Is This the Mediterranean or Southeast Asia?

​The same thing happened a few years ago on a weeklong cruise in the Inner Passage of Alaska. Our ship, one of the “-Dams,” belonged to the Holland America Line, so I was not surprised. Our cabin steward was a middle-aged Indonesian man whose name I no longer remember. On my first ocean-liner trip in 1972 on the S.S. France, the cabin steward, if memory serves, was Filipino. The other stewards in fact all seemed to come from that island country. The same thing seemed the case in later cruises until that Alaska one. Weird! I figured, okay, Holland ruled The Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, for 350 years. So for them the logical choice, the folks they could turn to for such work, were natives from there, the Filipinos’ racial cousins...

So what was it that happened? A little background first. I started learning the Indonesian language in 1961 as a 21-year-old. Indonesian?! Why not a nice European language like German, French, or Italian? Truth is, I had already begun learning those languages earlier. Meanwhile, in spring of 1961, in my gap year between my baccalaureate and graduate studies, I started following the active-meditation spiritual practice of an Indonesian man from the Island of Java. The magazine of his movement, called Subud, had articles written in English on one side of the page and Indonesian on the other. As an amateur linguist I decided to give the latter language a shot. After all, the guru traveled internationally, and I wanted to be able to speak with him in his native tongue when he came to the States. (I did, on several occasions.) Not only that, but I learned that the U.S. State Department considered Bahasa Indonesia as the easiest of the Asian tongues. It was written in our alphabet. It had no tones like Chinese or the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. It had a highly simplified grammatical structure plus lots of cognates with English and the other Western languages. By my first trip to Java in 1971 I could already speak and understand quite a bit. In fact, I gave talks in Indonesian at both the Teachers College of Bandung and the country’s premier institution of higher learning, the University of Indonesia in Jakarta. Then in 2013 my wife and I spent a half year as volunteer teachers at an international grade 1-12 private school in Indonesian Borneo. Although we both taught in English—the school was bilingual—I spent a lot of the day speaking the country’s national language.
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Fast forward to late-April 2025. My wife, Cedar, and I were on a weeklong Mediterranean cruise on a large three-masted motor ship, the Wind Spirit. I soon learned that the fleet it belonged to of motor-powered sailing ships had originally been owned by the Holland America Line. Hence the Indonesian connection. Although the Captain was English and the bridge staff primarily European, most of the other crew, from cabin stewards to cooks to wait staff to even some of the mechanics and boiler-room workers were from Indonesia. So, when I first met our steward, I started talking with him in fluent Indonesian. By the next day many of the 50 or so other Indonesians were coming up to Cedar and me, greeting me in their language with the honorific “Father” (“Pak”), and grinning. Cedar and I were treated by them like royalty, although I’m sure some of them wondered if I was CIA. (I’m not.) But I began wondering: Am I on a Mediterranean cruise or in Island Southeast Asia?

The late Sabam Siagian, Editor of The Jakarta Post, who was my first and only Indonesian teacher when he was a law student and I a grad student at Yale in the early 60s.