T A B L E_T A L K Expats wonder: Can you ever truly know the Japanese? Share your thoughts on the divide between American and Japanese culture in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Mondo Weirdo Island oddities Flying Caribbean style and Koh Samui blues (06/01/98) Letter from Jakarta: Part 2 By Jeff Pulice Expats drink, rumors run amok, Habibie has an amazing week (05/29/98) Who stole Tomorrowland's soul? By Janelle Brown Disneyland's revamped Tomorrowland presents fresh façade and a few thrills -- but where's the old magic? (05/28/98) Hitchhiking Vietnam By Karin Muller Renting a horse -- and other examples of how tourism is changing Vietnam (05/27/98) Getting into Chechnya By Thomas Goltz A journalist's heart-stopping adventure slipping by Russian border guards (05/26/98) Browse the Wanderlust Features archives		A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A LONGHOUSE .-. PAGE 2 OF 2 I smile, not knowing what he's telling me. The women laugh and after a few moments I realize that "no time" means "no stopping." Drink it up in one fell swoop. I am a bit nervous because most of what I have read about visiting a longhouse emphasizes the Iban's love of aggressively urging visitors to get dead drunk. But mercifully, the attention is taken off me and the tuak ceremony is replaced by a cordial serving of tea. We all share pleasantries with no words in them. We smile, nod heads, clink cups, laugh. Our guide hands the chief the gifts we have brought: two bags of school notebooks and packages of pencils and pens. The chief does no more than glance at the bags, immediately handing them to his wife. Dealing with presents seems to be "women's work." With sudden determination the chief rises. A young man brings in a live chicken and with one lightning stroke of a knife, slaughters it. A dab of blood is smeared on our hands to welcome us before the executioner takes the sacrifice off to the kitchen. Then our guide gestures for us to sit on a long bench and, as if everything that has happened so far is familiar and ordinary, he whispers, "Now you will see something interesting." A group of men, nearly as tattooed as the chief, moves to the gamelan instruments: brass gongs and deerskin drums. The welcome dances will start and the villagers crowd on the floor to watch. The chief, holding a painted shield and a large knife, dances the Ngajat, the warrior dance. Bending low, crossing one leg over the other, the chief is the supreme stalker of prey -- a hunter, leaping with focus and force, swift as a tiger. Then the shaman steps forward, cocks his head, crouches low and pivots his body slowly around to the intense, jangled music. Extremely slowly. With his knees bent low, he curves his back and arches his arms until it seems he has sprouted wings. The shaman is called the Tuai Barong, which means Guardian of the Birds, for he alone has the power to read omens in the flights and calls of the jungle birds and to set the longhouse's rituals accordingly. This lithe, solemn man has somehow taken on the spirit of the sacred hornbill. Now he is both bird and man. His sensual, hypnotic movements remind me that hundreds of years before Darwin, these people understood the biological kinship between animal and man and recounted it in religious ritual. The ceremony disturbs and fascinates. It is no wonder that the longhouse people who have seen the shaman dance all their lives still watch, mesmerized. Next a young woman appears wearing several belts of silver coins, an elaborate beaded yellow blouse, silver anklets and a silver headdress like an upside-down candelabra that jingles with her every step. "She's a deaf-mute," our guide whispers. Fluttering her fingers, this glittering girl turns softly and slowly in perfect time to the music, moving to the vibrations of the gongs coming through the hollow bamboo flooring. As I watch her, an elderly white-haired man sitting next to me smiles at me, as if to say, "Isn't that some dancing!" I smile back, trying not to stare at his ears -- or rather, his earlobes, which are pierced so large you could pass an orange through them. "Aaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeee!!!" We're rushed at by short squat creatures in bulky burlap flannel shirts, baggy pants, socks, gloves and crudely carved wooden masks with smiling faces. Looking like crazed trick-or-treaters, they pull us to our feet and exhort us to dance with them. They tug, twirl and tease us into dance. The music races. The drums boom loud as thunderclaps. The jangle of the brass gongs is both beautiful and disorienting. We're in a frenzy of goofy dancing, slightly scary and enormously