In January 1998 my father, wife, son, and I spent three weeks in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Indonesia. For my father it was a return to places prominent in his career as a missionary educator and minister; for me it was a return to places I had vacationed as a teenager; for Fran and Jimmie, it was a chance to see places often mentioned, but never before visited.
In 1958 the Wesley Methodist Church in Medan, North Sumatra, an English-speaking congregation, was formed. Dad, who spent a major part of his career as a missionary in Indonesia, became its pastor at one point. This year, 40 years later, they asked any former pastors who could to return and join them for their 40th anniversary celebration. It seemed like the trip of a life time.
Dallas
On Friday January 9th, 1998, my son Jim drove south from New York, picked up Dad in Ocean Grove, and arrived in Columbia. While they were en route, we were getting acquainted in Columbia with Esther Walker. Esther began life as a Batak Indonesian in the area we were going to visit. By coincidence, a second cousin of mine was working in that area, and they married. We would take some gifts to Medan for her family.
Saturday, January 10, the four of us left Baltimore and three hours later we were sitting in an eatery in the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport snacking with Jim's local reception committee: Mark, who had been a good friend of Jim's from his hotel days, and Margaret Ann, Jimmie's sister.
Hong Kong
Arriving in San Francisco Saturday at 7 PM, we walked over to the International terminal to meet other members of the 60 person mission / cultural study group with whom we would spend the next two weeks.
Singapore Airlines lifted us off at 11:45; they fed us, and we slept. When we awoke, it was Monday, and we were approaching Hong Kong. We had crossed the International Date Line. We had lost Sunday.
What's the difference between British Hong Kong and Chinese Hong Kong? Not much. A small sign in the airport that there were slight changes in immigration procedures for British nationals. Streets and hospitals are still named for British royalty, but the buildings now fly the Hong Kong flag, with its 5 pointed Bauhinia flower, and the red and yellow flag of the Peoples Republic of China.
First on the agenda was a City Tour. We later ascertained that first at each new place would be a City Tour. It is probably now a family joke. A new city--first thing is a city tour, right? The function of City Tours was to kill time until the hotel was ready to accept us. In Hong Kong, we killed time by walking around a park, exploring a market to find cokes and bottled water, and taking a drive out to the new, as yet unopened, airport.
Tuesday morning we visited Methodist Church headquarters in Hong Kong, and got an orientation: past, present and future. We were told the Hong Kong Methodist Church is the union there of American Methodism (the "Wei Li Kung Hui" -- Defend the Truth Church) and British Methodism (the "Tsun To Kung Wooi" -- Follow the Way Church). When I heard the words "Wei Li Kung Hui" used, I remembered hearing them as a small boy in an American Methodist mission station in north China.
The Church is heavily involved in schools and social services. In fact, about 70% of the church's budget consists of contracts in which the church undertakes these activities on behalf of the Government. It has not made a difference that the Government is now that of China rather than the Crown.
The Church has work in many of the high rise housing complexes. We visited the social center that the church runs at one, then took the elevator up to the top of the building 35 stories up on a mountainside. The view from the top is breathtaking, even when the sky is overcast.
Vietnam
It's only two hours from Hong Kong to Singapore; leaving in mid-morning, we were in Singapore by noon.
Halfway, we looked out the window and saw land. I realized we were passing the point of Vietnam's coast where Cam Ranh Bay is located. Jimmie took a picture to take back to his step-father, who like me is a Vietnam veteran. (Six years later I would have my chance to set foot on Vietnam three decades after the war.
Singapore
Upon landing, a City Tour helped us get our bearings. The bus stopped at the Botanical Gardens, then on to the Concorde Hotel.
Thursday morning the group made a courtesy call on Bishop Wong Kiam Thau of the Singapore Methodist Church and on Dr. John Chew, Principal of Trinity Theological College. Then the rest of the group went touring -- Jurong Bird Park/Sentosa Island City Zoo (orangutan) /Wax museum/ Underwater World Tour, while I spent the day re-exploring Orchard Road.
At Trinity Theological College, at the Church's property on Mount Sophia, we met in the chapel named for Olin Stockwell. When the Communists took over China in 1950, Dad was a Methodist missionary in Chengtu, China, while Olin Stockwell was a Methodist missionary in Chunking. Stockwell was jailed for a time, then later was head of Trinity College. The roof of the chapel is in the shape of the Chinese character for "man", upon which a cross is superimposed. Unfortunately, an extension of the Singapore subway will require that the building be taken down. The oasis of church-owned greenery on top of Mt. Sophia in the heart of downtown is too valuable and there are considered better uses, so it will go. Next door to the church compound is the Istana, the President's palace, another island of greenery. It will not go.
