Nonton Jake Shimabukuro di San Francisco

Sebagai bagian dari San Francisco Jazz Festival tahun 2008, Jake Shimabukuro, 32 tahun, menggelar konser pendek di Palace of Fine Arts di San Francisco, California, pada tanggal 9 November. Kalau belum pernah dengar tentang Jake, dia ini pemain ukulele luar biasa, extraordinary. Kalau mendengar ukulele, langsung kita berpikir, oh gitar kecil bersenar empat, untuk mengiring lagu-lagu Hawaii. Jaman saya kecil di Indonesia, Mang Udel aktor dan pelawak dari Jawa Barat itulah yang suka main ukulele di TVRI. Jake ini, walaupun kelahiran Hawaii, tidak menggunakan ukulelenya untuk main mengiringi lagu-lagu macam Somewhere Over the Rainbow yang dipopulerkan kembali oleh mendiang Israel Kamakawiwo (Iz), atau Tiny Bubbles-nya Don Ho. Si Jake ini jauh-jauh membengkokkan persepsi kita tentang ukulele, karena ia menggunakannya untuk main dan menciptakan lagu-lagu dari berbagai macam genre: jazz, klasik, rock, dan tradisional.

Saya pertama kali tahu Jake dari YouTube. Karena saya penggemar Tommy Emmanuel, pemain gitar finger-style picking dari Australia, iseng-iseng saya cari Tommy Emmanuel di YouTube. Salah satu video yang tersedia ialah duetnya bersama Jake Shimabukuro memainkan lagunya George Harrison dari the Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Kebetulan istri juga melihat, langsung kesengsem, dan menemukan konser pendeknya yang memperbolehkan keluarga membawa anak-anak. Siang itu Jake tampil prima seperti diharapkan. Dia membuka dengan suatu lagu gitar klasik, disusul dengan lagu tradisional Jepang Sakura Sakura sebagai tribut terhadap tanah nenek moyangnya. Jari-jemarinya menari-nari, yang kiri berjalan, berlari sepanjang leher ukulelenya; yang kanan memetik, menggenjreng dan terkadang menghentak. Walaupun postur tubuhnya kecil, tangan dan lengannya berotot akibat latihan main berjam-jam setiap hari. Ekspresi wajahnya seakan-akan ia berada di awing-awang, sangat menikmati permainannya sendiri, seperti orang kerasukan roh dewa ukulele

Dengan lincah ia pindah dari satu genre ke genre lain. Karena ini festival jazz, ia mainkan lagu standar Spain karangan Chick Corea, yang dipopulerkan secara vokal oleh Al Jarreau di tahun 80-an. Ini lagu sulit, baik secara vokal maupun instrumen. Di awalnya lagu ini pelan menirukan bagian andante dari lagu gitar klasik dari Spanyol, Concierto de Aranjuez. Kemudian ia naik tempo. Bagian cepatnya seperti orang berdansa samba, dan melodinya cepat seperti orang bernyanyi scat. Semua itu dimainkan sempurna dengan ukulele! Di lain lagu yang dikarangnya sendiri, ia memainkan ukulele seakan-akan ia main piano, lengkap dengan denting-denting dan latar belakang bas – lihai sekali dia mereproduksi suara dari alat musik sebesar piano dari ukulele yang hanya sepanjang lengan tangan.

Tidak lupa dia berdialog dengan penonton, ketika memainkan lagu Crazy G. Di sini ia memainkan ukulele seperti gitar swing jazz yang mengingatkan saya kepada Django Reinhardt (pemain gitar swing di tahun 1930-an) dan filmnya Woody Allen tentang pemain gitar swing yang dibintangi Sean Penn, Sweet and Lowdown (1999). Selang beberapa menit, ia berhenti, dan penonton serentak bilang: Faster! Lebih cepat! Begitu berulang-ulang sampai kecepatan strumming-nya yang maksimum. Penonton senang, anak-anak terhibur dan terbangun dari kantuk karena udara yang mulai dingin di bulan November.

