Taking the Leap

A mocking Indonesian expression talks of the “master of his backyard”, someone whose success is limited to their comfort zone of home. A new generation of Indonesians – talented, confident, skilled and with a desire to see the world – are taking the great leap out of familiar waters. M. Taufiqurrahman reports.

If the presence of an ethnic enclave in foreign countries is any indication, then Indonesia as a community is only marginally represented in the outside world.

While almost every major city in the world has its share of foreign cultures in the form of a Chinatown, Little India or, since the 1970s, a Vietnamese neighborhood, one would be hard-pressed to find a sizable enclave of Indonesian émigrés, even within Southeast Asia.

The only significant Indonesian expatriate community can be found in the tiny country of Suriname. Even then, these overseas Javanese had to be shipped there at gunpoint by the Dutch in the early 20th century, and were lied to about their destination.

There’s one obvious reason why a small island like Java has become the world’s most populous island: The idea that it’s better to stick together under the harshest conditions imaginable – natural and manmade disasters, ethnic riots, anticommunist pogroms – than to stay apart from family and friends.

According to the 2000 US census, the total number of Americans of Indonesian origin was 63,073, making up only 0.5 percent of the total number of Americans of Asian descent of 11,898,828. This figure is particularly low when compared to those for the Chinese, Japanese and Filipino communities.

We can claim that pop singer Michelle Branch and the Van Halen brothers have Indonesian roots, but they’d probably have a hard time finding Indonesia on a map.

The small number of people who could represent Indonesia on the world stage seems to give credence to the Javanese proverb that folks should gather together in good times or bad (mangan ora mangan kumpul), immortalized by writer Umar Kayam in his best-selling novel of the same name.

Another expression that best sums up Indonesians’ penchant for staying home is that old Malay proverb “Daripada hujan emas di negeri orang, lebih baik hujan batu di negeri sendiri,” which roughly translates into “It is better to weather a storm of stones at home than to enjoy a rain of gold overseas.”

Some Indonesians are determined to prove these age-old truisms wrong.

Many have started new lives from scratch and strived to make a name for themselves. They are content to be small fish in the big pond of competition overseas.

Architect Murdan Maulana, who moved to San Francisco in December 2001, thought that leaving behind a comfortable life in Indonesia was the only way to have a rewarding career.

After graduating from the Bandung Institute of Technology in 1993, Maulana worked for a number of firms across Asia, believing that an architect could thrive in their field only by collaborating with architects from other countries.

“This profession knows no nationality,” he says. “Everyone has to depend on people of different nationalities. Most of my projects are outside America, especially in China, Europe and the Middle East, and the success of the projects depends on the architects from those countries.”

For a while, Maulana, 40, was eager just to have his achievements recognized.  But he also wanted real rewards for his hard work and talent.

“Americans reward almost any achievement,” he says. “In Indonesia I got nothing.”

It’s not all bad when he reflects on his Indonesian roots, though. He acknowledges that some laudable qualities customarily associated with developed countries, such as perseverance and respect for the law, are ones he acquired in Indonesia, and which have been brought home to him by living abroad.

“The openness of American society prompts you to rediscover what makes you Indonesian,” Maulana says. “Americans’ willingness to celebrate differences inspires you to look into the traditions and religions you’ve left behind.”

For jazz pianist Nial Djuliarso, the move to America was necessary because that’s where the action is. It is, after all, the home of jazz.

His father sent him to the States when he was only 15 years old. After graduating high school in Tennessee, Nial got a full scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music, where he first majored in jazz arrangement and production before switching to jazz performance in 2002.

America has been his land of opportunity, says Nial, who has won numerous scholarships and awards.

“There are countless jazz competitions in America and Europe, and in these competitions people don’t look at my skin color or where I come from,” he says.

“Competition is good for my career. It’s good for publicity; I don’t really care if I win or lose.”

In 2004, Nial relocated to New York, where he was accepted at the prestigious Juilliard School’s Jazz Program. There has been no looking back for the 29-year-old since, or looking homeward.

“Except for noted jazz player Bubi Chen, there’s no Indonesian who plays pure jazz,” he told The Jakarta Post in 2004. “I don't know why. People in Indonesia mostly play smooth jazz, which isn’t bad if it’s played well.”

As with Maulana and his career in architecture, Nial is more than happy to be a little-known musician in a foreign land, rather than a jazz superstar in Indonesia.

Some Indonesian émigrés, though, have succeeded in becoming the best in their fields.

