A nighttime adventure on the Jakarta docks. Original story at Worldhum.
Call him Ishmael.
He was handsome in the Javanese way: slight and slender, his walnut-brown skin, soot-darkened in the Jakarta night, breaking into a flash of white as he smiled at me.
“Are you a tourist?”
He was the first Indonesian sailor to address me as such on the docks of Sunda Kelapa, the old port of Jakarta, where I had gone at night to see the creaking sails of old Makassar schooners. The combination of being half-Asian, cloaked by darkness, and filthy from two weeks of Indonesian travel meant I was rarely mistaken for a Westerner at night.I looked at the Javanese who had called out to me. He was surrounded by other sailors, dark-skinned and short-shadowed at night, illuminated in flecks of blood-orange by the cherries of their clove cigarettes. Their eyes flashed with the casual wariness of wharfmen. It seemed silly to approach a group like that at night on the docks, so I did.
“Dari mana? Where are you from?” the first one asked, ticking off the first question most Indonesians ask foreigners.
“Orang America,” I said.
“Speak Bahasa Indonesia?” he asked, the others listening, closer. Even in the dark, I could see their checked sarongs were stained with sweat and betel juice.
“Sedikit.” A little.
“Look like Asian face.” He lifted a slender hand briefly, as if to touch my look-like-Asian face, and then dropped it.
“Bu saya orang Myanmar. Pak saya orang America.” My mother is from Myanmar and father is American. This sparked an intake of understanding breath from the group. Myanmar, Myanmar, they whispered.
“Nama saya Ishmael,” said the first. My name is Ishmael.
All photos on this page by Adam Karlin