A Fortune-Teller Told Me (36 page)

“But how do you recognize them, these Bunyans?” I asked.

“Easy!” intervened Nordin, who had followed the whole conversation and seemed to find it all quite normal. “You only have to look at their upper lip, here.” He pointed to his own mouth. “The Bunyans don’t have this division that we have, here under the nose. Their upper lips are flat right across.”

At midnight the market was still bustling with people. On my way back to the inn, I was struck by something I had not previously noticed. Amidst the crowds there was an extraordinary number of madmen: peculiar, grubby types with copious beards and tufts of long tangled hair. One of them paced back and forth, a sack in his hand, constantly turning to stare at the ground as if he had lost something; another rushed about intoning litanies; others dragged plastic bags full of useless rubbish. One stood leaning against a lamppost as if expecting someone.

“Who are you?” he asked me in perfect English as I brushed past.

“Who are
you?”
I found myself instinctively replying. It was dark and I could not make his face out. When I tried to approach him and see if his upper lip was flat, he ran off.

E
very place is a gold mine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passersby, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread—a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met—and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theater of humanity.

I was in Tanjung Pinang simply because it was the one destination possible for those wanting to leave Singapore by sea. I meant to stay there just a couple of days, long enough to find a ship bound for Jakarta. But little by little I became involved in the daily life of the town, and I could have spent weeks there, following up something or someone that had caught my interest. Tanjung Pinang: another of those places, hard to find on the map, where I landed up through that infinite chain of chances which had begun with the Hong Kong fortune-teller.

One morning I had got up very early, run for half an hour and then gone looking for somewhere to have breakfast. And that was how I came to meet Old Yang. He had just finished removing, one by one, the numbered wooden boards that formed the door of his restaurant, had lit a cigarette and begun sweeping. First he pretended he had not noticed me, as is the way with Asians, convinced as they are that there can be no communication with a foreigner. I addressed him in Chinese, which reassured and surprised him.

“I am Chinese too,” I said.

“Chinese?”

“Yes. I belong to an ethnic minority: the Italians.” The joke never fails. China is a great empire, populated mainly by the Han—the
“flower men”—but also by a great many “people in small numbers,” minorities: the Mongols, the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Kazaks, the Dai, the Hui, the Miao, and—why not?—the Italians. From the Chinese point of view it is quite plausible; in fact, every now and then there is someone who does not realize it is a joke.

Old Yang was a classic Chinese of the diaspora. His father was from the province of Canton. He arrived on Pulau Bintan at the end of the last century with nothing but the singlet and shorts he had on, and worked in the bauxite mines as a coolie. When he had saved enough, he had a wife sent over from his village in China, and produced five children with her. Old Yang was the firstborn, so he had remained in Tanjung Pinang to look after his father and then to run the restaurant his father had opened. His two brothers and two sisters, by contrast, were sent to study in China in the early 1950s. In those years tens of thousands of young Chinese, children of poor emigrants, returned to the mother country from the various countries of Southeast Asia. China was liberated, the universities, once the preserve of the rich, were open to all, and to study was free. To the Chinese of the diaspora it seemed the ideal chance to give their children a Chinese education. Many never returned. They got caught up in the drama of that long-suffering land, and became victims of the Cultural Revolution. The fact that they came from abroad, from families who lived in capitalist countries, made them suspect. They were denounced as spies and counterrevolutionaries and sent to labor camps, to be reeducated or to die.

It was only in 1972, thanks to Chou Enlai, who took a personal interest in these “seeds of the dragon” scattered around the world, that the survivors were able to leave China discreetly. But where could they go? The countries they originated from, all engaged in fighting against Communist guerrillas, suspected those who came back from China of being Maoist agents and would not permit them to return. A few thousand remained for years and years in the limbo of Macao. Old Yang never saw his siblings again. One brother was beaten to death, the other was unable to leave China and is still living in Dailian. His two sisters, after years in Macao, finally got to Hong Kong and thence to Canada, in that ceaseless migration that has taken the Chinese to every corner of the earth.

While we were talking, Yang’s son walked in. A businessman, one of
the new generation. He had formed a company with some in-laws in Singapore, and bought and sold land on the island. He too had the beeper and the Ray-Ban case attached to his belt. His dream? To emigrate. Where? “To any country where the average per capita income is higher than here,” he replied. Typical!

Old Yang and Young Yang were born and had lived all their lives in Tanjung Pinang, but they had no affection for the place, no real contact with its original inhabitants. They found the Indonesians rude and uncultured, and boasted of belonging to “the great Chinese civilization,” of which, however, they bore precious little. They felt themselves to be Chinese: their ancestors were Chinese and their descendants would be Chinese. China was their mother country. Where that China lay was far from clear. It was not the China of Mao and Deng Xiaoping—too poor; not Taiwan—too small and insignificant. It lay in the idea of China, an undefinable Chineseness with which the great multitude of the diaspora identify themselves.

Of Pulau Bintan, Old Yang said: “It’s an excellent spot, there’s freedom to do business here, and if things go badly, we can always turn to our relatives in Malaysia, or ask for help from those in Singapore.” That is how the Chinese reason wherever they have emigrated: for them the countries they live in are rather like chessboards on which they play out a game.

