I couldn’t tell you summer from winter when we lived a mere six degrees south of the equator in a small town called Lawang on the island of Java. We lived in a U-shaped house with a private courtyard in the center as our backyard. During monsoon season, our mother would let us take our showers in the courtyard. My two sisters and I would grab a bar of soap each, strip off our clothes, and squeal with delight as we let the warm giant rain drops pelt our backs.
When we visited our grandmother’s grand house, we played hide-and-seek confined to only her living room. She had a long, deep back yard with a mango orchard which supplied some of the fruits for her tropical-fruit-extract factory. My sister and I felt brave when we would hang out in the hayloft, listening to the buzz of the bees as they flew back and forth between the mango blossoms and their hive in the rafters.
Just yesterday my sister and I talked about the delicious Indonesian food and decided that perhaps the chicken soup was so outstanding because the chickens were slaughtered only minutes before they were cooked for our supper. We still shiver at the thought of seeing our supper run in circles with its head cut off. Our grandmother’s koeli waited patiently until all the blood had drained out and it finally, endlessly to us, keeled over. He efficiently plucked the feathers before handing it to the cooking baboes. The baboes, their mouths permanently stained red from betelnut leaves, always moving in slow motion, had started their morning pinching the tails off bean sprouts, one by one by one. By supper we eagerly ate our soup with the crystal clear broth, deeply flavored with our sacrificed chicken, lemongrass, and ginger, and then finished with a constellation of green-onion circles floating on the top. Only in Java, have I ever tasted broth so delicious.
