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AI: And then, actually, before you started attending school, your family moved. And I think I saw that that was in, at the end of 1969?

PJ: Right. December of 1969 we moved to Indonesia. And my father, my father is a, is a very focused man, and he had decided quite early on that he wanted to work for Esso. And he would stand, when he was, I think, in engineering school, he would stand and look up at the window of kind of the managing director of Esso in Bangalore and say, "That's where I want to be." And that's where he ended up being. And so he was offered a position to move abroad, you know, it was called "going abroad," and it was to Indonesia. And it was 1969, there was very little in Indonesia at all. I mean, it was really, there wasn't a very big Indian community. There was some, but not very big. And so he... my parents have always been adventuresome in a lot of ways. I mean, I think it was a big deal for them to leave India, but they were from -- the way they tell it, they were both very, very excited about leaving, and about the opportunity to kind of travel and see the world. And so we, yeah, we moved to Jakarta and there was, I think there were two hotels there when we got to Jakarta. There was the Hotel Indonesia, which kind of stands at the Freedom Circle where there's a big statue, kind of, almost like a Statue of Liberty, kind of breaking away from chains, that's the symbol of the democratic revolution. And so Hotel Indonesia is right there, and then Hotel Kartika Plaza where we stayed for months our second time coming back to Indonesia, 'cause we'd left and went to Singapore for two years in between and then came back. That was pretty much it, and the rest of it was just green spaces and rice paddies, and there really wasn't anything. And then our school, we went to a school called the Joint Embassy, it was called the Joint Embassy School at the time, later it changed its name to the Jakarta International School. But it was sort of owned and run and managed by four or five embassies. It was the U.S. Embassy, the British Embassy, the Canadian Embassy, maybe, Dutch and French or German, I forget. But, you know, it was a little tiny school at that time, later became a big school, and one of the best in Southeast Asia, changed its name to the Jakarta International School.

AI: So, did you start there in kindergarten or first grade?

PJ: I must have been in kindergarten when I started there. In fact, I was. I was a little bit young, but my mother just wanted to push me out of the house. [Laughs] She, she said, "You were so talkative, you were always talking, you just needed to be with other kids." And so she somehow managed to get me in. I think that was, must have been kindergarten. But then, somewhere along the line, I skipped grades, and I think it was actually maybe like second grade or second or third grade. And I don't really remember because my sister skipped grades as well. We never thought it was anything unusual. My mother had graduated high school when she was sixteen and so did each of us. And we didn't realize there was anything funny about it until we came to the States and I was, I remember being an RA for freshmen who were my age, and hiding my birthday because I didn't want people to know that I was younger than them, but supposedly more responsible. [Laughs]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.