MY friend said, smiling condescendingly, “You’re from the coast. You don’t understand Java.”

This was 20 years or so ago, and I had just watched a dance from Palace X. I didn’t like it.

I have no idea whether this was because indeed I ‘don’t understand Java’, and whether ‘not understanding Java’ has some relation to the fact that I come from ‘the coast’

I was indeed born in a town on the northern coast of Java. To the