Richard Oh

The Romance of K’tut Tantri And Indonesia
By Timothy Lindsey
Equinox
347

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it. This is the inscription on the opening page of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez’s autobiography Living To Tell the Tale. It was published in 2003. In 1994, Timothy Lindsey had already had this in mind when he wrote his doctoral thesis about K’tut Tantri. Timothy Lindsey was not interested so much in the truth about K’tut Tantri, alias Muriel Pearson, Surabaya Sue, Vannen Walker, Manx, Nyonya Meng, the Scottish-born American screen journalist, but the many truths that make up a myth. He sourced from both K’tut Tantr’s own biographical romance, Revolt in Paradise, as well as other materials garnered from her close friends, foes, and historical tracts, to see if they held up to his close scrutiny. The resulting book is a stunning study of the complex personalities of a small, five-foot tall, Western woman, comparable to Mata Hari, living a larger-than- life existence in Bali, intricately woven in the nascent history of Indonesia.

Many a fact recounted in K’tut Tantri’s Revolt in Paradise were debunked. Her life as the royal guest at the villa of the Bangli puri was an exaggeration. The “villa” to which she depicted as her appointed royal residence in Bangli, was later confirmed by Bob Koke, one of the earliest expatriates in Bali who later built a hotel in Kuta Beach, as a bit more akin to a “garage”. The confession from the daughter of Anak Agung Ngurah, the prince of Bangli, suggested that her relationship with him was more than platonic. Her claim to be the first person to come up with the idea to build a hotel on Kuta Beach was later found to be a co-optation of Bob Koke’s idea. She had first served as Koke’s guide, referred to in her book as the Frenchman, and later they had a fallout, resulting in Koke’s building the Kuta Beach Hotel, and later under financial pressure Ketut Tantri built a ramshackle hotel, Suara Segara (Sound of the Sea). Her description of the guests who stayed at her hotel was one she fabricated out of what she saw at Walter Spies’s residence: famous artists, thinkers, distinguished statesmen, etc. Her experience during the Japanese was summarily eclipsed, whereas it was suggested she could have undergone, as most female captives during that time, the ordeal as one of the comfort women.

Much of her account on her involvements with Indonesian resistance army was verified as truthful. During the Japanese invasion, she fled Bali with Anak Agung Ngurah to East Java, where he joined the guerillas led by Sutomo and she took part as a propagandist broadcaster at extremist radios. Later, considering her to be able to serve the cause of Merdeka better in the headquarters of the resistance army in Yogjakarta, she was recalled by Soekarno to relocate and continue her work there. Her broadcasts were intercepted throughout Asia and other parts of world, including in America, where she was heeded seriously. Soon she became known as Surabaya Sue, one of the many sobriquets, such as Molly, Jousy, that eventually stuck. Her reputation became widespread when she published her war memoir Revolt in Paradise in 1960.

What prompted this American scriptwriter and journalist to embark on a journey to the land of paradise so far away from home? It was a rainy afternoon and, walking down Hollywood Boulevard, I stopped before a small theatre showing a foreign film and on the spur of the moment, decided to go in. The film was entitled Bali, the Last Paradise. It was in November 1932, Mrs Muriel Pearson set sail from New York on a fat little cargo ship bound for the Far East. She was then still married to a man called Karl Pearsen, a man whom she described at her mother’s age. Lindsey explored further and suggested her search was much more than just for the Lost Eden, as most Westerners’ romantic conception of the Far East, which ultimately involved references to kings, sumptuous kingdoms and exotic landscapes. Lindsey suggested her quest was for a father she had never known; there was no clear identification of her true father, except for her rather unattached description of her mother and a stepfather. This examination of Ketut Tantri’s origins and aliases suggests that her relationship with her parents, and, in particular, her father (whether natural, or step, father) was to some extent linked to her self-identity. Vannen’s early life in Scotland may thus have established themes that appear again in the romance she created around her experiences in Indonesia. Her longing for a father, like that of the little boy of her stories, plays a prominent part in her own account of her life. Her later depictions of men around her were indeed confirmations of this line of inquiry. Her involvements with the much older men, Anak Agung Ngurah, later the Japanese sugar daddy, Soetomo, Soekarno, Syarifuddin were all described by her as pure father and daughter relationships.

Lindsey understood too well how truths and lies are seamlessly interwoven in a person’s account of h/her past. Sometimes, the same person who blends lies in h/her account might not even know h/she has committed them, because in the end when encountered with the unwieldy truth of reality, imagination tends to take over and bend it to its ends.

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