ventures into the jungles of Sumatra, where orangutans climb onto the hood and examine the intruders curiously through the windshield. On one occasion, they come to a river they must cross to continue, and travel across on a raft built out of logs, a makeshift ferry service designed by Indonesian men in the village nearby. For a fee, the Indonesian men swim the Dutch man’s car across the river on the raft, their heads bobbing just above the waterline.
Like many colonial families, my grandparents often spend weekends at “the Soce,” short for the Sociëteit, a social club for the upper classes in the tropics. Every city in colonial Dutch East Indies has a Soce. The members are mainly Dutch, but there are prominent Indonesians and other upper-class immigrants to Indonesia who can afford the monthly dues and are regulars at the Soce as well. They play tennis, have bridge nights, and drink jenever, special gin imported from the Netherlands. Sometimes they dance to the swing bands that perform there. The children usually stay home with the babus, except when they have afternoon roller-skating tournaments and puppet shows at the Soce. The women form knitting circles and gossip, and the men discuss the politics of the global depression and the rise of the Nazi party and Hitler in Germany. These people feel connected to the Netherlands, but they don’t feel solely Dutch. Rather, they feel specifically Dutch-Indonesian, a different brand of Dutch, because they also talk about the treks through the jungle and hunting and coffee plantations that are part of their lives at the equator.
In 1932 and 1935, my father’s sisters, Doortje and Fieneke, are born in Bengkulu, and my father revels in his new role as big brother and sole son. In the province around Bengkulu, the capital, his father is the senior government doctor. He’s required to go on tours of small villages in the jungle or to Enggano, an island off the coast of Sumatra, where he holds clinics for the rural population, and he often brings little Sjeffie along.
These trips sometimes include visits to the jail in Bengkulu, and my father waits in the backseat of the car reading picture books and eating licorice while his father sees a prisoner patient. One afternoon, a warden walks by the car and sees Sjeffie. The warden raps on the roof of the car. “Little boy, why are you here? Have you been naughty? Are they putting you in jail?” He pokes his fat head in the open window of the Terraplane and chuckles from under a thick mustache, exchanging an amused glance with the tjoper, who leans against the driver’s-side door, fanning himself. My father’s five-year-old eyes widen. His lower lip trembles. “No, sir. My daddy’s the doctor and he’s going to see sick prisoners and then he’s coming right back.” “Is that so? Well, are you sure you’re a good boy? If you aren’t a good boy, we might just have to put you in jail.” The warden’s eyes twinkle with amusement, but the joke is lost on my father. He starts to cry. And he refuses to accompany his father to the jail ever again.
Every four years, medical doctors working for the colonial Dutch government are given six months of paid furlough between appointments that take them to different communities in the Dutch East Indies, so in 1936, when my father is almost five, the family uses my grandfather’s furlough to visit the Netherlands. They sail for a month on a huge passenger ship via the Suez Canal to the “old country,” the motherland. My father is introduced to many relatives, including his grandparents, for the first time. His grandparents moved to the Netherlands from the Dutch East Indies before my father’s birth, and they are thrilled to meet their grandchildren.
The family spends four months in the Netherlands. In the fall, as my five-year-old father witnesses his first red hues of fall and feels the first crisp breeze ever on his bronzed skin, the family journeys back to the perpetual summer of the tropical Dutch East Indies, where my grandfather is transferred to the city of Semarang, on the island of Java. He is appointed co-director of a large hospital there, and the family moves into a spacious house next to the hospital. Sjeffie thrills at the news that he’ll finally get to go to school. “I’ll learn how to do my numbers and letters now,” he announces proudly. “I’m going to learn how to read.”
Semarang, Indonesia, 2014
Joko points to an old colonial building as we pass it. Its art deco architecture stands out, and at my request, he pulls over near the former colonial center of the city so we can walk around. I have particularly been badgering him about finding the “Hotel Jansen,” which I have seen referenced in the diaries of boys interned in my father’s former prison camp at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in Amsterdam, where I read their words, sifting through dozens of folders and boxes. The boys write of how it’s a thrill to be taken with an officer out of the camp to the stately hotel on errands. I have searched online for old photographs of Hotel Jansen. Joko says he thinks it was torn down a few years ago, but I can’t believe that the grand hotel, a spectacular example of colonial architecture and an important landmark of Semarang, would simply be demolished. Joko’s lack of enthusiasm about the destination of the “Old Town” I’ve been so excited to check out also doesn’t register with me, initially. After months of looking at antique photographs of pristine colonial city centers, with their wide roads and breathtaking buildings, each more ornate than the last, I naively expect to find Old Town Semarang’s architecture preserved as it was.
