Chapter 14 Indonesian Stories (13)

I asked him if he could let me make photocopies of the other notebooks and keep them safe.He pulled out another tattered file, filled with Balinese Sanskrit and intricate diagrams. "Another patient!" he said. "Let me heal it!" I replied. Another big hit.By the end of the week, I had photocopied several old manuscripts.Every day, Master Lai called his wife over and happily showed her the new photocopies.Her facial expression didn't change in any way, but she looked carefully at the physical evidence. When I visit every other Monday, Mi-ohm brings me a cup of hot coffee in a jelly box.I watched her walk across the atrium with coffee on a porcelain plate, and walk slowly from the kitchen to Lai Ye's balcony.I thought the coffee was for Lai, but it wasn't - he already had a cup of coffee.This cup is for me.She prepares for me.I tried to thank her, but she seemed annoyed at my thanks and kind of wanted to swipe me away like a rooster that kept standing on the outdoor table while she was preparing lunch.The next day, however, she brought me a cup of coffee with a sugar bowl next to it.The next day it was a cup of coffee, a pot of sugar, and a cold boiled potato.Every day that week, she added a new item.I'm starting to feel like the alphabet game I played when I was a kid hitchhiking: "I'm going to grandma's, I'm bringing apples...I'm going to grandma's, apples and balloons...I'm going to grandma's, apples, balloons , jelly box coffee, sugar bowl and cold potatoes..."

Then, yesterday I was standing in the courtyard, saying goodbye to Lord Lai, and Miohm shuffled past with a broom, sweeping the ground, pretending not to notice what was going on in his kingdom.I was standing there with my hands behind my back, and she came up behind me and took one of my hands.She touched my hand, as if trying to unlock the combination lock and find my index finger.Then she wrapped her big and powerful fist around my index finger and squeezed it tightly for a long time.I feel her love flowing through my arms through her strong hands, all the way to my heart.Then she let go of my hand, limped away, without saying a word, and continued to sweep the floor as if nothing had happened.I stood there quietly, drowning in two rivers at the same time.

I have a new friend named "Yudhi", pronounced "Youdi".He is Indonesian, originally from Java.I knew him because he was the one who rented the house to me; he worked for the English landlady and looked after her house when she went to London for the summer.Yudhi was twenty-seven, a stocky build, and he talked like a Southern California surfer.He calls me "dude" and "good guy" all the time.His smile is enough to stop crime, and he has a complicated life story despite his young age. He was born in Java; his mother was a housewife, and his father was an Elvis fan who ran a small air-conditioning and refrigeration business.The family is Christian -- an outlier here, and Yudhi recounts being teased by neighboring Muslim kids for his shortcomings, including "eating pork" and "loving Jesus."The taunts didn't annoy Yudhi; Yudhi wasn't naturally irritated.However, his mother didn't like him fooling around with Muslim children, mostly because they were always barefoot, and Yudhi also liked to go barefoot, but she thought it was unhygienic, so she gave her son a choice - to wear shoes to play outside, or play Stay at home barefoot.Yudhi didn't like shoes, so he spent most of his childhood and teenage years in his bedroom, learning to play the guitar and going barefoot.

I've never met a more musical person than this guy.She plays the guitar beautifully. Although she has never learned from a teacher, she knows the rhythm like the back of her hand, like sisters who grew up together.The music he creates combines East and West, combining traditional Indonesian lullabies and reggae experience with early Stevie Wonder (Funk) funk (Funk) of early Stevie Wonder (Funk), it is difficult to explain his style, but he should be famous.Anyone who has heard Yudhi's music thinks he deserves fame. He has always wanted to live in America and work in the entertainment industry.This is a dream shared by the whole world.So when Yudhi was a teenager in Java, he convinced himself to work on the Carnival Cruise Lines (he barely knew English at the time), thus freeing himself from the cramped environment of Java and into the wide blue world.The cruise ship job Yudhi got was one of those crazy jobs that hard-working immigrants do—living on the lower deck, working twelve hours a day, taking a day off a month, and he did the cleanup.His working partners are Filipinos and Indonesians.Indonesians and Filipinos eat and sleep separately on the boat and never mix (Muslims vs. Catholics, you can imagine) but Yudhi, as usual, befriends everyone and becomes the middle ground between the two Asian labor blocs some kind of envoy.He saw more similarities than differences in these maids, guards, dishwashers, who worked around the clock to send over a hundred dollars a month to their families.