Chapter 2: Going to School

Any child who could put his arm over his head and touch his left ear was accepted in primary school. That was the rule in Sumpur and everywhere else, or so we were told by the children who were already going to school. We wanted to go to school tomorrow, so today we tried to see whether our fingers touched our ears.

I could already touch the top of my ear with my index finger when my father took me for my first day of school. I was brought before a teacher who had a trim body, dark skin, a large head, and a strict-looking expression on his face. My heart was beating hard as he wrote down my name, age, parents' names, and how much I was to pay for school fees. On his desk was a rattan cane. This is what they called a teacher? I did not know what they meant by "schoolteacher." I was acquainted with a catechism teacher, with his Chinese-style jacket, plaid sarong, and sandals. The schoolteacher, however, wore a buttoned-up jacket, trousers, and fine-looking shoes. And my father was going to hand me over to him.

I started to feel better when I saw the teacher laughing and talking with my father, being respectful toward him. I thought, if that's how they get along, then I won't be mistreated.

Father asked him to take care of me. "If he's naughty, you may whip him." Father said.

"Fine, sir," the teacher replied. "I'll take good care of him." Turning to

me, he said, "You can sit there," and he pointed to a long desk at which three other children were sitting.

"Thank you very much, in advance," said my father. Then he walked over to me at the school desk and said, "You just stay here. I'm going to go home now. Don't you leave until the teacher tells you to. And be careful, don't play on the railroad tracks."

Father went home, and I stayed there with dozens of other children whom I did not know. I was very sad, especially since I did not see any of my friends from the surau^[1] or from Muara, no one whom I could talk to or walk home with. I did not know any of the three kids whom I shared a desk with. They were also quiet and did not budge. We were all embarrassed to be the first one to say a word. We all waited for the teacher to say something.

He told us to relax and sit quietly, with our hands on top of the desk. I was thinking of my father, who had already gone home. I wanted to go home too. I thought I would be freer playing at home or on the lake shore than sitting quietly at this desk.

After a few days I started to enjoy school, however, and rose happily every morning because I had many friends there to play around with and run races with, and to play soccer, jousting games, boxing, marbles, and tops with.

I was very fortunate that my father was open to sending me to school. In that era many fathers did not want to send their children to school, and certainly not their girls. The reason for this was not that they were unwilling to spend the money, which was only 15 or 25 cents per bill,^[2] but that they were prevented from doing it by old superstitions that had settled in their brains. According to the superstitions handed down from their ancestors, whoever knew how to write would have his fingers sliced off in hell. That was the oldest superstition. Those who did not believe this superstition but still were averse to sending their child to school did so because they did not see the use of learning how to read and write if the child was not to be a secretary or a foreman of some kind.

Wealthy people and businessmen were reluctant to give their children schooling because, in their view, school was only necessary for learning how to earn money when you grew up; they already had a lot of money—far more than what a clerk made, for example—and on that account merchants' children learned how to make money from the time they were very little.

Serious Moslems were reluctant because they thought it sufficient if their children knew how to read and write the Arabic letters. Religion was more important than anything else, they said, because it was religion that determined one's fate in the hereafter.

Girls were not permitted to go to school because it was thought that they would just use their knowledge of writing to send love letters to boys. The girls were not supposed to be looking for their own marriage partners from among the young men they liked; marriage partners were supposed to be chosen by the parents.

So thousands of children like me in Minangkabau in those days were kept in the dark and had their futures mined by ignorant parents, parents who provided the wrong sort of preparation for their children's future. The older generation, and the ancestors they were so proud of and tried so hard to emulate, regressed further and further because they did not know how to read and write and did not want to learn. And they prohibited the younger generation from studying precisely at a time when the school doors were wide open.

They had fallen behind the times, and they were forcing their children to fall behind too. They were not aware that they were regressing, and this was a fundamental ill that was difficult to treat. They were unable to compare their intelligence with that of other peoples; they did not want progress: this much was clear from the way they spoke back then. I heard them every day. They were satisfied if they had enough to eat and slept well at night. Every afternoon the teachers had to go to the villages and try to persuade parents to send their children school.

But, the problem was, few did.

