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01. No
Wings On Their Shoes All entries © Nin | How I Write |
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The Indonesian Mail Service is from time to time threatening this country's un-well-being by edging towards an entry in the Guiness Book Of Records. This is how the mailpersons treat incoming mail. The custom's German Shepherds would sniff and bark at all foreign packages first, during which drugs and such would be detained and the cops' German Herders would be summoned to re-sniff and re-bark at them, while the ones that escape both squads of authoritative dogs get opened manually and pornographic stuff are confiscated (for this purpose I think they should hire any other European breed but not German canines -- French, maybe?). All packages are opened and re-sealed and when (in bad days: if) the packages reach the destination, the receiver would then be charged for (sic.) "Packaging", namely 30 cent American dollars materialized in the form of a big plastic bag with an orange logo of a dove. If the packages get lost, we could enquire to the city's main P.O. and get this: "We haven't received such a package yet." We wait for another 2 weeks or so and re-enquire, get the same message plus an advice to complain to the H.Q in Jakarta, which we do, from where we get this: "We haven't received such a package yet", after which we wait for another week and repeat the stunt once more to the same effect plus an advice to ask the customs, at which point the customs' customer service personnel would advice us to blame the British Royal Mail. The last resort people have been dragged into is writing about the tale to newspapers -- which the P.O. people don't read.
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SEE ALSO: History of Indonesian Literature |
1 We only know each other by names via the most impersonal channel, i.e. written pages that are sold as books and news-bearing bulks. He is a novelist and a newsmonger for a Jakarta-based newspaper. I didn't know what he looked like because his books and other stuff were plain words and got no picture of him at all. Alas, mine did. So he could "hello" me when he happened to be in my town and at the same bookshop last evening. After a boring remark on how come I don't write for sale lately, and the predictable funny line ("Somebody told me you have been engaged to a.....Norwegian? American? German?") he told me about the 52nd Frankfurt Book Fair -- he has been a regular visitor of this German event year after year. Surprised at how his fear this time about the Neo-Nazi uprising didn't get even a bit of proof at all, he continued with a long account of how good the Germans he has met there were, about business deals he happened to witness, in which the Germans involved were said to be way less cool than the rest (something you are never to take for granted - 'German' and 'cool' are lightyears apart and are intended by God to stay away from each other), and after I told him I didn't read the item about the Fair when it was on my morning paper last October, he described as best as he could how the event last year was a bit different -- it got a theme, 'Austria'; and next year it is going to be 'Poland' -- "I look forward to it," he said, "I really don't know that there is anything like book-publishing by the Polish." There were over 100 countries and 8,000 publishing houses participated, he said. Two of them are Indonesian -- the Badan Penerbit Kristen Gunung Mulia (Gunung Mulia Christian Publishing Company) from Jakarta, and the Catholic Kanisius Publishing House, where some German Jesuit pastors "reside", from Yogyakarta. Though the two PH's were only able to rent the lowest-priced stalls (around DM 8,000 or US$ 4,000, equals to IDR 32 million) "at least there were our reps," he said, with the nationalism characteristic of almost every post-Reform Indonesian activist. Well, 32 million Rupiah is too big for the small publishers that are trying hard to breathe around here. With the sum that was enough to pay the rent of a 2x2 meters stall in Frankfurt for a month, you can buy a car or give a big downpayment for a house in Yogya -- namely, something for a lifetime. It saddened him, this fact, like it was to me. I don't know when would be a time for my publisher to get to some international event like that German Fair, though the PH isn't among the poorest. His own publisher has been doing bad, having no chain of marketing channels that mine does, so it is also a pie in the sky to him. "Funny that you got to spend to get something you sell to be bought," he said -- an idiotic remark about the basic nature of advertising, and with my immunity towards anything that smacks of sales I couldn't emphatize, but his logic is shared by most people except the production houses. "What else did you get from Germany besides this melancholy?" I asked. "Her," he said, pointing to a Singaporean woman that walked to our direction with a hesitating smile. Oh, well.
