A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [50]
Ann became a popular teacher. For many of the students, the classes were at least as much a social activity as they were about serious learning, said Leonard Kibble, who taught part-time at the institute in the early 1970s. They took place in the late afternoon and evening, after the students got off work. Because there was just one miserable state television channel at that time, Kibble said, there was little else to do at that hour. “In such a situation, Indonesians can laugh and joke,” Kibble told me. “They love acting. The teachers had something called ‘role simulation’—which the students called ‘role stimulation.’ Some students did very occasionally feel guilty about laughing so much at their fellow students, but that didn’t stop them.” Ann’s classes in particular “could be a riot of laughter from beginning to end. She had a great sense of humor,” Kibble said. “The laughter in class came not only from Indonesian students making all sorts of funny mistakes trying to speak English but also Ann making all sorts of funny mistakes trying to speak Indonesian.” In one classroom slip that Kibble said Ann delighted in recounting, she tried to tell a student that he would “get a promotion” if he learned English. Instead of using the phrase naik pangkat, she said “naik pantat.” The word naik means to “go up, rise, or mount”; pangkat means “rank” or “position.” Pantat means “buttocks.”
Among the perks of working in the business-English department were the snacks, served in a crowded teachers’ lounge during the half-hour break between afternoon and evening classes. In Indonesian, the term jajan pasar is used for the ubiquitous homemade snacks sold at food stands and markets. Pasar means “market”; jajan means “snack.” They include seafood chips, peanut chips, fried chips from the mlinjo tree, chips made from ground cowhide mixed with garlic, sweet-potato snacks, mashed cassava snacks, sweet flour dumplings made with sesame seeds, sticky rice flavored with pandanus leaves, sticky black rice sprinkled with grated coconut, and rice cakes wrapped in coconut leaves or banana leaves, to name a few. Some come wrapped in a banana-leaf envelope, ingeniously pinned shut with a wooden toothpick that doubles as a disposable (and biodegradable) utensil. Ann loved Indonesian snacks—at first perhaps simply for the undeniable pleasure of eating them, compounded later by admiration for the enterprising people who made them. At the school, there were sticky rice croquettes, lemper, with meat in the middle; rice-flour cookies called klepon, with sesame seeds on the outside and palm sugar in the center; nagasari, made with bananas, flour, and sugar steamed in a banana leaf; and Dutch cream cakes. The snacks in Ann’s department were the envy of other departments. “I think most of us worked there for the really good snacks,” said Kay Ikranagara, an American who met Ann at the school in the early 1970s and became a close friend. Food accompanied every graduation. Felina Pramono and Ann would collaborate on the menu. On one occasion, Pramono ordered a personal favorite, fried brain. Ann instructed her never to order it again.
Ann was a striking figure who did not go unnoticed. “Maybe just her presence—the way she carried herself,” said Halimah Bellows, whom Ann hired in the spring of 1971. She dressed simply, with little or no makeup, and wore her hair long, held back by a headband. By Javanese standards, she was, as Pramono put it, “a bit sturdy for a woman.” She had strong opinions—and rarely softened them to please others. When she discovered that Irwan Holmes had organized a club in which students would pay to meet at a café and put their English to use in an informal setting, she fired him with no advance warning, he said. “She was obviously very concerned