Di sela-sela lagu Jake mengadakan tanya jawab dengan anak-anak. Dalam berbagai jawabannya yang diselingi humor, dia memberi nasehat agar anak-anak melakukan dan membuat sesuatu yang mereka suka, agar mereka punya motivasi dari dalam diri sendiri. Dia juga mendapatkan inspirasi dari orang-orang terkenal lainnya macam Bruce Lee, yang mampu memfokuskan otak dan usaha mereka dengan latihan selama bertahun-tahun untuk menjadi yang terbaik. Bukan anak-anak saja, saya yang sudah setengah tua ini pun ikut terinspirasi untuk fokus dan berlatih untuk memperbaiki cara berpikir dan bekerja.

Menjelang akhir konser ia mainkan lagu yang membuatnya seorang rock star di YouTube, While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Dia mempesona seluruh penonton di ruang konser itu. Walaupun sudah berkali-kali mendengarnya, tidak bosan kita melihat dan mendengarnya lagi, karena memang permainan dan ekspresinya yang tiada duanya.

Setelah konser, dengan senang hati Jake mau memberikan tanda-tangan dan diajak foto bersama oleh penggemarnya yang antre sampai dekat pintu keluar. Benar-benar orang hebat yang rendah hati. Sayang sekali saya lupa bawa ukulele yang baru saya beli dari Hawaii waktu liburan bulan Juli lalu. Setelah konser selesai, kita makan di restoran Burma Superstar, dan seperti biasa, saya pesan Mow Hin Ga, kuah ikan kental yang rasanya hampir persis sama dengan soto ayam Pak Said Asli di Jalan Ambengan, Surabaya!

Yap Lip Keng, prominent Indonesian Chinese and grandpa's friend

Grandpa died when I was 10. Since he spoke mainly Hokchia language and I spoke mainly Indonesian, we hardly got to know each other well. As a result I only knew him through my father's stories.

Growing up in grandpa's house in Surabaya, our family friends consisted of those whose elders had come from the same village in Fuqing (Hokchia) in the Fujian province. For some reasons, Hokchia immigrant-entrepreneurs became quite successful in Indonesia, including the once-richest-man-in-Indonesia Lim Sioe Liong, Chairman and CEO of Maspion Group Alim Markus , and the founder of Indonesia's top 3 kretek cigarette maker Gudang Garam, Tjoa Ing Hwie. None of them were close friends of our family; even though grandpa did alright, we were not rich.

One of my grandfather's close friends was Yap Lip Keng, a Kuomintang activist prior to World War II and later the Republic of China's consul to Surabaya. I was able to find the profile of grandpa's friend in a book (to be exact, in a Google Book's snippet) on Prominent Indonesian Chinese written by Leo Suryadinata, a professor at the National University of Singapore. Born in China, Yap and grandpa would be those classified as totok by Mr. Suryadinata. My generation, because of Suharto's ban on Chinese schools and language since 1966, could not speak Chinese fluently and went to Indonesian schools. We mixed with the children of peranakan Chinese and some - like I - fell in love and married them.

Just before we got married, family members discovered that Yap Lip Keng's niece (the daughter of his brother Yap Lip Hong) had married my mother-in-law's cousin, a doctor in Banjarmasin. There was a sigh of relief on both sides, since even though culturally we came from totok and peranakan backgrounds, we were already considered "family" (yi jia ren). This was a far cry from my grand-uncle's almost violent rejection two decades earlier, when his daughter wanted to marry a peranakan boy, even though he was a university graduate and a relative/descendant of the famed Oei Tiong Ham, Southeast Asia's richest man in the early 20th century. (They married anyway.)

Nowadays, practically all of Chinese in Indonesia are Indonesian citizens, speak mostly Indonesian, and despite the looser regulation governing the celebration of Chinese culture, identify themselves as Indonesian first, and Chinese second. We are all for practical purposes, peranakan.

The Accidental Polyglot

What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. Three languages? Trilingual. How about one language? Not monolingual, just American. As English speakers and inhabitants of the only superpower left, Americans are spoiled when it comes to learning and speaking other languages. A pity, given America's past and ongoing history as a country of immigrants. Instead of seeing the wave of immigrants as an opportunity to learn a different language, many Americans blame them for not learning English fast enough and speaking it properly. When traveling, say, in Europe, Americans complain that the French people do not want to speak English even though they know how. Another lost opportunity.