2 I sent too much processed junk to the projected landing place of Osama bin Laden. I'm not really sure what am I doing here and what for - I know they wouldn't read the copies, which is good (not the copies, but the not-reading is); but I find myself hoping that they do just a little. That was the whole banknotes I got from feverish forced-labor last week that I mailed the bulk on. Not a dime was left. I lost count if you ask me of the toll of being impulsive; this time, too, only after the copies were made I remembered that the darn books were not mailworthy - not just intrinsically, but also physically - they haven't finished editing them, and both Y and Q are still revising their pieces. But what was I going to do with the five kilograms of bound deceased tree carcases there on my desk? Selling them for food-wrapper? (Which should have been my choice by the way - for one kilo I'd get 30 cents). So the long and short of it was I gave them to the post-office attendants and just hoped for a bin Laden hijack somewhere before my package could arrive in NY. Judging from the manuscripts to perish in some dogmatic flame over a foreign ideological war is the greatest achievement. Since the past two years - as always, things like good used to happen whenever I have already left the vicinity - publishers have been born suddenly in the dead of the night to immediately proclaim existence in the morning. H of course hated this phenomenon, even though we all know it's Darwinism in the field and none of the greenhorns would likely be able to adapt to the homo homini lupus principle there. He'd gotten acid challengers accusing him of monopolizing the business in town (which is true), of publishing utter trash (which is partly right), and of dominating the best workers in the profession (which is incorrect). Last night T told me that there are, to date, 184 publishing houses in Yogya alone. Wow. And I mean wow! This place can't be any larger than Springfield, Missouri - but apparently so crowded with words. T wasn't in a generous mood, he shared the opinion that the sudden inflation of literature (a gigantic licentiousness is, he added, happening in the newspaper, magazine and tabloid publishing) isn't anything to bring on to your saying grace upon a breakfast table. The term 'publishing house' now means a house that publishes something, at least a bulimic size booklet. All of the perpetrators are our age - maybe X, a student I know, is among the youngest at 24 while the oldest player is probably FD, whose birthday this year is 40. Most of them crowd the in-between. One such a publishing house consists of three persons, one computer, and one or none of sponsor. H, to refer to the previously agreed-upon definition of the word 'publisher', functions as the manager of around 200 employees, three editors, ten typists, two dozens of PC's and all sorts of printing equipments that look scary, and he occasionally got sponsors but most of the time using the company's own fund. H's establishment was, mind you, the smallest of its kind. Yet the gap is so wide with the newcomers'. I agree with T about the guesstimate of the nouveau publishing houses' life-span. But I'm happy about the chance to see them springing up from the blue - if everyone writes a book, they said, it's nearing Armageddon then; so we'd better love these ultimate sinners! Of course money is the everpresent problem in the area (I was, a few months ago, paid thirty dollars for writing a preface and the indies publisher already said "Sis, actually we can't afford this".) For Indonesian publishers - and I mean the established companies like H's - one title is usually only printed under 3,000 copies - and all is paperbacks. So tiny a speck compared to the likes of Random House and all the rest of the New Yorkers in the business. When it is a translation, for each 3,000 copies the publishers have to pay the copyright proprietor somewhere around US$ 1,000. Not everyone will think this is not a headache - H certainly doesn't, yet he must pay because he abhors the prospect of being a 'thief'. If by some miracle the translation is reprinted, another one grand got to be transferred to New York or London. That's how things go here. Yet money isn't everything - oh, yes, I still say so - even though it takes too long and often the capital enough to finance one book was gained when the indies publishers were already losing interest and had been selling furnitures instead, but the method of piggy-banking a few cents here and a few more there can be rewarding to the resolute in the end. One more book won't hurt; you don't even have to see it at all since the one and only big store in Yogya has its space dominated by colorful gadgets having nothing to do with written pages. The thing your eyes would get stuck in upon entrance is nowadays a shiny imported billiard table and an array of choice swimsuits.
