SARAH SECHAN: (JP/Ricky Yudhistira) Try as she might, Sarah Sechan finds it mighty hard to shrug off the ironic, world-weary teen of her MTV veejaying past. Recently, a potential client hoped that the 33-year-old mother of one was still "very MTV".

"I was like, hello?! It's been years since I was with MTV, I've done a lot of different things since then," Sarah says on a recent weekday afternoon at her mother-in-law's Indonesian restaurant in Kemang, South Jakarta.

It includes cohosting a METROTV morning show focusing on health issues; last month she discussed on-air her recent bout of dengue.

"I love the show. It's done in a more mature way and it's time for me to do that ... I get to be me at this age," says Sarah.

Now she is also acting on the big screen, after catching the acting bug last year in the play Miss Kadaluarsa. She has a cameo in the full-on sex comedy XL, hamming it up as Mak Siat (a play on the Indonesian word for vice), who is continuing the practices of Mak Erot, the famed Sundanese traditional sex healer.

It was an "easy" role, she says, and she took it because it gave her a chance to work again with her MTV VJ buddy Jamie Aditya.

More demanding was the role of Cicih, a gullible Sundanese dangdut singer who dreams of escaping the sleazy club in her small West Java hometown, in Perempuan Punya Cerita (Women Have Stories). Seduced by the promises of a bogus agent, Cicih heads to the bright lights of Jakarta, bringing along the preteen daughter of her friend Esih (played by singer-actress Shanty).

Inevitably, both end up as sex workers. Cicih's eventual return home alone, and her desperate, craven appeal to Esih -- "I'm a victim, too" -- is a wrenching scene. "It was really hard for me to imagine that kind of heavy stuff, that guilty feeling, because I haven't dealt with things like that, so Nia (producer Nia Dinata) said try to imagine something bad," Sarah, who had to call up her mother for advice on using the coarse Sundanese dialect of Cicih's character, says of the scene.

"But it was done at like 4 a.m., we had been there all day, we were all tired and I also had to go to METROTV. And Shanty really helped me with the scene -- she made me cry."

Today, with her acting and TV work, Sarah is showing her maturity as a performer, and that includes in being careful of what she says. Her humor is naturally sarcastic, a hint acerbic, although the target of her put-downs is more often than not herself, especially about her short stature (she's 158 centimeters).

Sarcasm goes down well in the U.S. and Britain, two countries where she lived as a teenager from 1986 to 1993, and it was her signature style as a VJ, but it can be misconstrued by Indonesians fearful of losing face.

"My sarcasm is not that bad, right?" she asks. "We always have to be entertaining on TV, but we can't be too sarcastic because there are so many sensitive people in the world ... So I try really hard to be nice but sometimes it's hard to keep it in check ..."

Growing up abroad when her father was working as a banker was important, she says.

"It gave me a broad perspective. I can see things from different points of view. Sometimes you see people who've only lived in one place and haven't traveled, they see others doing something different and consider it strange, weird."

She says her parents never feared she would lose her "Indonesian-ness".

"It's not about being an American or Indonesian or whatever, it's about being global and having good values. My parents just taught us to have good values, to respect people, to be polite and, as Muslims, to do what we should. Just try to be good people, and learn the good things we can ..."

Sarah enjoys the best of both worlds of being Indonesian today. So she savors her crispy fried cassava that she nibbles on this afternoon, and she also likes her batik: on our two meetings in the past four months, she wore the fabric that has recently become trendy in the hands of creative young designers.

She also spends time on her Facebook account, takes a hands-on approach to raising her young son and enjoys an equal partnership with her husband, Emir.

She switches back and forth between Indonesian and English but, thankfully, it is not the deliberately self-conscious half-and-half Indo-English mishmash of some entertainers.

It was her English proficiency from living abroad that would bring her to the attention of a regional audience as an MTV VJ in Southeast Asia. Leaving her radio and TV hosting jobs in Jakarta, she moved to Singapore for MTV in 1998; she says living in the city-state gave her independence and she also saw the discipline and professionalism of her local colleagues.

Before the barrage of cable TV, Sarah and the rest of the early VJs had character as well as good looks, unlike today's VJs who are almost indistinguishable as "wazzupping" symbols of coolness. Are you kidding, I was the hot babe," she says of her MTV persona.

"The thing with MTV at that time was that they never said, 'you have to be like this or present like that' ... They just told us not to be racist, talk about religion or be negative, just be yourself ... But I am a sarcastic person, so they would tell me if it was becoming too obvious."

The veejaying job lasted until 2002, when she decided to take up an offer to be deputy chief editor of Cosmogirl magazine. Sarah, who had no experience in journalism, jokes that she accepted the job because she was told she would undergo training in New York.

She was part of a small team that started from scratch to put the Indonesian version of the magazine together.

"The magazine is all about empowering girls, and I thought that was a good thing. Because you see girls from good families here, and you ask them why they like things, and they'll say, 'I just do, I don't know why' ... So we talked about the environment, what girls think, sex, everything ..."

She worked with the magazine for three years until she had her son, Rajata. She says she had to choose between her two "babies", and Cosmogirl lost out.

The METROTV job began last year (she also hosts an evening financial brief on the news channel), and she is still a sought-after emcee, including in the region from her MTV name recognition.

She just started filming two more movies, and she has another dream for the future: hosting her own talk show. "Indonesian talk shows start out good, but then get silly, with the hosts just talking about themselves or insulting each other ... I want to do just an ordinary talk show, a bit like Oprah, sometimes a bit serious but inspirational and done in a relaxed way ... I would love to do it."

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