<Begin Segment 8>

AI: Well, that's so interesting to me, because it, especially it sounds like having so many, or a large proportion of teachers being American from the U.S., that that would really influence some of their assumptions and teaching and what they conveyed to you, and how you take that in.

PJ: Yeah, I wondered about that, but most, many of the people who were there really wanted to be there. And so sometimes I wonder, was there -- because the one thing I really always hated about our school is that Indonesians weren't allowed to go there. And so all of my friends that were Indonesian were made from outside of school, they weren't part of the school. And I remember then thinking and asking my mother about it, and asking teachers about it and saying, "How come Indonesians aren't allowed to go?" And there was a couple who was half, the mother was Indonesian, I think, and the father was American, and their kids were allowed to go there, but it was a big deal. And I remember, I think their names were Maya and... two sisters. And I remember talking to them about it, and saying, "This is so unfair." I mean, "Why, why is this?" And a lot of international schools are like that, you're not allowed to, the host country doesn't get to send kids there, which creates a tremendously horrible dynamic between the local folks and everybody else. And so I remember that was hard. I never really felt that the teachers passed on sort of negative attitudes about the country, though, and I don't know if that's just -- I think that's, partly because I had good teachers, or maybe it's because... maybe it is because they really did want to genuinely come there. But I've wondered about that myself, too. I've thought about that many times and thought, "Did I just block that out because I didn't like it?" But it really seemed like people were there because they wanted to be there, and that they appreciated Indonesia for what it had. And I don't remember people making the kinds of comments that I'm so familiar with now, around other foreigners and other countries and things like that.

AI: Well, I did want to ask a little bit more about your sense as a child, too, or as you were, as you were growing up and going to school there, that it sounds like, primarily, you had a very positive experience. And as you say, that most of the teachers were very positive and not denigrating toward people of various nationalities. But I'm wondering, do you recall a time when you started understanding that differences were not always accepted as equal differences? That sometimes differences were equated with being inferior or less than or...

PJ: Yeah, I think it was economic. And I think that there was a lot of economic -- you know, there's just a lot of classism. And I still see it today in the expatriate community, and I think that... so many times we separate racism and classism, and I actually don't know that they're so separated, and I think they're very intertwined. And I think I, I saw it as a flaw -- when you're young, I think in some ways, you see it as a flaw in yourself if, if you sense that, that kind of judgment going on, and I think that when I think back on the things that were hard about that school or about my growing up, it really had to do with class. My, my father was not wealthy, and yes, he was provided a house and he was wealthy compared to -- you know, it's all relative. But compared to most of the people that were there, we were not wealthy at all. We couldn't go on vacation -- I mean, we never went on vacations. People would jet off to Singapore and all these places, and we never did any of that. And I know my parents supported, my father in particular supported his family at home. And so that's what I remember as being the, and I remember... I remember thinking about -- I don't think I thought about it in exactly these words, but I remember thinking about kind of the injustice of it, except I think I used to think about it, it just doesn't seem fair that there would be all this money for Americans, but then here's my friend Emina Radavonivich, who was also from Yugoslavia and was my closest friend, who -- and her father was actually in the embassy. But there was war going on in Yugoslavia at the time, and people were dying -- I mean, she would come and talk about people dying in Yugoslavia. And I just remember kind of being, it sort of felt like we were in this fairytale world over here, and then here was the real world, outside And so I remember that kind of classism very much, even within the kids. 'Cause you know, kids can be very mean sometimes. Maybe like, "You mean you don't have such-and-such?" Whatever it is.

And then again, like I said, the stuff with the Indonesians was really disturbing. And a lot of the kids I think would start off not realizing that there was a difference, but then something would teach them, their parents, or the school not allowing Indonesians in, or all of those things would teach them differently. And so there was this attitude of, "Well, we're the International School and those are the Indonesians." So I think it did permeate, and there were a lot of things that we would do that were supposedly connecting us with... and some of that was on my own doing and some of it was through clubs or whatever, at school. But it was, it was... the time that I remember feeling like that again was when I was in investment banking and we used to have this program where analysts would go out and paint shelters or whatever once a month. And it felt to me like these dislocated worlds. You know, that there were, there were just these separations, and that nothing fit together. That you actually had to cross, like maybe take a bridge over from one to the other, versus having it all be an integrated part of your life.

AI: Right, that you started seeing some clear separations, and gaps in worlds of living.

PJ: Very early, I think, actually. Very, very early. I remember economics being -- and also because it was discussed a lot at home, you know, just in terms of having the money to do this or that, and I remember kind of, money being a dominating factor for a lot of my life. And sometimes I think that the, just... sometimes I think that my rejection of India actually had as much to do with that as it did with everything else, because there was just too much poverty there, and it just reminded me of, how come there's all this poverty here, and my friends talk about doing this or that or the other thing, and they'd have, you know. There's no, there's no equation that puts those two together.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.