Every morning I got two and a half cents [one benggol ] pocket money to take to school. In those days we still had coins called pitis , small coins with a round hole in the middle, worth one third of a benggol. I usually bought fried peanuts for a pitis, a cool drink called cendol for another pitis, and a piece of sugar cane for one pitis more. On market days I got five cents, which meant I could buy more things. I really needed this pocket money, since at recess times my friends all snacked; what was I supposed to do, sit and watch? It was common practice to ask a friend for a bit of whatever it was; for example, if someone had boiled peanuts and you asked for some, you got three or four, or if someone was having a cendol you might get a couple of spoonfuls.

Some of these friends of mine were stingy and did not want to give you anything when you asked. There were also those who were generous; usually their fathers were rich. There were some who liked receiving but did not want to give. Whenever they ate something they hid behind a fence or behind someone's house, afraid that one of their friends might ask them to share. And there were those who neither received nor gave; if offered something, they refused.

In those days no one took bread and butter to school, like children do today in the cities. When children brought something to eat from home, it was fried bananas wrapped in banana leaves, or fried peanuts in a little

sack. People who brought things like this usually did not get pocket money from their mothers.

Asking for pocket money was not easy because usually it had not already been put aside for us before we left for school. It was still in the father's pocket or the mother's money holder. The relative difficulty of the task depended on the father's mood at the time. If he was happy, he would see you and call you over and give you some money. But the next day he might be in a bad mood and pretend not to notice you or just keep away from you or be absorbed in his work or something. In that case you were afraid to ask for money and just trudged sadly off to school with empty pockets and an empty stomach. Even when you were down the road a bit, he did not call you and give you your pocket money. Whether or not he was simply pretending to be wrapped up in what he was doing or not, I could not say.

Sometimes you got snapped at, maybe because he was disturbed about something or because he had had a bad dream the night before. "What do you mean, money"? he would say, "Go ask somebody else."

Then you would be afraid and go off to school dragging your heavy feet along with you. At recess you hoped your friends would share. If you asked your stepmother for pocket money, she had usually been told by the father not to give you anything. But a child's real mother would generally give something, especially if she knew that the father was angry. From her uncang (a beltlike money holder used by older Minangkabau women and made of two folds of cloth with a pocket in the middle for money), she would take out one benggol.

My experience in school was not much different from that of any other child, so there is no sense in telling about the ordinary. Between the first and fifth grades, nothing out of the ordinary happened. We found we could easily take in all the lessons we were given, as they consisted of evident, obvious, provable material. All the lessons were clear and useful, so they did not run counter to our way of thinking. At school they did not teach superstitions or illogical beliefs that we were forced to accept, like the religious teachers did at the surau. The teachers at the school were wise, too, and knew what students liked and did not like; they knew how to hold a child's interest. They did not teach by rote, ignoring the ideas and talents of the children in the way the older generation did.

I remember an incident that occurred when I was in the third grade. One day the teacher was about to cane me because I had really misbehaved. I tried to prevent this from happening by saying, "You'd better not cane me; my father is a martial arts expert and he'll beat you up."

Much to my astonishment, I got caned anyway.

"Tell your father the martial arts expert to drop by," he said.

When I got home I complained to my father that the teacher had been

impolite and brazen, and had caned me even though I warned him that my father was adept in the martial arts. I was spanked again, this time for trying to play my father off against the teacher. I decided never to do that sort of thing again, no matter what the circumstances. The next day, and for a whole month afterward, I was teased by my friends, who cried, "You'd better not cane me; my father is a martial arts expert and he'll beat you up." I was mortified.

Later it appeared that I was not the only one who had done this. There was a boy in another class whose father was a martial arts expert, and he had also tried to frighten the teacher with this. So my embarrassment was at least halved.

In the school system of those days, if you did not follow along when the lesson was being read you were told to stand in the front of the class, on top of a bench. You had to stand like that until the lesson was over, with a book in your left hand and a walking cane in the right, like a preacher reading a sermon at the mosque. What was unbearable about this punishment was the embarrassment of having everyone stare at you. But one time a daring child stood up on the bench and began to recite as loudly as he could, imitating a Moslem preacher, "Peace unto you, with the mercy and blessing of Allah!"^[3] Everyone laughed, except the teacher.