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Borderline 2000 |
One language is lost every 10 days on this tired old planet. I didn't make that up -- the New Scientist said so last August. With the current rate of systematic (or even if it is randomly executed) "ethnic cleansing" everywhere, it doesn't take a too-scientific mind to make sense of this fact. Language exists because of the existence of the users -- once the race vanishes, there goes the language. But when extinction seems to be nowhere on the horizon, language evolves and grows like un-trimmed bushes. "Of making many books there is no end," complained the writer(s) of the Ecclesiastes. Since 1952, even the translations of the Bible itself have been choking the market for such things -- more than 26 version in English alone. So English is very much alive, and, to make some people's lives miserable, continues to spread across the boundaries of nations and while there is such a thing as dubbers in Germany for the made-in-Hollywood cinematic stuff and voice talents in Indonesia for Mexican soap-operas on TV, there is an unmistakable crevice that clearly tells us how a cultural artifact could not get a divorce from its roots simply by substituting the language. Some of you don't speak English at home -- neither do I, with the conspicuous exception of some indecent words characteristic of the colloquial speech. This, from time to time, makes the already hazy vocab we use to talk with each other even more blurry. Or so some of you tend to think, conclude, complain, whine, shout, write, say. The problem is, I don't agree with you. Not a single crumb. When I said "Well, we speak two different languages, no wonder you always look imbecile to me and I seem idiotic to you all the time", what I meant was not your everyday English, everyday German, everyday Italian, everyday Japanese, everyday Spanish, everyday Hindi and my Indonesian while we communicate in English. What I meant was -- and if you already know me enough I wouldn't even have to say this -- we live two different spheres, and I don't mean countries. We are not really compatible as persons, as selves -- we embrace two distinctive ways of life, frames of reference, beliefs, creeds, and whatever else that makes me I and makes you yourself. Even if we use exactly the same words, we will never get anywhere. If you stare at the previous paragraph and curse me for talking in labyrinth, you know that I am right -- we are too different to ever click anywhere. If you stop reading and shake your head and think "What the f--- is she talking about?", I would say you'd better not waste your time to mail me again, because my days have been short and I wouldn't want to waste my time either talking to you. I don't agree with you when you nail the "native tongues" as the scapegoats for the stupid, exasperating attempt at communication we've been enduring. Your "native tongue" and mine are completely innocent, as far as I'm concerned. It has been you and me, the core of the problem. Don't bother to point out how much of a burden an English word carries with it. Don't show me how many senses are there embedded within one single English word if translated to your native language. Don't try to force me to accept it as the answer why we can't really talk in English. Because I could write a thousand pages just to show you what are the meanings of an English word if translated into Indonesian. And a thousand more, in Javanese. But I won't. Because I speak English with you, and when I speak English I think in English -- not thinking nor speaking a translation of my Indonesian. Let's assume that I speak your language or you speak mine. There would be a perfect communication, right? WRONG. If all this time this one simple fact never actually penetrated your head though I have been throwing hints as often as the Palestine teenagers throw stones at the Israelis, now is the time. We are two irreconcileable beings. It's that simple. So I said "We don't speak the same language." Once again, just in case you still can't digest what I'm saying, I do not mean language. And there is no right or wrong, better or worse, good or bad, here. Simply difference. Which is, this time, between two spheres that cannot live side by side. Adios.
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Footnote: Everybody went to jail in Colonial Indonesia since 1500's. Generation after generation were locked up in swampy spots of exile, such as Digul, Papua, where malaria and blood fever and other equally indiscriminate man-eaters made sure to decimate the number of prisoners in case of rare executions. And incarceration didn't spare my generation under Suharto's regime that only ended in 1998. The so-called penitentiary institutions were open wide for those who somehow escaped being eliminated in sinister plots behind our backs. Debbie Slater should have spared a few secs to look real life up, just a byte or two away from the edges of the secure little American hometown of hers -- to Cuba, Peru, Nicaragua, and the like. See History of Indonesia at the particular page of recent years of grotesque jailments. |
