Dreams from My Father (Adapted for Young Adults) Read online

  “Your mother has a soft heart,” Lolo told me one day, after my mother tried to take the blame for knocking a radio off the dresser. “That’s a good thing in a woman. But you will be a man someday, and a man needs to have more sense.”

  It had nothing to do with good or bad, he explained, like or dislike. It was a matter of taking life on its own terms.

  * * *

  —

  I FELT A hard knock to the jaw. Lolo wanted to spar with me.

  “Pay attention. Keep your hands up.”

  We threw punches for another half hour before Lolo decided it was time for a rest. My arms burned; my head flashed with a dull, steady throb. We took a jug full of water and sat down near the crocodile pond.

  “Tired?” he asked me.

  I slumped forward, barely nodding. He smiled, and rolled up one of his pant legs to scratch his calf. I noticed a series of scars that ran from his ankle halfway up his shin.

  “What are those?”

  “Leech marks,” he said. “From when I was in New Guinea. They crawl inside your army boots while you’re hiking through the swamps. At night, when you take off your socks, they’re stuck there, fat with blood. You sprinkle salt on them and they die, but you still have to dig them out with a hot knife.”

  I ran my finger over one of the oval grooves. It was smooth and hairless where the skin had been singed. I asked Lolo if it had hurt.

  “Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”

  We fell silent, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. I realized that I had never heard him talk about what he was feeling. I had never seen him really angry or sad. A strange notion suddenly sprang into my head.

  “Have you ever seen a man killed?” I asked him.

  He glanced down, surprised by the question.

  “Have you?” I asked again.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Was it bloody?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought for a moment. “Why was the man killed? The one you saw?”

  “Because he was weak.”

  “That’s all?”

  Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. “That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?”

  I didn’t answer, and Lolo squinted up at the sky. “Better to be strong,” he said finally, rising to his feet. “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

  * * *

  —

  MY MOTHER HAD expected this new life to be difficult. Before leaving Hawaii, she had tried to learn all she could about Indonesia. She learned that it was the country with the fifth largest population in the world, with hundreds of ethnic groups and dialects. She learned that it had long been under the control of other countries greedy for its vast amounts of oil and timber. The Dutch ruled Indonesia for over three centuries, and the Japanese took over during World War II. She learned about Indonesia’s battle for independence. A freedom fighter named Sukarno became the country’s first president but had just been replaced. Some said he was corrupt. Others said he was too comfortable with the Communists.

  It was a poor country, different from the one she had known, and my mother was prepared for its hardships. She was prepared to squat over a hole in the ground to pee. She was prepared for the heat and mosquitoes. What she wasn’t prepared for was the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath. There was nothing definite that she could point to, really. Lolo was kind and had gone out of his way to make her feel at home, and his family was generous to her.

  But something had happened between her and Lolo in the year that they had been apart. In Hawaii he had been so full of life, so eager with his plans. At night when they were alone, he would tell her about growing up as a boy during the war, watching his father and eldest brother leave to join the revolutionary army, hearing the news that both had been killed and everything lost. He would tell her how the Dutch army had set his family’s house on fire, how they’d fled to the countryside, how his mother had been forced to sell her gold jewelry one piece at a time in exchange for food. He told her that now that the Dutch had been driven out of the country, everything would change. He intended to return and teach at the university and be a part of that change.

  He didn’t talk that way anymore. In fact, he barely spoke to her at all, unless it was about repairing a leak or planning a trip to visit some distant cousin. It was as if he had pulled into some dark hidden place, taking with him the brightest part of himself. On some nights, she would hear him up after everyone else had gone to bed, wandering through the house, drinking whiskey from a bottle. Other nights he would tuck a pistol under his pillow before falling off to sleep. Whenever she asked him what was wrong, he would say he was just tired.

  She suspected these problems had to do with Lolo’s job. He was working for the army as a geologist, surveying roads and tunnels. It was mind-numbing work that didn’t pay much. Our refrigerator alone cost two months’ salary. And now he had a wife and child to support…no wonder he was depressed. My mother hadn’t traveled all this way to be a burden, she decided. She would earn money, too.

