"The café-bar-restaurant on Jalan Kemang Raya rests like an elegant fish tank above the bookstore. It has large windows through which you can look down on lounging tukang parkir as they laugh and suck on their clove cigarettes. If you sit on the retro living room ensemble in the right place at the right time and look beyond the car park, you can watch all of Kemang creep by in one long neverending traffic jam. This is the story of the origin of that traffic jam; at a time in the distant past when the traffic used to roam free and a trip from Blok M to Jalan Kemang Selatan used to take ten minutes at most."

Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Available online with free shipping in Singapore

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang is a story from my book, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2012 and published in Eastern Heathens (Ethos Books, 2013, edited by Ng Yi Sheng & Amanda Lee Koe).

A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang:

is based on the Javanese legend of Sangkuriang
retells this tale in a contemporary setting based on the cafe above the bookshop, Casa Kemang, in Jakarta that my wife and I try to visit whenever we are in Jakarta
is about a young man who serves a lady in a cafe in Kemang, they touch, and she flees. A connection is made and they find out a lot about each other in a Kijang in the cafe car park.
Laramy Lee sees a critique of 'female entrapment in society' and an exploration of sexual taboos in his reading of the story in this wonderful review of Eastern Heathens in QLRS
is also about suppressed memory, the hidden secret self and the perils of traffic
includes passing references to tukang parkir, clove cigarettes, an Elektra coffee machine, bengkoang masks, Marjinal, anak punks, Akira, Anthony Burgess, pengamen, Iwan fals singing “Kamu Sudah Gila”, and Pekalongan batik.

"One day when her son was twelve years old, all three of them piled onto the family scooter to visit relatives in Bandung. But her son was difficult, laughing at passing truck drivers, squirming about, distracting her husband who was concentrating on the traffic. In hindsight, she wonders whether she should have asked her husband to stop at the side of the road while she disciplined their son. As they rode up the steep hill to Bandung, her husband suddenly swerved to avoid a bus. They were not travelling very fast but he still lost control and they all toppled from the scooter. The next thing she remembered, she was next to her son at the edge of the road, with passing motorists taking care of them. They had only minor grazes and bruises. Her husband wasn’t beside them. At first, she did not see him. Then she saw him lying on his side in the middle of the road. He was still moving a little, slowly beckoning with a loose arm in her direction. She watched several cars manage to miss him but then a large truck didn’t see him until it was too late."

Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly

Buy We Rose Up Slowly online here (free shipping in Singapore)

This story was previously published in Eastern Heathens by Ethos Books in 2013. Thanks to Amanda Lee Koe and Ng Yi Sheng for publishing this anthology of subverted Asian folklore.