The seminary president tells us that during the Japanese Occupation, all the Christian leaders were imprisoned together. Normally, being of different denominations, they would not talk to each other--but God has a sense of humor and they were forced to spend the years of occupation together. Out of this, a determined cooperation arose.
Down from Mt. Sophia is the Cathay building, the headquarters of the British broadcasting before World War II, then of the Japanese occupation propaganda. Down the road, now the YMCA, was a Japanese torture house. Over 50 years later, a new generation keeps the horrors of the Japanese occupation alive.
Not far from the Cathay Building, you hit Orchard Road. I had been in Singapore various times -- as a teenager between 1952 and 1959 on my way to and from boarding school; on RR in 1969 as a chaplain in Vietnam; as a consultant in 1987-1988 en route to Jakarta; but this was the time to be struck by what has changed and what has stayed the same.
Walking on Orchard Road, the smells of Singapore struck me--pleasant, vaguely sweet aromas like vanilla, absent the pungent dirt odors of other Asian cities. With air conditioning, life has moved indoors--air conditioned food courts holding McDonalds, French bakeries and Chinese noodle shops have replaced the street vendors I remember, who seem to be gone, The dirt is gone, but the old buildings too are gone unless they can be restored.
The buildings are so different; few are left from 30 or 40 years before. You have to look carefully to see what has not changed. The road goes over a canal. I see the canal and know that I have seen it before. The water is dirty but not that dirty; it reminds me of smaller canals in different places where my sister and I played with toy boats.
On Orchard Road I find Robinsons Department Store. I had unsuccessfully looked for it last night where it used to be -- down by Change Alley which is no longer an alley filled with street vendors but an enclosed mall with air conditioned, upscale shops -- and down by the General Post Office, which is no longer a post office but an empty colonial style building on its way to becoming an hotel -- and down by the harbor, which is no longer a harbor because it has been filled in for parks and buildings. Now on Orchard Road Robinsons was having a sale and packed with shoppers. I didn't see it, but perhaps somewhere in the store there may still be the little section where they sell toys, where my sister and I once would buy HO scale "Dinky Toys" for the "Train Table."
Words come flooding back. A driver is a 'syce'. The grass, a tough plant with short, broad leaves, is 'lalang.' The field is a 'padang.'
Medan
The next morning we were in the lobby early. "Wake up at 4, luggage to lobby at 5, board busses at 6." It took us some number of departures to begin seeing the humor of these instructions. At the end of the trip, facing our night in Columbia before Jim and Dad would drive north to New Jersey, we announced, wake up at 7, luggage to the hallway at 8, depart at 9, and everyone laughed. But now these were serious instructions, and we moved through the airports in a regimented fog. And at 9:05 on Friday January 16, Silk Air Flight 232 touched down at Medan's Polonia airport.
I had last been in Medan in 1969, 29 years before. Then, my father was a 58 year old missionary working with my mother in the Methodist Church's schools and churches there, with six years left before retiring; I was a 27 year old Army Chaplain who had just finished a year in Vietnam. Now my father was an 87 year old widower entering his 22nd year of retirement, and I was a 56 year old health care administrator.
First, of course, we proceeded on a City Tour, stopping at the main Mosque which we honored by covering our heads and uncovering our feet, then on to the Istana, the museum that once was the palace of the Sultans of Deli. Once that was done, we proceeded to our hotel, the Emerald Garden Hotel. Or, if you prefer the Indonesian version, the Emeral Gardenia. We weren't sure if the English and Indonesian meant the same thing.
Others visited a high school, a university, and a project teaching women to earn their living sewing.
Monday morning we put Medan behind us and travelled into the mountains of
North Sumatra
.
At that moment, I was a Vietnam Veteran returned to the Central Highlands of Vietnam where I had served. The temperature, cool and moist, was the same. We were out in the countryside and the plants, the farm houses, and the people were not that different. The road was narrow and the pavement was broken. "The engineers need to get out here and pave that right away," I found myself thinking, "so it's harder to plant a mine." But in Bandar Baru, there was no danger of mines.
The wife of the seminary president recognized Dad. She had been one of his students. "Dai Moosher", she called to him in Mandarin Chinese, "Rev. Day!" and they happily conversed further in Mandarain.
After a presentation in the new chapel, built with aid from Korean Methodists, we sat down to eat. We confounded the original design of sitting apart from the students in a place of honor, and spread out so the students were obliged to mingle with us. We got past the difficulties of language by pointing to different objects and trading the words for them in our respective languages, and laughing at the efforts to pronounce them.
Driving on, we reached the Berastagi Mutiara Hotel. The next day, talking to a vendor in a shop, he asked where we were staying. When I told him, he said, "Oh, the new Chinese hotel. They pay very well. My brother works there.
