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Show 67 had bean more merciful as occupiers than her own people in Indonesia (was that so? In Medan the Westerners had disappeared quickly, and while some ugly rumors had circulated, she had not herself sean any "atrocities"), but the destruction of her country, the bitterness of its poverty. . . And there were tha little things, the small nastinesses that, reason told her, were part of any occupation: the ruler/s^j automatic belief that his might had made right, his instinctive attribution of defeat and confusion to stupidity, his easy assumption that all natives were "gooks." Nor did the items that attracted her sisters -- the panoply of items smuggled from tha PX - hide the priorities. Chiefly, however, har attitude toward "love" made har suspicious, for she was satisfied with tha Japanese way. Her people were distrustful of love; highly touted though it was - on TV, in the movies, in books - it had a vague flavor of Western permissiveness. Born to arranged marriages they expected what they usually got: compatibility, shared backgrounds, decency. But seldom love: that they permitted to develop after the marriage. Such was the opposition, and so powerful did it seem as almost to obscure from har consciousness an also powerful current in the opposite direction. For however much these reasons appealed to har reason, her emotions were heavy. Her life was grey - as a repatriate she knew no young men in Oji, nor did she have a family to giva her the proper status. Har mother had inherited the house; she had never lived in Oji before - indeed |