I'm not sure how to start, but I have to hope to undo the impression that I conferred some honorary degree to criminals -- and endorse, or even encourage, crimes in general -- and indiscriminately condoned convicts of any social sin. Just because I have some pen-pals whose whereabouts these days are their wardens' anxiety-attack, doesn't mean I am for crimes. Careful here: crimes are not twins of getting jailed. Nobody loves crimes, for God's sake. Crimes are social actions against everything society lives by. Even misanthropes are members there, no matter how repulsed they are of the fact. I, gentlemen, also don't need an invite to enter Society - as long as this planet still be, my membership is registered. I didn't say "as long as I still be" - because death wouldn't free you from what has been confining you while you live. Rites or neglect, entombment or just dust to dust, commemoration or forgetfulness - they are our share in post-life, distributed by society we help to infuse by observing the same towards our deceased fellow-members today. I did not seek cons. I know several members of an online community which business is, between one office duty and another, or sandwiched right after such things and before nervous-breakdown, to hunt inmates to exchange emails or snail-mail with them. But my history is, like everything else in my life, incidental happenings. A man I knew got incarcerated last December. We only talked online and via the phone, so it took a while before I knew he was running away from his time. This criminal on the lam is, after he decided to take the punishment, still a recipient of my snail-mail and emails (via his family) today. That's how it started. In my world, I have known some people who knew the inside of prisons. A professional commedian, convicted for a joke against Islam; a dozen students who were detained after virtually every protest rally against the government. Well-known writers, editors, publishers, in this country had been jailed once upon a time. Journalists are, too, and for them a special treatment was also ready - kidnapping or/and execution. In that political sphere, my friend, it is impossible for me to acquire the so-called 'virtuous' point of view - too many people, wholly innocent, were in jail; this functions to disable such a naive, sterile moralizing. Early on I had gotten the perspective that I still use today; while some activists took jailment as a political and personal achievement, I suspended judgment. 'Ordinary criminals', impolitical crimes, were something I saw sometimes when I was young. The neighborhood wasn't a respectable area and so it was plagued by this kind of mammals. Housebreakers, muggers, pick-pocketers, 'bodyguards', extortionists, etcetera. They were my neighbors. But this is the first time in my life that I deliberately take in jailbirds as friends. I replied to emails forwarded to me by the activists of Conhunt, Inc. - initially not the inmates' themselves, but their families. Thereby I had some correspondence with their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives, ex-colleagues. All of the convicts in the picture are male, alright, because they are what I need; I want to know about them for 'my' inmate, the first that I accidentally knew, who is a man. The sharp division of the penalty system renders it different for male, female, and kid offenders. Their problems are different. Treatments are different. So I specialized. And I focused on their families and so on because I need to know about myself - I am a convict's friend, at least. It is of course easier from this distance, to be so 'kind'. If the man next door gets himself into jail tomorrow, I admit perhaps I would not even see him once a year. Social sanctions widens, when it comes to crimes; families and friends get into the same mire. In Indonesia, too, ex-cons find life outside prisons unbearably hard on them. There is also another reason that I had developed a milder distaste towards criminals when I was a kid. Not only because some social junk (that's how they called my neighbors) were humans as far as I knew, thus disproving the stereotype that they were child-molesters, wife-abusers, and so on, but my readings built me a lot. Sydney Carton was in jail, Rudolph Rasendyll, Monte Cristo, Quentin Durward; real people, too, whose lives (or rather deaths) had sparked the birth of tons of fiction -- Walter Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey, Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela. Hordes of literary heroes were in jail. Then there is the way I was socialized into this civilization, i.e. how I was brought up. I remember when I was, like, five year-old, and my grandma told me about the Indonesian Independence - how President Sukarno was jailed and exiled and jailed again and so forth - why, I asked, was he a serial killer? He did not even kill one man. He and so many people before him, a chunk were from my own family-tree, were treated as criminals for nothing but their heads and spirit; imprisoned for their ideas; put in jail for us, for Indonesia, for the people they didn't know by name and sight; they were all Jesuses to my five year-old brain. This Republic is still young enough to maintain this sort of mental camaraderie, even today. I bet a long long way back around George Washington's days was the same. And I knew an ex-con (who probably went in again after some time out) who was my hero at 10. They said he had beaten dozens of people to permanent disabilities. But he jumped into a deep sewer one day to rescue my kitten, and he carried my friend home after a bike accident, telling her mom it wasn't her fault (otherwise she, although was already injured, would have gotten more wounds from the parents' punishment). It might be nothing Javanese but it surely is my family's creed: whoever takes crime as a career is sinning against society, but as long as he or she cares about other people (different people from those they victimized, as a matter of course) then it might be pardoned - especially after they took the punishment. Javanese, Betawinese, and all other ethnicities have their own Robin Hood among the folktales. Even with a very sane mind, we can only say Robin Hood is a criminal but (bla bla bla good things). Still in the same line, whosoever does crime against ultra-bad, corrupt, cruel, evil victims are not criminals. Lawful, legal actions are not synonymous with justice. Whoever does, in