<Begin Segment 14>

AI: Well, so when you were getting ready to leave, where, where were you leaving from? Were you leaving from Indonesia to go to college?

PJ: Yeah. I was leaving from Indonesia, but what had happened is that January, I think, December or January of that year, my father was going through a very difficult time work-wise, for the whole year before I went off to college, and it was very uncertain that I would even be able to go to college. And I remember that was very difficult. But then that December, I think it was December, he got an offer in Singapore. I think he left his -- either he left, or he was... or the company closed down. I forget, but he ended up not having a job in Indonesia and got the software in Singapore, and, but he had to move to Singapore right away. And so they moved, my parents moved, and I didn't want to leave, 'cause I only had six months left of school. So I stayed with my uncle -- who was my mother's brother, who was living in Indonesia at the time -- and his wife, and finished school there. But it was a very difficult six months for me. They had never had teenagers, and my uncle was incredibly strict, and it was my last six months, and I was, I was miserable. I remember my father coming, and I love my uncle very much, he used to be my favorite uncle. But that was a bad time for the two of us, and I remember my father coming to visit, and I went to stay with him in the hotel and I begged him, I was in tears, I said, "Just let me go stay with a friend of mine." So it was a hard six months. But then I basically went from that to -- I spent a couple of months in Singapore with my parents, and then I went off to, to Georgetown in August or September... August, I guess it was the end of August of '82.

AI: Well, and so how did you choose Georgetown? How did you come to go there?

PJ: It was, you know, I look at all these kids now who go and they do tours, and I was literally like flipping through a book, and you know, saying, "Okay, well, this one looks good." And I had an aunt, my mother's older sister lived in Maryland. And so there were these two colleges, and she had, she said, "Well, you should apply to Georgetown, and then there's this women's college called Trinity." And so I applied to Trinity and I can't remember where else I applied. But my parents really wanted me to go to Washington, D.C., where I would -- either to Swarthmore, where my sister was, which I absolutely did not want to do. I did not want to go where she was. I always felt like I was in the shadow of my older sister. And then, so the other option was to go somewhere where my aunt was.

And so literally, I got into Georgetown, I hadn't, I mean, I didn't know what it was. I didn't even know it was Jesuit. [Laughs] I didn't know it was a Catholic school. I got to Georgetown, and I realized that there was a priest who lived next door to me, and I just, I was so surprised, you know. And so that's how I chose it. I got in and I decided to go. I think I got into a couple of other schools, Trinity, I didn't want to go into a all-girl's school, and I forget where else I got in, but I just decided I would go to Georgetown.

AI: That was one of the questions I was going to ask you about the Jesuit Catholic heritage, if that had been a concern of yours, that...

PJ: I had no idea, and then I got there and I found out that this, there was this, you know, institution, this kind of Catholic institution and that there were church services and everything. But actually, it was so much less religious than the Baptist missionaries had been in Indonesia -- 'cause, you know, I wrote a little bit about this in the book, that there was just so much of the, kind of the Baptist missionary presence in Indonesia -- that Georgetown felt, didn't feel religious at all to me. In fact, I remember my birthday, I think we had some wine or something out and the priest started to walk down the hall, and I said, "We have to put the wine away, the priest is coming." And everybody laughed. I mean, they said, "Don't you know the history of Jesuit priests?" [Laughs] It was just, it was not a particularly religious place in that way. I never really felt confined by the Catholicism.

AI: Right.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.