Mitzy Boediono

Perseverance, hard work and perfectionism have paid off for pastry chef Mitzy Boediono, a native of Semarang in Central Java. Several US publications have praised her culinary creations as among the most delectable.

The Serious Eats website gave her Itzy Bitsy Patisserie – owned and run by Mitzy out of her New Jersey base – a rave review in 2008, calling her desserts “the best French macaroons that didn’t come from a bakery in Paris”.

A Passion for Food the same year described her macaroons as the most delightful in New York City.

So what does it take to win over the notoriously hard-to-please New York food critics?

Simple, Mitzy says: Leaving behind some of her Javanese traits, including modesty.

“Soon after I opened my New Jersey patisserie, I sent samples to the critics to see what they thought. And look what it’s brought be now,” she says.

“But it took a while for me to summon the courage.”

Having her work judged by others undoubtedly took a lot of courage on Mitzy’s part, because growing up as an Indonesian of Chinese descent in Semarang, she learned that being reserved was the best way to deal with a new situation.

But it also helped that she learned to make macaroons from the best possible teacher: French pastry chef Pierre Hermé.

Mitzy left home for small-town Orvallis to study finance at Oregon State University in 1992. She went on to a lucrative job at a brokerage firm, before marrying a fellow Indonesian in 2003. She decided to follow her culinary yearnings by enrolling at Hermé’s French Pastry School in Chicago in 2006, after attending the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.

Learning from the best people in the business taught Mitzy another lesson, this time about the virtue of being a perfectionist.

“I work long hours every day just to find the right texture for my macaroons, one that has to be crunchy on the outside, but moist on the inside,” she says.

Mitzy next plans to open a patisserie in Jakarta.

“I’m not too sure about the prospects there, though, as I’ll have to work in a different environment, one that’s totally unpredictable,” she says.

Khoirul Anam

For physicist Khoirul Anam, the predictability of life and everyday routine has helped him not only survive in ordered Japan, but also achieve success in Asia’s most technologically advanced country.

“Most of the time living in Japan has been very rewarding,” he says. “I relish so much the regularity and predictability of live here.”

Khoirul, raised in a blue-collar family in Jombang, East Java, has lived in Japan for the past eight years. He has tenure as an assistant professor at the prestigious Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST).

Relocating to Japan proved to be a good career move, and he is now considered one of the leading figures in wireless telecommunication technology. He shares with two Japanese scientists the patents for more efficient wireless receiver and transmitter technologies.

For the first innovation, he managed to reduce the transmission power for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, but instead of reducing the speed of data transmission, he managed to increase it.

For his second patented work, the 32-year-old designed a more efficient close-capacity performance technology, one applicable in digital terrestrial broadcasting systems.

The pressure from working in a highly demanding environment also takes its toll in bouts of stress, but Khoirul has his own way of dealing with it.

“Most Japanese unwind by drinking,” he says, “But because I grew up in a devout Muslim household, my faith is what sustains me.”

Nelson Tansu, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, says he barely has time to get stressed, because his research in electrical and computer engineering takes up most of his waking hours.

“Ask my wife, I don’t even have time for music or movies,” says the 33-year-old. “Once in a while I watch a movie on DVD, because I don’t have time to go to the movies. I don’t even know which singers are popular in America at the moment.”

Tansu may be burning the candle at both ends, but for him the rewards are worth it.

He has received academic accolades in the United States, primarily from being the youngest professor in the country when in 2003 he was tenure-tracked to become assistant professor at Bethlehem’s Lehigh University at the age of 26.

Ever since that appointment, Tansu, a native of Medan in North Sumatra, has worked hard to live up to the expectations.

He has had his work – 175 academic papers – published in several refereed international journals and conference publications, and holds four US patents and four invention disclosures. Tansu is also a regular reviewer for the leading applied physics and optoelectronics journals.

Currently, Tansu is working on ways to produce energy-efficient solid-state lighting, a technology that relies on light-emitting diodes (LEDs), in which the illumination comes from semiconducting materials.

Tansu and a colleague at Lehigh recently received a three-year grant from the US Department of Energy to study methods of improving the efficiency of white LEDs.

Tansu has lived in America most of his adult life, since attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. He has since become a permanent resident, but that hasn’t diminished his love for Indonesia.

He handpicks prospective students from Indonesia to join his PhD programs, and does just about all he can to get Indonesia on the world map of technological innovations.

Far from home, he still acknowledges the influence of Indonesia on who he is today.

“My roots, growing up in Indonesia, have contributed to my career and my life,” he says.

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