the name of the law, deprive others of their rights, such as land, houses, cattles, etcetera, is a criminal. Those I would have gotten from the world itself even if Grandma didn't teach me about them. The Indonesian 'justice' system had never affirmed the idea of being just, and always left a doubt. Above all else, in all these years I have learned to trust myself in not subscribing to an overall classification of human behavior as 'good' or 'bad', 'right' or 'wrong', without considering the deeds individually and seeing how it relates to the circumstances. If you become a tourist in Java, and you are mugged somewhere, just by your scream a hundred men might come to your rescue, and they would eye you with disdain if you try to dissuade them later from killing your mugger on the spot. Can you, sir, tell me if that is good or bad, right or wrong? Kindly do. I will only plea guilty for a few things which are, even to me in self-righteous days, weirdly 'wrong'. My grandma hates criminals who go to jail for corruption, forging cheques, and the like. She does even though the rest of the principles we share in thinking about them won't change because of it. But this private distaste upon particular genres of crime is, yes, nutsy. I got the same disease. Hired guns are 'okay', the man who steals money from his mother's purse is not. Jailed for brawls are 'not so bad', but imprisoned because of debts is disgusting. I am conscious of the kooky system of evaluation that I seem to subscribe to, so I give it a chance to change itself into something saner. I'm still trying. Back to my criminals - I can never respect anyone who moralizes about friendship or any greater relationship people have with convicts. You just have no idea what it's like. This human race is born gregarious. Even psycopaths have some other people somehow related to them. In the past, say, ten years ago in 1989, people whose Somebodies were incarcerated formed small clusters to generate companionship. Some rather kooky self-peddlers manually hunt male convicts to make something they thought of as resembling 'love'. Some self-canonized saints visited jails and tried to earn repentance or husbands or wives. The internet doesn't change the thing, but it makes it more solid, stretches its scope to infinity, and it strengthens the rings around convicts over a colossal scale; not, perhaps, in size but certainly in crossing every barricade. Of time, of place. There are people directly related to cons in a personal basis (family, etcetera), these make the inner circle. Outside it, a layer of 'the concerned' - assorted beings who have some interest in people behind the bars, boosted by a variety of motives, generally interpersonally-centered. A wider ring consists of social researchers, thinkers, lawmakers, and the like, who are not interested in jailbirds as themselves. The most significant thing the internet does that wasn't even thinkable ten years back in time is, it opens the jailgates to everyone. Of course I mean not to enter it as a fellow inmate! Just an example, by now I have had a complete aerial photographs of one particular prison in Fulton. I know how it is officially said as being managed. I know the warden and several other significant names. I know how letters of complaints to the warden, the Governor, and so on, look like. I know what sort of cons do what kind of activity and where approximately. This wouldn't be so easily gotten in 1990; the internet, the cybercommunities, correspondence with a jailbird and his regular visitors, enable me to have the knowledge - which is practically unrelated to anything in my life, especially with regards to geography. It is 12 a.m. there in Fulton whenever my clock says midnight. Now the clever question: what for? The answer is exactly the same as why I always reply to your emails, my friend. Please nag yourself to get something concrete to sustain the fragile logic that has turned your heart into steel.
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| Sailing
On 2000 |
I'm a very bad cartographer. Funny that this was seldom gotten even by the tidiest, single-minded skippers I met, but that actually is the truth. When they occasionally showed me their home-drawn maps and asked for my opinion, I relied completely on my instinct and sense of direction -- not on some inexistent knowledge of seafaring at all. I don't even sail, in the first place. I drift. But sometimes it was all that they needed -- not an actual help, just something that gave them the sense of doing a journey. These were the ones who thought that they lost direction for some reasons. To whom, unfortunately, all that I was able to say was that they did not need any direction to begin with -- that they already knew where they were going to -- that they would, no matter what, arrive somewhere, if that's what they wanted -- or they would always be somewhere though never got to any harbor, if they knew what the journey was all about.
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Genie
Footnote: SEE ALSO: Complete history of Eurasians (including and especially Eurasian authors) in Indonesia |
I will only give you a little something I cut from a Dutch writer's work, Eddy du Peron. It tells of something that doesn't have anything to do with literature, i.e. his observation of the Indonesian paramilitary around our independence in 1945, but it represents what I want to say to you now:
Those skills I have told you about are the weapons. The tools of the trade. Fussing over them is not excusable. I will give you another quote, since I can't possibly say it this way. My own words will be falling into a cliche, and you must have been sick of hearing such a thing. So I borrow from Andrei Stoltz:
To me, you have all one needs to be an artist. Listen - to yourself.