  She found a job right away teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the American embassy. The money helped, but she was still terribly lonely. The Americans at the embassy were mostly older men and made rude jokes about Indonesians until they found out that she was married to one. Still, over lunch or in casual conversation these men told her things about Indonesia that she couldn’t learn in the newspapers. They explained that the U.S. government had been upset by Sukarno’s Communist leanings and had decided he wasn’t a friend to America. Word was that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA) had played a part in the military operation that brought him to power, although at the time nobody knew for sure. After the takeover, they told her, the military had swept the countryside and killed anyone thought to be a Communist sympathizer. The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million.

  It came as a shock to my mother to find out that we had arrived in Jakarta less than a year after this wave of brutal killings. It was frightening that history could be swallowed up so completely, that people continued to go about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened. As her circle of Indonesian friends widened, a few of them whispered other stories—about the corruption throughout the new government, the bribes demanded by police and the military, and the crooked business activities of the president’s family and friends. With each new story, she would go to Lolo in private and ask: “Is it true?”

  He would never answer. “Why are you worrying about such talk?” he would ask her. “Why don’t you buy a new dress?”

  She finally complained to one of Lolo’s cousins, a pediatrician who had helped look after Lolo during the war.

  “You don’t understand,” the cousin told her gently.

  “Understand what?”

  “Lolo didn’t plan on coming back from Hawaii so early. During the military takeover, all students studying abroad were told to return immediately, with no explanation, and their passports were taken away. So when Lolo stepped off the plane, he had no idea what would happen next. The army officials took him away and questioned him. They told him that he had just been conscripted and would be going to the jungles of New Guinea for a year. And he was one of the lucky ones. Some of the students who were told to come back are still in jail. Or they vanished.

 
“You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin said. “Such times are best forgotten.”

  My mother left the cousin’s house in a daze. Outside, the sun was high, the air full of dust, but instead of taking a taxi home, she began to walk without direction.

  She could not stop thinking about the word power. In America, power was generally hidden from view. Everyone was supposed to be equal, and that’s what you believed—unless you visited an American Indian reservation or spoke to a Black person who trusted you. Then you saw clearly what was hidden under the surface. But in Indonesia, power was not disguised. People who had it were open about it. People who didn’t, like Lolo, knew their lives were not their own. That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them. And so Lolo had made his peace with power. He learned to forget he had no freedom. His brother-in-law had also “forgotten” and had managed to become successful, making a fortune as a high official in the national oil company. Another brother, though, had made mistakes. He would steal silverware whenever he came for a visit. Lolo understood that in this country, a man like him could make one slip and tumble backward.

  My mother was a foreigner, middle-class and white. She could always leave if things got too messy. The difference in their positions created a gap between her and Lolo that could never be bridged.

  I’m not sure Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them. He was not a man to ask himself such questions. Instead, he concentrated on rising in society. With the help of his brother-in-law, he landed a new job in the government relations office of an American oil company. We moved to a house in a better neighborhood; a car replaced the motorcycle; a television and hi-fi replaced the crocodiles and Tata, the ape. Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually when she refused to attend his company dinner parties, where white American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the bribes they had paid for offshore oil drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the incompetence of Indonesian housekeepers. Lolo would tell her it looked bad for him to go alone and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.

  “They are not my people,” she would say.

  Such arguments were rare, though. My mother and Lolo remained on good terms through the birth of my sister, Maya, and through their separation and eventual divorce. Ten years later, when I was in my teens, my mother even helped Lolo travel to Los Angeles to treat the liver disease that would kill him. It was the last time I saw him.

  It turned out that the tension I noticed had mainly to do with me. My mother had always encouraged me to adapt to Indonesia, and I had. I took care of myself, I didn’t complain about not having much money, and I was extremely well mannered compared to other American children. Too often Americans abroad didn’t learn about the places they visited and acted high and mighty, and she taught me never to be that way. But she had finally realized that I would have many more opportunities in America than in Indonesia, and that my true life lay elsewhere.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST STEP was to make sure I got a good education. Since my mother and Lolo didn’t have the money to send me to the International School, where most of Jakarta’s foreign children went, my mother arranged to add to my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course—lessons that came in the mail. Five days a week, she appeared in my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and taught me English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work. I resisted. I’d tell her my stomach hurt. Sometimes my eyes kept closing every five minutes. But she was determined, and she would patiently say:

  “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

  It wasn’t just my education my mother was worried about. The longer we stayed, the more concerned she grew about my safety.

