His mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of his sister, Maya, through the separation and eventual divorce, until the last time he saw Lolo, ten years later, when his mother helped him travel to Los Angeles to treat a liver ailment that would kill him at the age of fifty-one. What tension he noticed had mainly to do with the gradual shift in his mother’s attitude toward him. She had always encouraged his rapid acculturation in Indonesia; It had made him relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared to other American children.
She had taught him to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. He was an American, she decided, and his true life lay elsewhere. Her initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send him to the International School, where most of Djakarta’s foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of their arrival to supplement his Indonesian schooling with lessons from a U.S correspondence course. -P.49, August 10, 2021.