I read about tempo doeloe everywhere on Indonesian websites, and even see restaurants with this name, specifically referencing the colonial era in a nostalgic way as “the olden times.” I expect the colonial buildings to have new functions in a modern, postcolonial Indonesia. I imagine they will be preserved as historically significant. I’m shocked to discover that this is not so at all, and that most Indonesian people I meet display little knowledge of the colonial era, especially the younger generation. At landmark after landmark, when people ask why we are taking photos and I explain the colonial history of a specific place, many of them express surprise.
As we navigate through what is left of the Old Town, a decidedly conflicted relationship with tempo doeloe becomes evident in what appears to be the complete abandonment of Semarang’s former center of colonial life. There is not even a sidewalk, so we are forced to walk in the street, scooters and cars spitting exhaust in our faces as they rush past, just inches from us. I discover that with the exception of the spectacular railway station, still in use, and a couple of landmarks, most of the historic colonial buildings have not been preserved at all.
Some buildings still feature the faint imprints of their former colonial names, and their former grandeur is evident in their arched windows, tall double doors, and art deco embellishments, but they’ve almost all fallen into disrepair in Old Town Semarang. Plaster chips off their facades, and ivy creeps its leafy tentacles over everything, emerging from cracked windows. Roofs are caved in, red clay tiles dangling from the holes. Graffiti is scrawled across the art nouveau tiles lining doorways, and the pungent scent of urine emanates from the buildings. I have the unsettling feeling that I am perilously close to being colonialist myself in my thoughts about the neglect of these relics of my ancestry. It’s a feeling I won’t be able to shake for the rest of our trip. A feeling I know intellectually is problematic but that persists. A disappointment. A loss. A willful discarding of generations of heritage. Oddly, my father seems pragmatic in his response to seeing his heritage become a decaying ghost town. “It’s a shame, because these are well-built buildings, but I guess they just can’t afford the upkeep,” he says, missing the point, or perhaps wanting to miss the point. “The modern world takes over. This is how life is.” The immediacy of his acceptance of circumstance is remarkable. It’s a big difference between my father and me. My father is endlessly adaptable, focused on utility over sentimentality, relentlessly forward-looking, while I cannot stop looking back.
In the afternoon, Joko takes us to my father’s old neighborhood, and we search for his former house. What was once a village-like neighborhood is now filled in with concrete buildings, so my father does not recognize anything. “These were all fields,” he says, “and the homes all had huge gardens.” Now the neighborhood around the hospital is packed tightly with apartment buildings and small homes. Here and there, we find colonial homes, but they have little gardens, and it appears they’ve been subdivided multiple times for urban infill. The hospital too has expanded—right over my father’s former house, which no longer exists.
While most of the hospital consists of newer architecture, the old hospital still stands as a separate wing, its colonial shutters and red clay roof tiles a distinctive feature. My father remembers visiting his father here, and I attempt to film him talking about his memories in the lobby of the old wing, but almost immediately, an armed guard in a military-like uniform appears and places his hand over my camera. “No photo,” he says, scowling. I try to explain the purpose of our visit, ask what his concern is, but he just repeats, “No photo,” wagging his finger at me. We leave the building, and he follows us out, hand resting on the butt of his machine gun, watching until we have left the parking lot.
The church my father attended as a boy still exists, adjacent to the hospital. While the hill it sits on is no longer covered in alang-alang grass, the church itself is unchanged. I try to envision this hill as it was, but I struggle to reconcile the image with this urban environment. We hike up the church’s driveway and walk the perimeter, which is now covered in asphalt. The tall wooden doors are locked, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around. We are about to leave when a man appears from around a corner—the pastor. He shakes our hands and invites us inside, considerably more friendly than the hospital employees next door. The wooden pews are the same as they were in my father’s day. He would have sat on these benches as a small boy, bored and fidgeting, thinking of the snakes he was going to trap later that afternoon. The thought is somewhat surreal, as though this structure was stuck in a time warp while the city around it grew and my father aged and built a life thousands of miles away.
