Our family was not well off in those early years; the Indonesian army didn’t pay its lieutenants much. We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-conditioning, refrigeration, or flush toilets. We had no car—my stepfather rode a motorcycle, while my mother took the local jitney service every morning to the U.S. embassy, where she worked as an English teacher. Without the money to go to the international school that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.