joyous, a delirium where host and guest -- performer and spectator -- are wonderfully blurred. The music stops and the masked ones vanish. The welcoming ceremony over, the rest of the day is ours to enjoy. Strolling the longhouse, we are treated not as tourists, but as guests. We're greeted with smiles and invitations, yet we're also "given our space" when we just want to rest or merely observe. The longhouse is truly an indoor village, an aggregate of individual family units, and the hall, wide and shadowy, is like the main street of the village, both a social center and a place for occupation. The men are away working the rice and pepper fields or on logging contracts, so I observe the women and oldest men engaged in a variety of traditional activities. The equatorial air hangs hot and wet. Despite the industry all around, there is languor to the longhouse. On the verandah the long-eared man sits in a black peppercorn sea, sorting the good from the bad. Behind him, two women rhythmically winnow rice in shallow baskets. Again and again, the rice flies skyward like an offering to the gods. Inside the hall, the women sit on the floor in groups as they work. In one small group, a girl crushes dried herbs in a stone mortar, another braids a basket and a third weaves palm leaves into a mat. A woman who looks old enough to be a great-grandmother is nursing a baby as she fans herself with a banana leaf. Beside her, another baby sleeps in a sarong hung by a spring from the rafters. Over the baby's head hangs a small empty bottle of Johnny Walker to ward off ghosts. Never left alone, the toddlers are continuously indulged -- teased, kissed, passed from lap to lap, hugged extravagantly. The women laugh and chat as they sit on the flax mats in their floral sarongs -- I've entered a Gauguin painting. To cool off, the women bathe in the river as often as six times a day. When the afternoon air has turned to steam, we too walk down to the river, and soon we're joined by a gaggle of preschoolers accompanied by an elderly woman. The most patient of baby sitters, she squats on her haunches, chewing nuts as she watches them frolic in the river -- splash wildly, scream with laughter, dive off rocks. When she rises and turns toward the longhouse, without a word of protest her charges leave the water and follow her in single file like ducklings. And so the day passes. We spin homemade tops with the children, delight the chief's sister by our exaggerated wincing at her soursop fruit, and in the early evening, eat a tasty meal of mountain rice, jungle ferns, tapioca leaves, bamboo shoots and telapia fish all steamed in bamboo. While we eat, the chief's sister tells me a secret -- she and the other ladies were the masked dancers. "You!" I say in exaggerated surprise. Exposing her gold teeth, she laughs gleefully at her revelation. I am moved by the fervor of these people. They work with intensity and take pleasure in music, animated conversation, storytelling and laughter. Their intensity was perfectly described by Tom Harrison, author of "Borneo Jungle," who visited Sarawak as an Oxford student in 1932: "Living always in deep greens and teeming tropical life, the Bornean natives see the whole world, both of reality and dream, in terms of twisting, tendulous, exuberant vitality." Nighttime. Patrick and I are sitting on the hall floor after the evening dances, drinking tuak with the chief. Up and down the dark hall, groups of people chat around tiny yellow circles of candlelight. The Tuai Rumah now wears sweatpants. He's been showing us several rope-untying tricks, and Patrick has taught the chief how to hang a spoon on the end of his nose. Once again the gamelan music starts up softly. The spicy scent of the drying peppercorns floats in on the warm, black air, and beyond, the jungle is so alive with the pulsation of insects, it seems to be breathing. With our guide translating, we ask the Tuai Rumah what it's like to be chief. His mood turns abruptly serious. "I knew my life would be a good one," the chief says. "When I was 21, my grandfather came to me in a dream as a good spirit, as the Owner of the World -- a Pulang Gana. 'You will become the Tuai Rumah,' he told me. 