“Ayah … hampir … ummmm … dibakar … di sini,” I attempt lamely, using the English-Bahasa word translator I’ve loaded on my computer tablet to attempt to communicate in Indonesian. The pastor looks puzzled. “Dad almost burned here,” I’ve just told him. He shakes his head. I give up and switch to English. “Hello. My father almost burned this church down.”
Semarang, Dutch East Indies, 1937
The tall grass flows like water, in gentle waves across the field. It is hot, very hot, the humid kind of heat that pricks your scalp and gets underneath your clothes until the stickiness itches under your arms, behind your knees, in the crease of your neck. It’s especially bad if you are a fair-skinned Euro, a colonial white boy, a totok. Sjeffie stands on the hill above his house in khaki Bermuda shorts, his blond hair and crisp white socks contrasting with his tanned skin in the tropical sun. He’s now six years old, curious and determined. The German neighbor boy, Friedl, stands beside him, swishing a bamboo rod back and forth through the grass. Friedl looks more like the local Indonesian kids than my father does. His mother is black, a Dutch woman from the South American colony Suriname. She works as a doctor in the hospital with Sjeffie’s father. Friedl’s white German father is an accountant. The crickets hum, and the boys are bored. They’ve caught and released chichaks for hours but have now grown tired of trapping the small geckos. Friedl’s eyes light up. “Hey, Sjeffie, let’s play cowboy and Indian.” The boys have read about cowboys and Indians in their comic books. They know that in America, there are cowboys and Indians everywhere you look. “OK! I get to be the Indian!” my father says enthusiastically. But Friedl wants to be the Indian too, so soon they are just playing Indians. My father says, “OK, but listen, if we’re Indians, we have to make a campfire for smoke signals.” Everybody knows that Indians are constantly making smoke signals.
Friedl gathers twigs and grass and makes a pile. The boys crouch in the Indo sword grass, the alang-alang that towers and sways over their heads and blocks out the searing sun. My father lights the pile with matches he’s swiped from the kitchen. The twigs catch, and the fire crackles. The boys dance and whoop around the fire. But the grasses dip down in the breeze, and the fire licks at their edges. Soon the flames move up their blades. Blade to blade, the fire grows, moving outward. My father stamps at it, but it is spreading too fast. Friedl gets scared and runs home to his parents, but my father stays, stamping furiously as he watches the fire march farther up the hill toward the church at the top. In a panic, he sees that he cannot stop it. He is too little. He is just one boy, helpless against the advancing flames.
Thankfully, the fire department is already on its way. The firemen spray the flames with water and save the church, though it’s blackened on one side wall. Sjeffie is overcome with gratitude for his rescue. But when he comes home, the mood is decidedly different. There is no gratitude; my father is grounded for many weeks by his father. Bungawati, his babu, scolds him in both Dutch and Bahasa Indonesian. He’s a naughty boy! How could he be so careless? “Stout, Sjeffie. Anak bandel!”
Luckily, Sjeffie is now six and is going to school, where he can’t burn anything down. He has to sit on a chair and listen to the teacher. In school, my father learns to read and write letters and numbers. He goes to the Bible school, so the students have to sing and pray to Jesus at the beginning of each day. The school is integrated with Indonesians, Dutch, and Indos, the mixed Dutch and Indonesian kids.
My grandmother, meanwhile, has been growing round again. She lets my father and his two little sisters put their hands on her taut belly. “Your baby brother or sister is in there,” she says. “Are you children ready for that?” They nod enthusiastically. When baby Kees is born a few weeks later, my father is ecstatic that he is no longer the only boy in the family. As Sjeffie sits on the carved wood settee in the family room, his mother lifts Kees from his bassinet and places him on Sjeffie’s lap. “Hold on to him,” she says, and she and the babu smile as my father grips his little brother nervously, kissing his downy head. “Ati-ati,” says the babu. “Careful with the baby.”
When baby Kees is two and my father is in the second grade, my grandfather is transferred to a new hospital and given the position of director. Tearfully, the family says goodbye to the neighbors, and to the household staff who won’t be coming with them. They pack up the house and move five hours south, from coastal Semarang to the center of Java and a city called Madiun. There they settle beneath the massive volcano Mount Lawu, which rises green and lush from the landscape, its crown disappearing ten thousand feet into the clouds.