Indonesia has a population of 190 million. The Chinese constitute barely 2 percent, but 70 percent of the country’s trade is in their hands, and the top five industrial groups and the major banks are theirs. Everything is the product of Chinese companies: from soap to cement, from cigarettes to coconut oil. Even Tanjung Pinang is largely in Chinese hands: they control most of the shops and the boats that shuttle between there and the nearby islands, and they are involved in all the new development projects. The city’s first karaoke bar belongs to a Chinese, and so do the brothels, disguised here too behind the innocent signboards of barber shops.

There I had the whole story of the diaspora Chinese—strong, tough, hardworking, always ready to move on and adopt the passport of any state that would guarantee them security and protection. One of their new ways of making money is to build, to cover everything in cement—and in this activity the Chinese are in the forefront. By now their influence extends all over Asia. They are destroying Bangkok. Soon they will
do the same with Rangoon, Hanoi and every other city to which they have access. It is the diaspora Chinese who, with their massive investments, are now remaking the coastal cities of China in their own image. They are the new models of success, heroes of the Chinese youth disoriented by the failure of Maoism. The Chinese of the diaspora seemed to me more and more like missionaries of that materialism from which I was trying to escape.

During my morning run I had seen a Catholic church on a hilltop, and Nordin told me the priest was a Frenchman who had been there at least ten years. Certainly this must be a man to talk to.

That afternoon I went there on foot. Churches are always oases of peace, order and cleanliness, with their ranks of pews and the notice boards listing the times of masses and prayers. I enjoyed the contrast with the smelly chaos of the city, but, to my disappointment, the priest was not there. He had gone to another island on a retreat, and would be back in two weeks. I had already turned away when a cleric came after me, saying: “If you like, there’s a Dutch father here.” I waited awhile in a beautiful airy room. The sun was streaming in. A tall, elegant man of about fifty appeared. He had long blond hair and was dressed in brown trousers and a white shirt, with leather sandals on his feet. Father Willem was in Tanjung Pinang for a few days’ visit, like me. He came from Bangka, an island further south, toward Java. The Dutch, being interested in the tin mines, had given Singapore to the British in exchange for Bangka. Not a good bargain!

Father Willem had traveled all over the archipelago, and in his opinion the situation was practically the same on every island: the Chinese are a minority everywhere, and everywhere the most enterprising, the most active, the wealthiest. The difference between them and the local people, he said, was simple: “An Indonesian goes fishing and has a good catch. He’s happy, he goes home and for days he enjoys his earnings and feels he can put his feet up. A Chinese goes fishing and has a good catch; he thinks, ‘This is the good season, and I’ve found the best waters.’ He unloads his boat, goes fishing again and catches a lot more fish.” Father Willem believed it was a question of race, and there was nothing to be done about it.

I mentioned that someone had spoken to me of the Bunyans. Of course, he said, they were famous even on his island, but Lingga was their capital.

And magic?

“Here magic is the real world,” he said, as if wishing to make his position clear in case I was the usual dismissive skeptic. “If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything about Indonesia. Magic is everywhere; magic determines people’s lives more than anything else.”

Father Willem was born in Holland before the war, and had come to Indonesia as a missionary in 1960. He had remained there, becoming an Indonesian citizen so as to avoid problems of visa and residence. “When I arrived, as a good European, I thought that magic was superstition, and I wouldn’t accept any part of it. But with time I’ve learned to respect it. It’s something I now bear in mind. At the risk of your misunderstanding me, I might go so far as to say I believe in it. In magic there’s something profoundly real, and true. Here the people say they are Muslims, or Christians in the case of my parishioners, but that’s all on the surface. Underneath there’s that other world, with these beliefs which are so much stronger, hence so much more genuine.”

There are two kinds of magic, he explained. White magic, practiced mainly by the Chinese, who make use of it to get on in business or to arrange good marriages; and black magic, practiced exclusively by the Malays, to control the will of other people, to do harm, to carry out vendettas. He said that in Java a friend and colleague of his, Father Lokman, had spent more than thirty years studying black magic, and had himself acquired some powers as a medium. His conclusion was that magic has to do with brain waves.

“Why is it,” he asked, “that when you meet one person you’ll say he’s nice, while of another you’ll say you can’t bear him? There is some process of invisible communication. How do you explain love? We’ve lost the habit of asking these questions, but the problem remains. Why does one see a woman and fall in love with her? This is something we haven’t explained yet.”

Here was a priest who asked questions about love. There was something splendid in that. I have noticed on other occasions that the clergy talk about love as if they know more about it than ordinary mortals. And perhaps they do: they have given it more thought, more reflection.

“In the thirty years I’ve spent on the islands I’ve seen things that, were I to talk about them in Europe, I’d be taken for a madman. I’ve seen nails removed from people’s bodies. I’ve seen the bottom of a bottle extracted from a woman’s breast. A man in my parish had terrible back pains. He went to the doctor. They X-rayed him and found he had three nails inside him. They operated, but only succeeded in removing two of them. They couldn’t get the third out. They X-rayed him again and found seven more. These things happened before my very eyes. In Bangka I saw a man who, by thought alone, sent a nail to his enemy which was so hot that when it hit the wooden boards of his house they burst into flame. Along came a lay Dutch brother who had studied magic for years, and he said: ‘I could send the nail back where it came from, but I can do even better.’ He put the nail in the freezer and the man who had sent it nearly died of cold. I too wonder how it’s possible, how it works, but I would never say that it didn’t happen, or that it was ridiculous.”

“Could it be,” I asked, “that all this belongs to a wisdom whose origins we no longer know, but whose techniques some people still know how to use? A bit like acupuncture: it works, but no one really knows how.”