There's no better time to start learning another language than when you're very young. When I was growing up in East Java, I heard at least five languages spoken at the same time. I lived in my paternal grandparents' home in downtown Surabaya. My grandpa and grandma knew only the Hokchia language -- a close relative of the Fuzhou language in northern Fujian, China – and spoke it exclusively with my father and his nine brothers and sisters. They sent my father and his siblings to Chinese schools post World War II; consequently they spoke Mandarin with each other, with a heavy dose of low Javanese and the bazaar Malay commonly spoken among the ethnic Chinese community in Java. By the time my siblings and I entered school in the 70s, the Suharto regime had closed all Chinese schools, banned the usage of Chinese language in public, and constrained the celebration of Chinese festivals to private homes. As a result, my generation went to Indonesian schools and speak mainly Bahasa Indonesia. And so it was. We spoke bazaar Malay with the brothers and sisters; proper Bahasa Indonesia with the teachers and civil servants; Javanese with school friends, the housekeepers; and bazaar Malay with a smattering of Mandarin with our parents, aunties and uncles. With the grandparents, we spoke the little Hokchia that we knew and sign language.

My father and mother have nine brothers and sisters each, and we had to properly call the aunties and uncles in the Hokchia language. In Chinese culture, paternal aunties and uncles are called differently from the maternal aunties and uncles. The husband of your father's elder sister is not just uncle, he is "father's sister's husband". The wives of your father's brothers have ranks: father's big brother's wife, father's 2^nd brother's wife, father's third brother's wife, and so on.

It's amazing that the past four generations of my family have each been speaking a different main language. My grandparents spoke only Hokchia throughout their lives, my parents mainly speak Mandarin (although they also speak Hokchia and Indonesian), my generation speaks mainly Indonesian, and my children speak mainly English. Speaking a different language is a way to understand another culture, and it is probably one of the greatest gifts that parents can give to their children.

You May be Gay, but I am Gay-er

Many times people have asked me, usually after they get comfortable, "How is it that a Chinese looking guy like you have Gerdyman as a last name?" One confessed that she had expected the usual suspects as answers: I was adopted by German or Scandinavian parents after escaping a civil war somewhere in the Far East, I changed it after living in the USA to sound cool, etc. The truth is a little bit complicated.

I am Indonesian by birth and Chinese by ethnicity. Up till my father's generation (he is now 68), all Chinese people in Indonesia were also considered citizens of China. In the 1960s, economic envy and political pressure from the Army drove the Sukarno government to pass laws to force Chinese to stop trading in the rural areas, to choose Indonesian citizenship, and to change their names to anything but Chinese names.

Many Chinese Indonesians (Orang Tionghoa) decided to go to the ancestral homeland (hui guo) in Mainland China rather than suffer the indignities of discrimination. This was helped by the heavy campaign of the communist party to persuade Overseas Chinese (huaqiao) to return, hoping for foreign exchange after failed economic policies. The vast majority, my father included, did not see a future in Red China, decided to stay, choose Indonesian citizenship, and adopt a different name.

Since my family lived in East Java, naturally he looked for Javanese sounding names. Wanting to preserve the family name GE (Hokkian, pronounced like "gay" in English), he combined it with the Javanese suffix -diman, with an "r" to smooth things out. Hence, the family name Gerdiman was born. English was starting to replace Dutch as the cool foreign language of the archipelago, and so he replaced "i" with the Anglo "y", ending with Gerdyman, whereas his brothers and sisters all kept Gerdiman.

Prior to becoming a US citizen last October in 2006, I considered going back to the old family name. I weighed the costs and benefits and finally decided against it. I live in the San Francisco Bay area, and I can't imagine introducing myself as, "Hi, I am GE (Gay!)". Nothing against the gay people - my daughter's godfather is one - but I like to keep my sexual orientation clear and straight (pun intended). My son Joseph was born in December after I became a citizen. I soon realized I made a wise decision. You see, his middle name is Benjamin, and we often call him Joe Ben for short. My decision may have spared my son from future playground teasing: "Look, Joe Ben Gay is here, can you rub me, I just hurt my foot!". (Ben Gay is the popular brand of a pain relief ointment here in America).

Well, now I have an interesting story to tell. When I interview for a new job, the company interviewers expect to see a tall, blond guy. They almost always are startled to see a short Chinese guy walking in. It's a nice ice breaker. And with my gay friends I always joke: "You may be gay, but I am GE-er!"