Leaving those who wanted to rest, our busses went back up the road to a Botanical Garden where an elephant was available to ride. Among our pictures is now one of three generations of Days, my father, my son, myself, on the back of an elephant.
The next morning our busses took us into town. Tim Hutabarat saw a vendor selling durians, and bought one for the brave ones to sample. This Indonesian fruit is said to "taste like heaven, but smell like hell." In all my prior travels to Indonesia, I had managed to avoid them. Now I took the plunge and swallowed a taste. Someone said it tasted like creamed onion. One taste was enough. But Dad was in heaven and had all he wanted.
We drove to a Karo Batak village where we were given a tour of Batak communal long houses, which traditionally held as many as four families. The King's house was larger and had not four fireplaces but five. One fire alone was burning, and it filled the house with smoke.
The next morning our journey continued. Fran was ill, so I arranged for a taxi to take her and Jimmie direct to Lake Toba, a three hour drive onward. The cost, 180,000 Rupiahs, which at 5000 to the dollar came to $36, a bargain. The Rupiah was rapidly losing value and by the time we returned to Medan it had fallen to 11,000 to the dollar.
The busses drove on to Sidikalang, where another of Dad's students, Rev. Rameana Sihombing Silitonga is now pastor (with two assistants) of a 14-church circuit. After a description of the work there, we boarded busses to travel an hour farther west along incredibly narrow roads to one of her churches. There had been plans for part of our group to visit another, but they realized the busses could not go there. The pastor travels by motorcycle.
Across from the church, school was letting out, and the roadway was flooded by elementary school children wearing white shirts and red shorts or skirts. We were an instant attraction; we were assured that never before had either tour busses or westerners come this far out into the hinterlands.
We returned to Sidikalang for lunch provided there by the church, stopping en route to see coffee, vanilla, and ginger growing.
Prapat, Lake Toba
Doubling back on the route we had driven west that morning, we now drove east and came to Lake Toba, which we then followed clockwise for several hours. The road was one lane wide, and each time we met opposing traffic, negotiation was required to arrange the point and process of passing. Dad remembered that decades before he had wished to travel this very interesting and scenic road overlooking a volcanic lake from a great height, but been told it could only be driven by four wheel drive vehicles. Now we were driving it in giant busses.
Finally we reached Prapat, where we stayed at the Niagara Hotel overlooking the lake -- pronounced "Nee-ah-gah-rah" by the locals,
The next morning, Thursday, we boarded a boat to cross Lake Toba to Samosir Island. We stopped at one point and saw the tombs of ancient kings. At another point we were entertained with a program of Batak dances. A third stop gave us lunch at a beautiful lakeside hotel, overlooking the clear waters and cooled by its breezes.
In the evening we shopped in a local street market. I found a mask of a Batak demon for my office wall; I have looked for years for some visual representation of the Murphy in Murphy's Law, and this seemed as close to "Murph" as I could come.
Beside the bus a family were selling a pile of durians. Lionel Muthiah, another former pastor of Wesley Church, stopped to see if the children knew any songs. They did, and soon they were showing off by lustily singing choruses learned in their Batak Sunday Schools.
As we approached the church, we could hear Batak instruments playing, and all 60 of us danced our way rhythmically through a receiving line of village and church elders and local government dignitaries. Three hours of speeches and ceremonies followed. While those of us who spoke no Indonesian missed the specific words, no one missed the fact that this was a terribly important event for the whole community.
Boarding the van one of them uses for a taxi service, we drove to a residential area where they share a comfortable middle class house down a narrow dirt lane. They offered us an appetizer -- durian, which we regretfully declined--except for Dad, who happily justified their thoughtfulness. We then ate dinner Batak style, seated on the floor--though provided with forks and spoons as an accommodation to our western disabilities. Then a round of pictures, gifts to be taken back to Bill and Esther in Westminster, and the request that I make a little speech, which I did, with translation.
Bali
It was 6 PM on Saturday January 24 when we arrived at the Dhyana Pura Hotel, which with a training school in hotel and restaurant service, is owned by the Christian Church of Bali. The word 'pura' means temple, or gathering place; we never did find out what Dhyana means.
Jim and I went in the pool. The water was so warm we stayed and talked for over an hour, emerging with prunelike wrinkled fingers.
"What did you do in Bali," someone will ask. Well, Sunday we paid good money to go to a Hindu funeral, having read in a guidebook that this was an opportunity not to pass up. We were taken to the street where the family lived and saw the large bier on which the casket would be carried, and heard the musicians. Then we walked in the procession of mourners for over a mile to the cremation site. The cremation itself was anticlimactic, and besides, it started to rain.
Sunday afternoon I took a walk down the beach, wading in the surf most of the way. Here it truly is a "hot water ocean"; the water temperature even of the ocean must have been in the 80's, Fahrenheit.