'You'll be a good chief and your family will have a good life.' He was right." The chief explains that being Tuai Rumah is a big responsibility: He oversees the financial, physical and emotional well-being of 34 families. He must never show favoritism because if he's not fair, he will lose his people's support. Above all he must be strong and make hard, even unpopular decisions. In his time he has made many hard decisions, yet again and again he believes he has been proven right. "When the government built the Batang Ai dam, they offered us a concession for taking our land, but I would not let my longhouse accept it. Some thought I was foolish, for we were offered 30,000 American dollars. When they went to Kuching they were unhappy, for they could afford only to drink coffee, yet they had to see people from a longhouse who had sold their land, drinking beer. But today the other longhouse is poor! They were not used to money so they bought too much on credit and gambled too much on cockfighting. Now their money is gone -- and their land is gone. But we still have our land." "What is your hope for the Stamang longhouse?" I ask. The chief considers the question for several moments as he plays idly with the rope at his feet. At last he responds and his answer surprises me. "To have a road running from here to Kuching, for we're very isolated. And also to see the children educated. Education is important! I've sent the children who are more than five years old to the boarding school up the river -- the one you saw. And I welcome tourists not just for their money, but for the opportunity to see people from other countries. This way we learn about them." As the chief talks, I am distracted by the sudden appearance of his wife, who enters carrying the two plastic bags of school supplies we brought. She takes out the 40 notebooks and places each one on a space on the longhouse floor -- each one about three feet away from another -- like stepping stones. When she finishes, she lays one pencil and one pen smack dab in the middle of each pale blue notebook. Then, quietly, she walks down the hall and taps a group of waiting women to come take the books. These are the mothers of the children in the boarding school. Silently and swiftly each mother picks up a number of notebooks equal to her number of children. In less than a minute, the floor is bare. It feels late now, yet beneath the longhouse, ducks and chickens still cackle and quack. The fighting cock tied up outside the chief's door crows now and then as if it were dawn. We see again the man with the elongated earlobes talking in one of the candlelit groups. We've since learned he has the curious name of Goon and is the chief's older brother. "If you're the younger brother," I ask the chief, "why were you made the Tuai Rumah?" Our guide translates this question, and after thinking a moment, the chief answers: "When my older brother was a young man, he decided the earth was flat. He was convinced that if he could only get to the end of the jungle, he could look over the edge of the world and know how big it is. He had such a great desire to look over the edge that, without telling anyone, he walked into the jungle. "For three weeks we did not know where he was. Finally people from another longhouse came upon him walking in the jungle and brought him back here. After that it was thought he should not be chief." "Because he thought the world was flat?" I ask. "No, because he walked through the jungle alone. We do not do things alone." We sleep in the longhouse that night, settling down just as a thunderstorm breaks. The rain pounds like horses' hooves on the tin roof, and beneath the longhouse dogs howl so mournfully that the canine chorus rising up through the floor is like ghostly wailing from the nether world. We sleep like babies. The next morning, we leave. "Come back!" the chief's sister says to me warmly. "And next time bring your family!" It's been a month since I visited the longhouse and I want to go back. In fact, I surprise myself by how much I think of these people. I want to live with them, know their rituals and their festivals -- know more about who they are. I want to go back -- but can I? I wonder about the proposed Bakun hydroelectric dam on the Rejang river. The last dam project, at Batang Ai in 1985, flooded 21,000 acres of land, submerged 26 longhouses and displaced 3,000 people. The Bakun one, which could supply one-fourth of Malaysia's energy, would flood 200,000 acres -- about the size of Singapore. Logging too has made its impact. The $1.5 billion in yearly timber exports has not only propelled Sarawak from an exotic backwater into the modern world, it has devastated an enormous area of rain forest, home to 23 tribes. Today one-half of Sarawak's land is zoned for logging. I've been thinking about these facts a lot. I think about them because I now know a little -- and care a lot -- about a people whom a month ago I hardly knew existed. That's what happens when you look over the edge of your world. SALON | June 2, 1998 Maxine Rose Schur has written for Wanderlust about Paris and Petra, Jordan.