The only people she knew who had lived in Indonesia were white Dutch people who had moved back to the Netherlands after surviving the Japanese prison camps during the war, only to lose their homes and wealth when Indonesia had become independent. They were usually bitter, scarred, and homesick. All her other information she had gleaned from a nationalistic newspaper she favored, and two nineteenth-century library books, one written by a phrenologist who was convinced of the white race’s superiority, the other by a missionary. In Mama’s mind, anyone who was a published writer was an authority,
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