Not many steps down the beach, one began to notice here and there a topless European woman. The first time, an American is fairly startled. The second time less so. By the third time, one has started to become desensitized. I returned to the hotel and drowsed by the poolside for an hour.
Jim returned from his own much more vigorous walk down the beach and found me by the pool. He had walked about 5 miles to the Hard Rock Cafe and then returned by road where he had found a shop selling an amazing variety of music and computer CDs.
Monday, Jim went diving, scheduling the trip so he'd have 24 hours to decompress before boarding the next plane. While the company he used is not on the internet, another is, and gives information both on the kinds of services offered as well as the wreck of the U. S. S. Liberty to which Jim dove at Tulamben.
While driving we saw a sign that said, "U. S. Navy --->" and discovered that three American ships had come to port, dropping 3800 sailors and marines into the tourist traps of Bali. Undeterred, we proceeded Monday evening to the Bali Hard Rock Cafe, where we had hamburgers surrounded by sailors and marines in civilian clothes. And under the watchful eye of the Shore Patrol, consisting of one each sailor and marine NCO who were NOT in civilian clothes.
Tuesday we took a full day excursion into the center of Bali, visiting some Hindu temples on the way and having lunch beside a lake in an ancient volcanic crater. That evening at the hotel, we wre treated to Balinese dancing.
Reunion
Wednesday morning we gathered our accumulation of suitcases and purchases together and headed back to the airport. By now we had baggage for the three of us; we had Dad's suitcase; we had the suitcase carrying gifts back to Westminster, and we had our purchases. Going to airports was becoming less and less fun. It was a relief to check everything we could through to San Francisco.
At 12:50 SQ #143 left Bali, arriving in Singapore a little over two hours later at 3:10. Now would come the moment of truth. Had we made a mistake in going off to Bali while Dad toured South Sumatra? Would something have happened preventing his rejoining us here in Singapore?
We found out what gate he should have landed it, and the gate to which we all were going. Jim and I dashed to the gate we were all going to. No Dad. Leaving Jim there, I went back toward Dad's arrival gate. Halfway there, we saw Dad happily waiting, wearing a button indicating special treatment, waiting for the Singapore Airlines staff who had his boarding pass to wheel him to the next stop. When the staffmember showed up, he made it clear to us that while it was nice that Dad had family, he wasn't relinquishing his responsibilities until Dad was safely on board the next plane! We needn't have worried.
Dad's Adventures in Lampung and Palembang
When the plane landed in Jakarta the previous Saturday, we walked with Dad up to the point where baggage claim was to the left and transit passengers went to the right. Spotting the Muthiahs, I asked if they could walk with him the rest of the way, and they seemed happy to oblige. Then, in a moment, he was out of sight.
Dad stayed with the group for the Jakarta City Tour on Saturday before going to their hotel, and then the next morning attended two church services with them, before being taken to the airport for a short flight to Tandjung Karang in Lampung District, South Sumatra.
In Lampung Dad was met Sunday afternoon by the Methodist District Superintendent, Saryono, in whose home he stayed that night, and who helped Dad meet old friends. Dad had worked in Tandjung Karang for a year or so beginning in 1960 before going on to Medan.
On Monday, Dad and Saryono boarded a train for the full day train trip to Palembang. Upon arrival in Palembang, he was greeted by an old friend, an active church member who owned and operated a hotel, whose guest he became. Tuesday was spent seeing what had become of Palembang in the last 40 years. Dad reported there were many changes, and much that he no longer recognized. The school of which he had been principal was thriving and had added college level programs to the high school work. He had a chance to see old friends.
Homeward Bound
At 5 PM we were all on board SQ #2. At 8 PM we landed at Hong Kong. With a new crew and many new passengers, at 9 PM Wednesday we took off into the night. To accommodate time change and the date line, we moved our watches ahead 8 hours. It was now 5 AM San Francisco time -- and once again Wednesday. With a 350 kilometer per hour tail wind, we were told, our speed was bumped up to 1250 kilometers per hour, and we would be in the air only 10 hours, not 14, arriving at 3 PM in San Francisco.
San Francisco
It was actually 5 PM on Wednesday January 28 when we arrived. Jim checked the hotel, where we had guaranteed reservations. Our rooms had already been given away. Not even a "sorry." We were back in the land of anonymity and uncaring. Another hotel took us.
Its restaurant was an International House of Pancakes. It provided a demonstration of how we were all reacting differently to jet lag. It was evening in San Francisco and I ordered steak. But Jim had French Toast, and Dad, chocolate chip pancakes. Fran contented herself in the room with a glass of milk. Early the next morning, our clocks had changed. At 6 AM I had the French toast--and Dad ordered Chicken Fajitas.
By 6 PM we were in Baltimore. The airline shuttle was waiting. We were home!
