Our query was into the "structure of feeling" of these "intimate" relations, so
differently remembered-the emotional economy and the sensory regimes in
which those relations were rendered possible, then retold and remade." We
wanted to know how Indonesian women and men today remembered "the
Dutch" they knew up close and sometimes only from afar, what language they
used to describe those daily exchanges, how they remembered what struck them
at the time as distinctly European. As such we sought out neither the richest storytellers
nor those locally celebrated for their vivid recollections. We were as
interested in those reluctant to speak as in those who eagerly proffered their stories;
as drawn to those who could muster no easy frame, whose recollections
would not distill into story form for a ready counter-narrative. In most cases,
we were not struck by their ease in recounting "the colonial," but rather by the
singularly uncozy and "charmless" accounts people offered about their jobs and
the sensibilities that pervaded Dutch colonial homes. The play of repetitions
that seemed so innocuous-that the Dutch were all "so good," that Dutch employers
were "so very cleann-drew us to plumb less for the deep grit of their
accounts than to follow their surface grain