As an altar boy at Saint Anthony’s in my youth, when the Roman Catholic vernacular was Latin, I had to memorize all the Latin prayers of the Mass but my first true experience in trying to communicate in a foreign language was when I was in high school and the study of a foreign language was a college pre-requisite. Weston Union High, located in a rural community with a low tax base and a student body population of less than 200, had only one foreign-language teacher and that was Mrs. Edith Head who taught first- and second-year Spanish. Because the school could ill afford to have her teaching only two classes a day, she was also the supervisor of detention classes where the mostly-male minor delinquents who had been caught smoking behind the gym or setting off a cherry bomb in a toilet would snicker as they made puns about her surname. In Spanish, my name in is “Juan,” of course, but I asked to be called “Patricio,” my confirmation name, because it sounded more romantic to my ear. I can’t say that by the end of two years of Spanish I was able to carry on a conversation with any fluency but the experience did pique my interest in language learning.
In September 1970, after enrolling as a fine arts and theater major at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I signed up for French 101. Harboring dreams of becoming an artist and living in France one day, I was certain that French would be a vital tool in my rise to fame as an international artist. In my class, due to an excess of “Johns,” I was called “Jacques”—but not for very long because a burst appendix in early November kept me out of school for two weeks, after which I was unable to catch up with the rest of my peers and was forced to quit the class. Longer, however, did last the name ascribed to me by my ballet teacher: “Hubert”—which sounds downright old-fashioned in English but transforms into an altogether different moniker when lipped by a French ballerina and dance instructor.
In 1974, after transfering to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and switching my undergraduate major to Southeast Asian Studies, I began to study Indonesian. In class, Audrey Unggerer, the teacher’s assistant, called me Yahya, the name of Saint John the Baptist in Arabic and Indonesian. The following year, when taking a private tutorial in Dutch-for-reading purposes, Professor Christine Boot, would sometimes, absentmindedly, call me “Jan”—pronounced “Yahn”—but there was no misunderstanding as to whom she was speaking.
Following completion of a course in advanced Indonesian at Malang Teachers’ College (IKIP) in August 1976, I moved to Jakarta to enroll in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Indonesia. There, beginning in January 1977, I studied “History of Modern Indonesian Literature” with Widarti Goenawan, “Comparative Indonesian Literature” with Sapardi Djoko Damono, and “Literary Theory” with Boen Oemarjati. I also enrolled in an intensive Dutch language course which met three hours each day. It was this course that proved to be the most time-consuming but, ironically, much more mentally challenging than the three courses conducted in Indonesian.
A party in 1977 to welcome new Dutch-language students. Around the table (l-r): Melani Hardjosudiro, Zuly Chudori, JHM, Dewi…?, Reni Anggraini, Felix Sun, Susi Moeimam, Inge Bernard. Standing: Susanto Zudhi, Mimi …?.
Through the “Indonesia network” at U.W.-Madison and, more specifically, the assistance of the late Mannasse Malo, whom I had come to know when he was pursuing a PhD in sociology and I was secretary at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, I found accommodations in Jakarta at the home of his wife’s aunt in Pasar Minggu, which was far from the U.I. campus in Rawamangun, East Jakarta, but had several distinct advantages, one of which was that Bapak and Ibu Pattimahu, spoke Dutch as their first language. As such, I was able to practice with them at home the language I was learning in school. To my dismay, however, they called me the diminutive “Joni.”
I have many fond memories of the semester I lived in the Pattimahu home. The cost of rent was Rp. 30,000 per month (approximately US$ 300 today) which was far more than most students could afford to pay but as I was teaching English 6-8 hours a week at Rp. 2,000 per hour (US$ 20 today) to a well-heeled Parks Department official and a Naval officer who was to be consigned to the Indonesian embassy in London, I could afford the expense. Further, the rent included both laundry and (if I were home) three full meals a day and if Ibu Pattimahu had a hobby, it was baking for never a day went by when there was not a snack waiting for me on dining table under a netted food cover when I came home from school. After a quick “Hoe gaat het me U?” to her in greeting, I’d scarf down the scrumptious cheese-flavored kastengels, pineapple-filled nastar cookies or whatever it was she had prepared that day.
Yet another advantage to the Pattimahu home was my expansive bedroom and study area on the second floor of the house, two sides of which were open-aired and looked over a grove of hairy fruit and jackfruit trees. Especially when it rained, the sound of rain on roof tiles harkened me back to the diminutive bedroom of my youth whose inside door to a tin-topped porch became a timpani in times of tempest.
Similar to my parents at the time, this Ambonese-Manadonese couple were in their mid-fifties and had numerous offspring, with seven children of their own. These things, too, reminded me of home, much as did their steady stream of conversation around the dinner table and their bent for engaging in playful argument about most anything at all. The one thing, however, that reminded me most of home was Mrs. Pattimahu herself who could have been my mother’s twin when, before each meal, she made the Sign of the Cross and bowed her head deep in prayer. And just as my mother would say, in English, “Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.” Ibu Pattimahu would intone, in her Indies-accented Dutch, “Zegen ons, Heer, en deze spijzen, die Uw milde hand ons geeft, door Christus onze Heer. Amen.”
From religious services I attended with the Pattimahu family, I knew that Ibu Pattimahu could just as easily recite Christian prayers in Indonesian and one day I asked her why she chose to pray in Dutch. She told me, “I speak to God in the language in which I feel most comfortable—which is Dutch. I believe that there is one God even He does have as many names as there are languages in this world. Likewise, He recognizes all His children’s names no matter which one they might go by.”
So very true, I then realized. Whatever my language or race and regardless of my name, be it John, Juan, Patricio, Jacques, Hubert, Yahya, Jan, or Joni, I knew that He would know my voice and make no distinction when I called.
John H. McGlynn
john_mcglynn@lontar.org