Di Antara

Buku-buku dan dua potong ayam…
Surabaya is Indonesia’s second-largest city; much less crowded, much less dense, much less exhausting.

Unless you get lost inside a five-story, six-tower shopping mall trying to find a bookstore where you can on the one hand find a decent novel written in English, and on the other hand purchase yourself a good sturdy notebook in which notes can be taken easily without a desk around (the usual state of my interviews).  Neither of these tasks were easy, and I wandered around Tunjungan Plaza my only night in Surabaya endlessly trying to find both of these items – especially something to read to replace the incredible Durga/Umayi by Mangunwijaya which I finished way before I expected to. 

Strangely, the novels that I ultimately found available in huge quantities were English translations of Yukio Mishima’s works, at a Japanese department store.  I’ve read and enjoyed Mishima before so this wasn’t the most terrible thing, but it is a bit strange to find yourself choosing between Jackie Collins, picture books of automatic weapons, adaptations of Star Wars, Michael Crichton, and a Japanese nationalist who committed ritual suicide after launching a very abortive coup attempt in the 1970s.

I can’t say much about Surabaya – stayed in a very western hotel, visited a very western shopping mall where I have to say that Popeye’s Chicken never tasted better after eating muscular (read:  tough) ayam kampung in Flores for a week.  Maybe I had the bird flu on the brain, but something about picking up an unnaturally hefty chicken breast after three months of no American-style “chicken,” and my mouth was happy.

Babies and cigarettes…
Over the last two weeks, I lived in hotels, and this gave me some occasions to watch TV.  In Surabaya, I was met with the news of the terrible events in Sharm al-Shaikh, and mortified by all the details emerging from the second round of London bombings.  When I woke in the morning, I think I saw on one of the news tickers that small explosions had gone off in Turkey as well, and all I could pray for was a day without bombs, a hope that nothing is coming home to America, and that Indonesia can make it to one year free of major acts of terrorism.

But after watching enough Indonesian TV, I started to get a feel for what drives the ad market here.  You can tell what it is easily in America – it’s all cars, all the time, cars and maybe sneakers and soft drinks on occasion; but car ads are the most frequent, and the most intensely rotated.  “Like a Rock” is forever planted in the American subconscious.

In Indonesia, there are two ad forces most heavily in circulation:

1.  Cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes. 
Tobacco is a big business in Indonesia, which I will go into more of when I talk about Madura.  But I would say literally 50-75% of all commercials on TV are for cigarettes – Djarum, Gudang Garam, Dji Sam Soe, L.A., Mild, Kansas, Sejati, and that’s about all I can remember off the top of my head.  These are all local cigarette brands, produced in Indonesia for Indonesians, by Indonesian companies.  If you think our tobacco companies are shameful, wait until you switch on the nightly news at ten o’clock, with an animated cube in the corner that first says “Metro TV” in red, and then revolves to show “Gudang Garam.”  I think half of the Indonesian TV channels now in business would shut down if the cigarette companies were to cease TV advertisements as they have in America for decades; no one would be around to pay for their programming.

2.  Expectant mothers, and recent mothers
This is another good 10-15% of the market for adverts.  All kinds of drink mixes and related products – we’re talking powdered milk and nutritional supplements.  Want your child to be strong?  Make sure they drink this kind of milk.  Want your son to grow up to become a wealthy, handsome corporate mogul?  Feed them this juice mix.  Want your fetus to be healthy and come out of you right?  Make sure you drink this nutrient supplement.  It must work pretty well – standing in line before a very expectant mother in a Carrefour last night, I saw a big basket full of those nutritional items.  Nothing like a little maternal panic to make some money.

Anyway, I don’t know anyone in Surabaya, so after I used a signal flare and a compass to navigate my way out of the mammoth shopping mall and walked ten km to the nearest taxi queue, I watched a few hours of TV in my hotel room.  Wow – after one year of grad school with no TV, I had forgotten what it is like to have sixty channels of TV.

***

And then I went to bed, and early afternoon, Sunday, connected up with a second facilitator, and off to Madura we went.

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