Leila Chudori - Home

Our friends in Peking were very accommodating and showed us extraordinary solidarity. They found us a place to stay. They fed us, and even entertained us, arranging all sorts of meetings for us, as well as visits to sites that often left us feeling exhausted. For the first few weeks in Peking, they put us up at the Friendship Hotel. Thereafter, they found a small house for us to live in. In just a month’s time, Mas Nug, who had been a student of Chinese studies at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, was able to find a job as a translator for the journal Peking Review . Risjaf and I, who couldn’t speak a word of Chinese, were given work as assistants to the clerks in the same office. Frankly, we didn’t care what kind of work we had to do; the important thing was to make a living. Between the time we arrived in October 1965 and the following year, we Indonesians in Peking were in constant contact with one another, everyone sharing and comparing the bits of information he had received.

By this point, I had been able to learn more details about what had happened to my mother and Aji and his family. Military personnel had visited them several times. They had been intimidated. Their homes had been searched and they had been called in for interrogation — several times, in fact — but they hadn’t been detained or incarcerated. By good fortune, my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a kiai , a respected religious leader in Solo, and his status in the community helped to shield my mother from harm. Because of him as well, Mother’s neighbors and other people in the area where she lived offered her sympathy and comfort. In their eyes, she was just “a poor blameless woman who didn’t know what her good-for-nothing son had been up to.”

So be it. I didn’t care what was said of me as long as my mother was safe.

By late 1966, we had received so much training in the concepts behind the Chinese Cultural Revolution that our throats were raw from screaming “Mao Zhu Xi Wan Sui”—Long Live Chairman Mao! — but we were also deemed sufficiently ready, it seems, to be “invited” to move into the Red Village, a commune on the outskirts of Peking where members of several Indonesian social organizations who had also been stranded in Peking were practicing dong bei fang , which can be literally translated as “Facing the Eastern Sea.” Among the Indonesian exiles were other journalists, writers, teachers, and a number of Communist Party cadres. Through instruction in how to work together in a collective manner, we came to understand the kind of communal system the Chinese government sought to promote: a highly structured agricultural system where the members of the commune were obliged to turn over to the state a certain portion of what they produced. In observing this way of life, I became increasingly certain that Marxist theory, which I had once admired, had little more than theory to its credit. I longed to engage in a discussion about this with Mas Hananto — but he was now being hunted precisely because of this ideology and his belief in it.

The name of the village in which we lived was one that stood out for me. As this was the time of the Cultural Revolution, the word “red” in Chinese stood for “happiness” or “revolution.” But as it was there, in the Red Village, that we Indonesians learned of what was happening at home, the word “red” for us symbolized the color of rivers in Java and elsewhere which were clogged with corpses.

So many deaths, whose number grew from hundreds to thousands and on up to a million or more. While some people were “only” interrogated, intimidated, or tortured, many more were killed straightaway — on roadways, in the forest, on river banks, and at the edge of ravines. We heard that in Solo, around the time of the September 30 Movement, some Communist Party members or sympathizers had killed a number of non-Communist youth activists and thrown their bodies into the Solo River. In East Java, the same thing had also happened, with the victims’ bodies thrown into the Brantas River. So what happened was that after September 30, the region’s strongly anti-communist military, paramilitary, and religious groups reclaimed the Solo River and turned it into their dumping grounds. According to the information that made its way among the Indonesian residents of the Red Village — news conveyed in whispers and hushed voices — so many corpses had been dumped into it that at bends in the river, where the corpses accumulated, one could walk atop the bodies from one bank to another. After hearing this news, and for weeks on end, the distance between the Red Village and Solo suddenly evaporated, and I could smell in the air the putrid scent of decomposing bodies.

When this mood came upon me, I grew furious, no longer caring about any threat to myself. Almost hysterical, I sent off a cable begging Aji to move Mother to Jakarta. I don’t know why, but I felt Mother would be safer in Jakarta.

During our fourth week in the Red Village, friends in Peking brought word to Risjaf that most of our colleagues at Nusantara News had been detained. Miraculously, Mas Hananto was not among them. Somehow, he had managed to vanish without a trace.

“Probably disguised himself,” Risjaf quipped in a low and mysterious-sounding voice.

“What as? A beggar?” I scoffed.

Mas Nugroho spoke firmly, optimistically: “Hananto can be slippery. I can see him being able to go most anywhere, without people catching his trail.”

“I’m sure he’s in disguise,” Risjaf repeated.

I didn’t have the will to rebut Risjaf’s foolish notion. In the dark and depressing atmosphere of the Red Village, the only thing we had to bolster strength in one another was a sliver of hope and a gram of energy.

Mas Nug received news from his mother that Rukmini and Bimo had gone into hiding in Yogya a few weeks previously. He sent back the suggestion that they move back to Jakarta to live with his brother.

We received the welcome news that Tjai and his family had made it safely to Singapore. Although Tjai was the most apolitical person among us, he had two strikes against him: he was of Chinese descent and he worked at the Nusantara News office. Because of this, in the current conditions — even though he was not a senior staff member — the odds were not in his favor. Fortunately for Tjai, he had an uncle in Singapore where he and his family were able to find refuge.

There was always a two- or three-week lag in the news we received — sometimes even a month or more. In early April 1966, for instance, we received news dating from early March that was difficult to believe. On March 11, we were told, three army generals had gone to see President Sukarno at the presidential palace in Bogor, where he had taken refuge from demonstrations in Jakarta. There they asked him to sign a statement known as “Super Semar,” an acronym for “The March 11 Letter of Command.” The effect of this command was to transfer the power of the executive office to army commander Lieutenant-General Soeharto. That same letter authorized Soeharto to take whatever measures “he deemed necessary” to restore order to the nation. It was hard to get my head around what was happening in Indonesia. How was it possible for a cabinet meeting that Bung Karno was leading to be interrupted by a demonstration and why had our “Great Leader of the Revolution” felt forced to flee to safety in Bogor? What kind of pressure had those three army generals exerted to make the president sign such an important document, one with repercussions of such great magnitude for the fate of the nation? That day, that event, determined the course of all things to come. I was beginning to grow extremely tired of the political circus taking place at home.