The next two years or so were kind of uneventful, I guess. I moved through Primary 1 and Primary 2 in my school; William got bigger and started walking and talking and being someone for me to play with; Daddy still worked in the mall school and I still studied there twice a week; Mummy did more teaching and had more new friends with the neighbours; Um Ritchie visited sometimes but not often; but other things were totally different from before. For example, there were no arguments or shouting between Mummy and Daddy; nobody calling our house late at night; nobody coming in their cars and parking outside all night, and nobody was unhappy anymore.
I learnt more in my school and I became smarter. I learnt about the world and about different places and things started to get less confusing for me. I was always confused why I was different from the other girls in my class, but now I began to understand why I didn’t look the same as them. Sometimes when I was little, I would be walking in the mall with my daddy and people I didn’t even know, strangers, would pinch my cheeks as they walked by and call me lucu – cute. That used to really annoy me (and my daddy, too) but I learnt that they did it because I looked different. Actually many people here think bule kids are very beautiful. Well, maybe, but they still shouldn’t pinch my cheeks, right?
My daddy gave me lots of advice about being a little white kid in Indonesia. He said people would always look at me because I was different, and although most people would be kind, some would maybe say cruel things or do things that annoyed me (like pinch my cheeks, for example!) and that if they did, then I had to ignore them. Daddy said everywhere he went people always looked at him because he was white and almost every day people called out to him if he was walking or out running.
He said it was very annoying wherever he went to hear people shouting, ‘Hey misterrrrrrr, misterrrrrr … misterrrrrrr bean, misterrrrr bean, bule … bule bean …’ and so on, but he just didn’t listen and if someone shouted at him or called him ‘mister’ ‘bean’ or ‘bule’, he just totally ignored them. He said to not even turn my head or look at them when they did this, don’t raise your eyebrows or shrug or look away, just don’t do anything at all and show absolutely no reaction whatsoever, and then the person or people would feel stupid and stop. After all, he said, would I keep shouting at someone in the street if they weren’t paying me any attention at all?
I tried to do as my daddy said and it worked. Now I don’t care about them anymore.
When I was nine, I moved school again. This was a new school nearer the centre of Jakarta, and Mummy and Daddy said it would be better for me. I didn’t mind, actually, because although I liked my current school, it wasn’t very big and it didn’t have a sports field or swimming pool like my new one did. The only problem was it was quite a long way from our house and so Daddy couldn’t take me to school in the mornings anymore.
Not long after this, Mummy and Daddy bought a new house and Mummy opened a new school teaching English there. It was the same as our old house and school in Sidoarjo, but this time it was a bit different because we didn’t live there. It was a very long way from our house, even further than my new school, and it took almost two hours to drive there every day. After I finished my school, our driver sometimes took me to Mummy’s school where I did my homework, and sometimes took me straight home.
Now that I was bigger, I had lots of new hobbies and games. I liked to play football in my school and with Daddy outside our home, and I liked to play with William and help him to dress and feed himself, but I was not a little kid anymore. I was still very close with Daddy, of course, but now I spent more time with Mummy or at home with William. Daddy was busy and got home late still, and often had to work on Saturdays or travel to different places so we didn’t have so much time together. That made me sad a bit, but as I said, I was not a kid anymore and so I didn’t get sad so much anymore.
As Mummy’s school got bigger and more students, the lessons finished later and later every day, and sometimes Mummy was too tired to come home to Cikarang, and so she would sleep in the school. At first this was only once or twice a week, but soon it became almost every day. Mummy said it was better for me to also sleep in the school and we would make one of the rooms there into a bedroom and so I could go to my school and back directly from there each day. I asked Mummy if Daddy would move there too, but Mummy said that would not be a good idea because Daddy still had to go to his work in the mall in Cikarang each day.
I agreed with Mummy that was the best idea because I saw how tired Mummy was if she did too much travelling every day. I was worried about Daddy, though, because who would look after him and clean his clothes or cook his food if Mummy and me and mbak weren’t there? Mummy said Daddy could cook for himself and