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Footnote: See also the real-life educational system & schooling in Indonesia (with pictures) |
"So the condoms didn't work?" people here asked me, when the sister of a friend (American) got married at 18. They also asked "Is her family too poor to send her to college?". This is something that I think you might not comprehend yet. To be earning one's own bread at 16 is not an achievement in Indonesia. The only thing that will make the parents proud is if he or she earns as many 'A's as possible in High School, where he or she in our eyes belongs to when he or she is 16. Workplace, to us, is for the unfortunate who for some reasons can't go to school. In the world that I know, over my part of Indonesia and in my time, getting a formal education from Kindergarten to University straight on is normal - prevention from having so is considered anomalous, for instance the lack of financial backup, sheer distance from pedagogic institutions, unplanned pregnancy, etcetera. We are not moving on the same line Northerners (especially Americans) seem to stroll on - if someone gets dropped-out of school at, say, 16, and works in a grocery instead, we call this a calamity - it is not by any means normal to us; a kid that age ought to stay at school and keep studying formally until graduated from college. If someone gets married at 18, we call this catastrophic - even as we recognize the legal age to be 17 (thus a year earlier than Americans), this age is indecent to start a family in and our impression of the thing is generally a pity towards whoever does it. The Oxford English Dictionary said that the word 'barbarian' means 'a rude, wild, uncivilized person'. Even if they lacked one or two or all of the trio of characteristics, still anybody non-Grecian was barbarian to the Greek and anyone non-Chinese was barbarian to the Chinese - so funny that both the Greek and the Chinese then were barbarians to each other. The vicious circle got us the pyramidal barbarianization of every human being inhaling the ancient oxygen. 'Uncivilized' embodies the vice unrivalled by a good many other terms. Perhaps you'd agree that 'civilization' whitewashingly means ability to deal with words, to leave written evidence of existence, and to record history - the majestic nomads like Atilla's Huns and Alaric's Goths hardly fulfilled this requirement. 'Rude' and 'wild' are something else. These can't be confined to certain peoples. Those who wrote of Atilla's exploits as uncouth barbaric actions were the very people whose civilization enacted gladiator mortal combats and prospered on trade of slaves and crucified, inquisited, beheaded, and so on, the unconformists of their time. The respect lavished upon those who write and read is ancient; this sort of uselessness was spared by marauding chiefs and bloodthirsty warlords. The kingdoms of pre-Indonesian years did the same. The so-called 'learned people' is never, anywhere, a majority; their value is indeed in the fact that there's always so little of them around. I think this has something to do with later Indonesian snobbish attitude when it comes to formal education. Just a little concession here, though -- is it snobbery to begin with? Regardless of this word's senses the core of the thing is that we see it as normal - as I have so often said before this line. In 1900, with the practice of the Dutch's 'politics of ethics', higher education was a bit lively for the first time in their East Indies; but of course it couldn't be universal; only the members of the aristocracy and such could get formal schooling. Previously the sons and general family members of kings could study in some Holland universities - they returned as doubly-respected entities, being so educated while having been exalted in social position already even if they were not Masters of Law. The Dutch actually only let them pursue formal learning to equip their own colonial government; but the side-effect was of course inevitable that this small percentage of people (some said no more than 2% of the entire population) would play the crucial part in giving birth to nationalism transcending ethnicities and eventually to the Republic of Indonesia in 1945. The agrarian populace revered the ones who had absolutely no idea how to use a hoe and to distinguish the grains of rice from beans - the revolutionary gunners hailed the same entities who didn't know what going to war was really like. The New Order had made a resolution to render formal education compulsory for every citizen aged 7 to 12, then revised it into a 'nine years of compulsory ed' later. But since it isn't entirely free, the cost is still too much for many and unschooled kids are common sights. Under the Reform amendments of previous bills the formal pedagogy isn't centralist anymore, and until this very minute the enforcement of decentralization is still generating haphazard maladies everywhere from provinces down to districts. All the while, from the first days of this Republic, the place of the formally educated stays the same. In the seventies most people who went to universities were considered superpeople, while the ultimate achievement was still (as was under the Dutch colonialism) "to work for the government". In the eighties getting university diplomas to start a business of one's own was the accoladed gain. In the nineties to get out of universities to join multinational corporations is ultra-chic. Stories of people - businesspersons - who got major successes without getting highly educated would show you what formal education means today. These stories are printed on magazines and newspapers and broadcasted by TV stations - why? Because to us it is an anomaly. Otherwise it won't splash at all. It underlines the Indonesian state of mind, with its fixation on formal education to assess one's worth. The praises lavished on autoeducated persons who made fortunes upon a Junior High diploma and God-given talent in selling bottled water is not appraisal of being non-educated; it is, on the contrary, displaying the value we put on the normal way of growing up, i.e. spending half of our lives in classes, uninterrupted by mundane business such as getting pregnant or selling insurance before it is time - after graduation. In my years too many university students were barely literate - i.e. they studied like High School kids did. Today these kids are already fathers and mothers and workers of the upper crust of the social realm, where being a bachelor is no longer an all-amazing status and that's why they keep on studying to be Doctors and Professors - diplomas generate automatic raise of salary. But still you have to get schooled first in any era to be normal. That's my story.
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