  One night, a friend and I hitchhiked out to his family’s farm. It started to rain, and there was a terrific place to mudslide. But at the bottom of the hill there was this barbed-wire fence….

  I got home after dark and found a large search party of neighbors in our yard. My mother didn’t look happy, but she was so relieved to see me that it took her several minutes to notice the wet sock, brown with mud, wrapped around my forearm.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “That. Why do you have a sock wrapped around your arm?”

  “I cut myself.”

  “Let’s see.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Barry. Let me see it.”

  I unwrapped the sock, exposing a long gash that ran from my wrist to my elbow. It had missed the vein by an inch, but ran deeper at the muscle, where pinkish flesh pulsed out from under the skin.

  She was not happy when Lolo suggested we wait until morning to get me stitched up. She badgered our only neighbor with a car into driving us to the hospital. Most of the lights were out when we arrived, with no receptionist in sight and only the sound of my mother’s frantic footsteps echoing through the hallway. Finally she found two young men in boxer shorts playing dominoes in a small room in the back. When she asked them where the doctors were, the men cheerfully replied, “We are the doctors,” and went on to finish their game before getting dressed and giving me twenty stitches that would leave an ugly scar.

  Years later she told me that she had had the feeling that my life might slip away when she wasn’t looking, that everyone else around her would be too busy trying to survive to notice.

  But there was something even more important to her than school transcripts or medical services, and that became the focus of her lessons with me. She was afraid that I would take the wrong lessons from Indonesia and wanted to teach me the virtues she had learned in her Midwestern childhood. “If you want to grow into a human being,” she would say, “you’re going to need some values.”

  She made her points using examples from our lives:

  Honesty—Do not imitate Lolo, who hides the refrigerator in the storage room when the officials come so he doesn’t have to pay taxes on it. In Indonesia, even the tax officials expect such behavior, but it isn’t right, here or anywhere.

  Fairness—The parents of the richer students should not give television sets to the teachers in the hope of getting their children higher grades. If those children do receive better marks, they should take no pride in them.

  Straight talk—If you didn’t like the shirt I bought you for your birthday, you should have just said so instead of keeping it wadded up at the bottom of your closet.

  Independent judgment—Just because the other children tease the poor boy about his haircut doesn’t mean you have to do it too.

  Unfortunately, there was not much that reinforced her lessons. I would nod dutifully, but I thought her ideas were impractical. All around me I saw poverty, corruption, cynicism, and people who would do anything for a little security. They lived hard lives and seemed to accept their fate. I didn’t have her faith in the goodness of people and their ability to shape their own destinies. It was only much later that I appreciated the power of her humanism, which I came to see as part of a larger tradition in the United States—the values that gave America such things as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Peace Corps.

  The most persuasive example she could offer was, strangely enough, my distant father. She would remind me of his story, how he had grown up poor, in a poor country, on a poor continent; how his life had been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners, though, or played all the angles. He was hardworking and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different kind of tough
ness, principles that would lead to a higher form of power. I would follow his example, my mother decided. I had no choice, she told me. It was in my genes.

  My mother set out to teach me about the Black experience in America. She would come home with books on the civil rights movement, the recordings of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Dr. King. When she told me stories of schoolchildren in the South who had to read hand-me-down books from rich white schools but went on to become doctors and lawyers and scientists, I felt ashamed of my reluctance to wake up and study in the mornings. According to her, every Black man could be the great Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall or the actor Sidney Poitier; every Black woman could be the voting rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer or the magnificent jazz singer Lena Horne. To be Black was to inherit a special destiny. There were burdens, but we and only we were strong enough to bear them. And we were meant to carry those burdens with style. More than once, my mother told me the calypso singer Harry Belafonte was “the best-looking man on the planet.”

  But I learned that not every Black person was able to appreciate that heritage. One day my mother took me to the American embassy, where I sat in the library while she went off to do some work. After I had finished my comic books and my homework, I found a collection of American magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders. In one of them I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They were strangely, unnaturally pale, as if blood had been drawn from his flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.